Neophyte World Builder

CROWN

I was surrounded by bubbles.

At least, that’s the impression I had at first. I hadn’t been awake for long—after spending over a thousand years in a deep sleep to recover my Soul Energy—but I’d stepped into this place expecting for it to be an actual… place. Orpheus had come from here, so I’d assumed it was her own sanctuary or something.

Instead, I couldn’t even move. Or no… I didn’t actually have a body any longer. Some time ago this would have caused me more consternation, but by now I was able to just go with the flow. I knew I existed, so being nothing but a perspective in a sea of bubbles was something I could cope with.

With nothing else to do, I focused on a bubble.

The bubble resolved into something that was roughly like an ellipsoid, and concentrating further gave me some very large numbers. Universe age, total energy generated, last cycle energy generation… the sort of thing I would have expected. Further attributes such as topology and size were available, but I pulled my attention back. I wasn’t here to peek at the universes of other administrators.

The only statistic that I’d noticed that was new to me was an important one… Cluster Alignment. Ploxotl had this at eighty-three percent, which I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. Did it have to go down to zero to drift out of the cluster? Or was fifty percent the danger zone? As usual, none of this had anything resembling an instruction manual.

It also bothered me that I had no idea how to pronounce that. Plocks-o-tell? I shouldn’t have worried about it but I did.

Looking over the bubbles, I saw that the one I’d just observed was also linked to about a dozen others. That was good, because the energy generation for Ploxotl hadn’t been great. Under a hundred per cycle was pathetic compared to what mine produced, but a dozen doing that much or more would easily overcome my generation. I had no idea if that was a normal amount, or low, or high.

Orpheus had claimed my own universe was generating an unusual amount, but she’d also put qualifiers on it concerning age of the universe and so on. Did much older ones generate more or less? I’d never pried into that, and now I was regretting putting off those questions for later.

It was later, and I couldn’t ask them of the one person who could answer them.

Well, maybe one of the older administrators could. I’d have to see, once I could get in touch with them. Trent was still pretty “young” as administrators went, so might not be the best one to ask.

I tried thinking of my own universe… and that is when I learned that this interface also responded to thoughts and desires, at least partially. One of the many bubbles glowed, and I focused on that.

Really, Orpheus? I thought to myself. I wasn’t sure if she’d named it that unknowing what it meant, or had a sense of humor she hadn’t let me see. Though maybe it was just filtering my own thoughts… yet it had specifically said provisional. Orpheus had to have been the one to select it.

Though I did wonder who had given me the new name. If Orpheus was gone, did the interface itself assign it? Had she done this just before she vanished?

I forced myself to stop getting distracted and looked at my Alignment, only to come up with sixty-seven percent. As Orpheus had said I was drifting close to the edge, that implied I couldn’t let it get less than fifty.

It also had a note next to it that said: “Anchoring in progress.”

Interesting.

As informative as that was, it wasn’t what I’d come to this non-place to handle. The interface was broken for everyone, and that probably wasn’t being taken well. I had to repair it first… but once again, I had no idea how to do this.

Since I could see the various attributes of other universes, whatever processor had been handling the interface up to this point was clearly working, and it was able to connect to other universes. Which left me questioning why it wasn’t working. The chat system had complained about being unable to connect to the substrate, and I assumed that was related to the interface errors.

Except… local interfaces already worked.

Was I thinking about this the wrong way? I’d been assuming there was a central server, but how would something like that exist without a place to put it? Even this “place” I was in was just a mental reconstruction of the…

The connection between universes.

So the connection was fine, but it still wasn’t working. I was right back to wondering if there was a central server then. Something had changed and eliminated the ability to perform some of the interface functions. The connections were still there, right?

As I thought about that, an intricate web of threads twining between all the universes flared to life in my mental vision. It was a silent confirmation that yes, everything was still connected. So something else was missing from the network. Something that had been there before, but wasn’t now.

Or someone.

It occurred to me that if Pleiades didn’t want others to have what he’d created, he wouldn’t make it easy to get. The actual mechanism had to be in the substrate, so why had it stopped working? The major change had been… Orpheus vanishing. That’s it.

She’d said that I should be able to feel her presence, to trace her somehow, and I almost tried that then and there… but I needed to focus on getting things fixed, not chasing after the accidental High Administrator. If she’d been taken, I couldn’t do much at that moment anyway.

I focused on the various “bubbles” and tried to picture their connections… and thankfully, it worked. Sort of.

Thin filaments glowed in my vision, a complex and interconnected web between all of the universes. Thicker strands showed in a subtly different color to my sight, and I rapidly deduced that these were the actual connections of an administrator that they maintained between their own universes.

It was time to examine what was wrong.

Focusing on various universes let them cluster together, grouping into the ones each administrator controlled. A quick glance told me that most of these were not close together conceptually… it was grouping them by administrator for my convenience, not showing their distance to the edge of the cluster. I could probably find a way to change that, but it wasn’t important for what I was doing.

