Neophyte World Builder

CROWN

I sat down in the chair with my hands folded together, leaning forward. My eyes were focused in a firm, disapproving glare… or at least, that’s what I hoped it came across as. That was the intent.

Duck looked suitably chagrined, her smaller form tucked up in the chair opposite me, arms around her knees where they were pulled up to her chest. She looked very much like a sulking child who knew she’d done something bad. Her chosen form’s tiny size further emphasized the appearance, radiating guilt and contrition.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t trust that at all.

“So,” I muttered. “I can tolerate an awful lot, but I think Duck here has crossed a line.”

Diamon had come by at my request, and was standing to the side. The miniature three-trunked mammoth had been somewhat quiet, but that was normal for him when he didn’t have anything to say. Now, he had listened to my entire explanation of everything Duck had done, and I was curious what his opinion would be. He did not disappoint.

“I have heard of a Terminal gaining this much independence once before. I would recommend reintegration and replacement.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose, and even Duck made a face.

“Not that you’re entirely wrong, Diamon, but show a little more tact,”she grumbled. “I’m sitting right here.”

The other administrator started to wave off her concerns, but I held up a hand and shook my head. Diamon looked at me oddly.

“She’s right,” I admonished. “We don’t know exactly how much of her own person she is. For now, she’s still linked to me, but she clearly has her own thoughts and ideas or she couldn’t have done what she did.”

So saying that, I turned back to my errant Terminal. “Occasionally hiding things from me I might be able to forgive, Duck. But by your own admission, you altered my perceptions and memories. How could I ever trust you after that? Even if you and I have the same goal, I could never trust that you weren’t clouding my mind with your tricks to do something else.”

This wasn’t actually fully true… the trust part might have been, but I was pretty sure I’d figured out how she’d managed to mess with my mind. I hadn’t taken the steps to prevent it yet, but Switchboard was keeping an eye on it for me.

Duck just spread her hands wide and tilted her ears down. “You shouldn’t. I was playing coy and giving you hints while also making it harder for you to figure out all I could do, and that was not smart of me. I could tell you how limited my ability to affect you is, but since I already did it once, how could you trust me? I put myself in this situation and I don’t want to stop existing, but I’ve been thinking hard about how to convince you otherwise and I’m not coming up with good answers.”

“I see,” Diamon murmured. “Even your Terminal agrees, High Administrator.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose again and sighed. “Yes. But there’s something else I have to consider. She’s also a conduit into the World System in a way I haven’t quite figured out yet. If I assimilate her, that may be lost. And she also knows I’m reluctant to destroy a truly thinking being.”

“One of the few things I won’t argue with him about, and not just for self-preservation,” Duck admitted.

Diamon flexed his trunks, then turned to face me more directly. “I see your worry, High Administrator Regalia, but the fact remains that you cannot trust her to work so closely with you any longer. You must do something to either restrain her, or otherwise ensure she can never work without your knowledge again.”

“Which is easier said than done,” I noted with a grumble. I slumped back into my chair.

Quietly, Duck stared at me with a resigned expression. She knew this had all changed. She wouldn’t be my wingman any more when I went down to my world. She wouldn’t be handling designs, or drafting new bodies up. I couldn’t trust her with anything I was working on.

Could I even let her speak to Akasha?

Did I want to take my daughter’s mother-figure away from her?

I glanced over at Diamon. I didn’t need him here to help make a decision… I needed him because he kept me focused. While he was watching, I needed to be the High Administrator, not my whimsical self. I had millions of intelligent beings on my own world I was responsible for.

In the entire cluster, I had trillions upon trillions.

That moment, I remembered something Orpheus had told me at one point. That she was not cruel or dismissive, she simply had to consider how anything affected the cluster. The entire existence of numerous universes hinged on how I handled everything.

I could see now why she had decided on such strange and stupidly rigid rules. I could also see how often she likely bent them to give me a helping hand, even before I realized she was doing it. The responsibility of so much would naturally lead to a conservative approach. When trying to keep however many universes functional and fighting off extradimensional war, taking risks seemed like a stupid thing to do.

The risk had been in bringing on new administrators like me. A last ditch attempt to find some way to fight off the enemy. That was the desperation move, and if it failed everything came with it. Naturally she’d tried to make sure nobody did anything incredibly stupid by her terms.

Incredibly stupid.

And then Orpheus had vanished and left us all high and dry, hadn’t she? Her entire plan had worked for energy generation, but whatever had happened with the incursions had not done what she expected. That is presuming she was even right about the whole mess, because the incursions had stopped abruptly and it had been over a hundred cycles without much movement from the other clusters.