Each administrator’s group of universes had thick bonding threads connecting them, which clumped together into a sort of ganglia. Occasionally, the threads would have short branches on them, which usually followed a different path to one or more of the administrator’s worlds. Each ganglia also had threads of a different kind connecting to it… the filaments that I now realized were the connection to the interface.

Some of these ganglia were larger than others, and had thicker and more numerous connections to the interface. I could only surmise that this was reflected in the actual rank of the administrator, and looking at Diamon’s compared to Ember’s seemed to bear that out. I was starting to figure out how to read this.

Tracing back the filaments that I supposed led to the interface, they inevitably crossed paths with the threads leading from other administrators, or split off into… nothing. Many of them were frayed or just cut off, but even so they connected everyone in the cluster. That connection was chaotic and haphazard, but it was there. I just needed to figure out why it wasn’t working properly.

The information was there, it just needed something to route it.

I began to get an uneasy feeling that Pleiades may have taken a few shortcuts in this interface that Orpheus didn’t know about.

Turning my attention back to my own universe, I brought it up to look for my own ganglia. Or, in other words… me. I only had one world, so the cluster of threads appeared more like a blob attached to the side of my universe’s bubble. I examined it more than the rest, because mine did look… weird.

Where most of the others had an even growth mine had come out looking lumpy and misshapen. The connections to the interface were a tangled mess, plunging into my “body” at odd angles and also wrapping around and even through the bubble of my universe. Some of the threads from the interface even plunged into my universe directly, completely bypassing the clump that was me.

Akasha, I thought to myself. She’d been able to tap into some parts of what Pleiades had known, even though I couldn’t. Was there a reason I couldn’t access the same information? Did the interface limit me, somehow?

That’s when I remembered that yes, it did. For safety reasons. Orpheus had said as much, but perhaps there were other reasons as well. The question was… had it been intentional on the part of Pleiades?

I continued examining my “self” as I appeared in the cluster, and found one of those branches I’d seen on the others. Mine was… different, though. It was more like a bulge directly off of my body, with its own filaments wrapped around and through the universe bubble, if more shallowly. It also had its own connections to the interface threads, which were tangled up in its own threads far more than I’d seen anywhere else.

The sight worried me for a few moments… before I realized what I was looking at.

Duck.

Finally, I could see why Orpheus had called my Terminal “anomalous” before. It looked a lot more serious than what she’d implied. Unless it had grown worse over time… or Orpheus had a different way of looking at all this which hadn’t made the entanglement so obvious.

One strand leading off of my universe was particularly thick and lacking entanglements. I puzzled at it for a moment, but then remembered the whole discussion on Anchor Beings Orpheus had given me. Despite being close to the edge of the cluster, I was considered foundational. A contradiction, to be sure… but was this how it was represented?

For that matter, after I’d fallen into torpor, had the incursions kept coming? Why hadn’t they tried to further infiltrate my own world? Had I just been a means to reach the interface all along?

To reach Orpheus?

Was that even what had happened?

I didn’t know enough yet to pursue this train of thought, so I concentrated on what I could do for the time being. Those questions would be investigated later.

I followed the trail through the bubbles, and at long last I laid eyes—or whatever senses I was using for this—upon something I had never thought I would see again.

My original universe. Earth.

And I felt… nothing.

I wasn’t a human any longer, was I?

Well, to be technical I knew it was one of the tightly bound seven universes I found. Their names were things like P-1 and P-4, and their Alignment was ninety-seven percent. All seven, not quite fully aligned… but that made the core of the cluster. Their equilibrium formed the center of the cluster, with no single universe reaching one hundred percent.

I wondered if that made it more stable.

The massive ganglia that made up the persona of Pleiades was there, much larger than any of the others I’d seen. What must be hundreds of bubbles were connected to it, beyond the base seven I’d heard about. Numerous threads meandered outward to fade away as well, and I realized that those must be universes that the ancient former High Administrator had created in other clusters… universes that likely preceded my own by uncountable eons.

It was humbling in a way I’d never felt before. Was this what it meant to embrace the creation of universes? To become an existence so large that even the “self” was larger than a single universe could hold?

It was also concerning, given that the huge clump of threads that made up my “father” was dull and colorless. It wasn’t dead—I could feel a sort of metaphysical pulse within—but it was inactive. I could tell that much.

What I did not see was any sort of special connection to the interface. If anything, my own connection was far more unusual than what I saw on Pleiades. That was just a little worrying for me.

I needed to trace and then guide the threads, I realized. I could sense them, pulsing. The interface trying to be used, trying to route messages between administrators. Trying… and failing, messages getting lost, vanishing into the cloud of fibers. They needed direction, and I could provide it.

But I had my own world to keep running, and I couldn’t afford to do nothing but babysit the connections.

I pondered for a long while before the solution came to me. Something I’d never tried to do even with the interface… and now I couldn’t call it up to help me.

No matter. I felt I could do it.

For the first time since I’d become an administrator, I concentrated on my sense of self…

Then I split off a Terminal.