I looked at Duck sulking there again, and back at Diamon.

“Duck, I’m going to ask you some questions. It’s vital that you answer them truthfully, because if I’m wrong you could be destroyed,” I announced suddenly.

My Terminal blinked, her ears twitching but not lifting. Then they drooped further as she thought about it. In elf terms, she’d shown reluctant assent.

“You once said you were basically a version of me. How true is that now?” I drummed my fingers on the arm of my chair. Randomly, I wondered if any of the various creations of my world had invented the recliner. I wondered if I could prod one into doing it. How much energy would that create if I didn’t?

Duck answered me before my thoughts could go any further down that ridiculous path.

“Pretty close in most ways, but we started diverging a little right from the start,” she admitted. “I didn’t really start developing my independent personality until about two thousand years ago, planetary time. I’m… still you at the core, but you’ve only been awake a few hundred years, while I had to sit through your entire thirteen-hundred year nap in real time.”

Her tail dipped as she looked at the floor. “That’s actually why I decided to come clean. Over a thousand years as just a Terminal without a task gave me a lot of time to think. At least I can sleep. I did a lot of sleeping during that time.”

I didn’t want to think about that length of isolation.

“The last time a Terminal went independent, the problem was not in its origin drift,” Diamon noted. “It often got in the way, as it tried to do everything its creator did, but with a different perspective.”

“Yeah that won’t be a problem,” I reassured. “I have a few ideas. Actually, I’ve settled on one specifically, but you won’t like it, Diamon. I’ve got to break with tradition again.”

Diamon waved a trunk. “You are the High Administrator. You make the rules.”

I had a serious feeling not every administrator would be so accepting of my new rank. Diamon was unusually obedient to authority, I’d noticed. As far as he was concerned, I was above him now despite our gap in experience.

While he was saying that, I was sending a number of instructions to Switchboard. This would require some minor adjustments to how things worked in the cluster. I wasn’t even sure if my idea would work at all.

That’s how I knew it was a good one.

Opening up my interface, I went to the High Administrator portion. I needed something very specific, and I winced at how expensive it was. Once more I would need to drain the cluster’s coffers significantly, but this was the only thing I could think of… selfish or not.

And it was selfish. I knew that. I was risking the entire cluster when, World System connection or not, it would be safer to delete Duck. Everyone knew that. I knew that. It was the only option that actually made sense, after she’d manipulated both my senses and myself.

The worst part was… I could pry into her mind and see if she was telling the truth, and I still didn’t want to do that. It would be worse than just telling if she lied. I’d be tearing into her innermost thoughts, the ultimate invasion of privacy.

If she had been truly my Terminal, I wouldn’t have worried about it… but I was pretty sure my own belief had been part of what had turned Duck into her own entity. She wasn’t just a splinter of me any more, even if she was close to me… and subtly linked to me. I’d widened that gap, but we still had a thread attached.

Just like Orpheus had a thread to Pleiades.

I coalesced the Soul Energy, formed it into a ball, and tossed it to the elf. She caught it on reflex, then froze, staring at me.

“Yeah, it’s a World Seed,” I confirmed. “Your very own.”

Duck visibly recoiled from the glowing sphere, but she did not dare drop it. Neither of us knew what would happen if she did that, and neither wanted to find out. It would probably be fine, but dropping the start of a new universe on the floor wasn’t a thing to test casually.

Diamon lifted two trunks. “Is that wise, High Administrator? I do not believe a Terminal can use a World Seed by itself. They are limited by design, and do we have the energy to spend making a new administrator?”

The elf swallowed and answered before I could. “No. This is my punishment. This is how he keeps himself safe.” She looked over at me. “Isn’t it?”

I nodded. Diamon looked at me uncertainly, so I clarified.

“Duck is going to create a universe. She’s going to do it in such a way that it’s too different.” I crossed my arms. “She’s leaving the cluster. Not to defect to another, but to find out what they know. To explore the outside and bring back any information she can. She’ll be making universes to spread throughout the clusters. Our forward scout.”

Diamon’s trunks writhed in a way I’d never seen before. “Going outside… and replicating to others. That could take eons. It is inefficient. Though I know of no other way…”

Duck shook her head. “Not that inefficient. They tried to get into the cluster through me. I can… try to track that back to its source. I’m not sure I can do it but Donut’s right. If anyone has a way to track them, it’s me.”

I didn’t argue. She’d understood. I also understood her hesitation in doing that for me, whether or not I was her superior.

She grasped the World Seed tightly and looked up at me.

“I’ll say goodbye to Akasha and get to work.”