Neophyte World Builder

DUCK

It had been harder than I’d thought, saying goodbye to Akasha.

Crown had taken up the mantle of being Akasha’s father, and acted the part. I’d been… friendly to her, but perhaps never being able to see or touch her avatar had kept me distant. I’d even designed her body in a way that I’d have wanted. When Crown had told me I’d be leaving, I’d said goodbye for Akasha’s sake, not my own.

Now I realized that even if I spoke to her again, she might be a completely different person.

That hurt.

I had told Crown I was mostly him… that wasn’t a lie. I had a lot of his priorities and beliefs in how things should work, even if I sometimes played Devil’s Advocate about them. What I hadn’t said was how the portion of me that wasn’t him had changed my viewpoint so much that I was in many ways distinct.

This made it… interesting for my own universe to come.

“Really, Donut? I don’t even get a Terminal of my own like you had?”

The plain white room was all too familiar. By the time I’d been “born” the sanctuary had been decorated, but I still had plenty of memories of what Crown had done before that, and distant memories of Earth. Even my earlier memories as “Duck” were a little distant now, like I’d been a different person.

But I remembered the blankness.

For a time, I just stood in the empty white room, pondering my existence. I could still feel the faint tether to Crown, a tickling in the back of my soul. Whether or not that would survive my ascension to Rank 1, I had no clue. I wasn’t even sure if time was passing outside of this room. Crown had worried about that quite a lot, but I’d never let it bother me.

Time operated weirdly across universes, and I couldn’t pretend to understand why, so I didn’t try.

I took a deep breath of the non-air in the sanctuary, then rubbed my eyes.

This simulacrum of a body couldn’t actually cry, but I felt like I should. Ever since I’d started to diverge—right when Crown had paid off his debt—I’d become more and more… different. Independent. I still wanted Regalia to succeed, but I’d felt things and eventually had something I knew I shouldn’t have.

Desires.

Not just an echo of Crown’s own, but my personal, differing desires. In some respects, Crown’s decision to cut me loose in this way was the greatest gift he could give me. I hadn’t expected it, and as punishments went, it was pretty tame. Sure, I wouldn’t see Ember or Trent again… but I wasn’t that close to either.

And I had betrayed his trust. Probably in more ways than he knew, even. I’d never tried working against him, but the statement that he couldn’t fully trust me wasn’t wrong. His decision to remove me from the equation also wasn’t wrong. I couldn’t be mad at him.

It still hurt.

The idea that he still trusted me enough to send me out to another cluster, to find and work against the people that had attacked him… had attacked us. That was… interesting. At first surprising, but then I realized what he knew that I hadn’t, and how in his own way, Crown had done both a mercy and a cruel punishment in doing this.

He knew I cared about Akasha… and he knew I would very much like to hurt the creatures that had hurt her.

“Right, Duck. Let’s get to hurting,” I muttered.

Already talking to myself. The isolation was real.

I had one huge advantage over Crown… or Regalia as I forced myself to start thinking of him as. I not only knew more about universe design than when he’d started, but I also had those tickles of the World System that I’d felt, not to mention the ragged and aching wounds upon my soul from the incursion attempts against me directly. Those were informative in their own way.

I also had one huge disadvantage, though.

I’d have to learn to do all this without the World System. Everything manually, by hand. Like a normal non-Orpheus cluster administrator. That was going to be a tall order.

My connection to the World System had given me hints at how to do all this, but a hint book wasn’t nearly as useful without an instruction manual to go with it. Not only that, but I’d have to make a universe so divergent from anything I was familiar with, I’d get booted right out of the cluster.

With any luck, it would also not be similar enough to an existing universe to warrant me being merged with one. That would be a short and uneventful start and end to my solo career. I was pretty sure I’d gained enough independence that my tenuous tether to Regalia wouldn’t save me if my universe were merged with another.

Doing this while navigating how many Reality Points I had by feel instead of with the display was going to be another challenge.

I paced a circle around the tiny room, trying to work out my tension. Since I didn’t actually have any tension in my non-body, this didn’t work very well. It did help center my mind, though.

The ache that sometimes throbbed in my soul manifested again, this time as an imagined pain at the base of my tail. I hadn’t mentioned to anyone how the attempts to get at me actually hurt and left scars… it didn’t seem like a good idea. I didn’t want them to pity me. As much as I was an untrustworthy bitch, I wanted the Orpheus cluster—or Regalia cluster now—to succeed. If they had felt sorry for me, they might not have done what was needed.

Exile hadn’t been what I expected, but it was something I could work with. I’d fulfill my purpose even if it was outside of the cluster.

“Okay. Topology.”

Staring at the blank walls, I considered the major factor that made Orpheus universes what they were. Transitive distance space manifold. The idea that going from A to B, and from A to C, would let you consistently know the distance from B to C. Much like Regalia, I wasn’t an expert on this stuff since he hadn’t been when he’d been on Earth, but playing around with universal properties made me more aware of what that meant. Localized exceptions like singularities could change this, but as a baseline rule it held true.

I just had to break that assumption. Easy. Just make a universe where a triangle with all angles being equal didn’t require all sides to be equal in length.

No, it wasn’t easy at all, but it sure was easy to say.

High curvature spacetime could technically do that, but that was more a warping of the actual rule, not breaking it. It would probably put me pretty far from center, but it may not be enough to fling me right out of the cluster. I needed something big. Something that just broke the assumption to the point that natives would never even assume. But I didn’t want to break causality… that would make things too messy for me to follow at all.

I lazily envisioned different universe shapes while I considered. From sphere to torus to a curled sheet, all the way to the classic Möbius strip. I was pretty sure that regular topologies wouldn’t do anything for me here, but it helped me think, and more importantly it helped me practice doing things without the World System’s interface.

I’d also need an expanding universe. I wanted to keep the idea that information took time to travel, because looping was just going to happen if I didn’t put in information destruction somehow. I could change that to fit as well, and that would guarantee being thrown out of the cluster… but I needed to keep my sanity, as well. So the universe would need to steadily grow in size.

My tail swayed a few times as I thought back to what I’d just considered.

Did it need to get bigger?

What if I could expand the universe without making it bigger? That would break the coherent consistency metric that the Orpheus cluster clung to. It was also a lot easier for me to comprehend.

I was somewhat aware that several thousand years ago, I would never have thought of this sort of thing as easy at all. Whether Regalia realized it or not, running the universe had changed both our perspectives in more ways than just how we viewed mortals. Concepts that were the domain of advanced mathematicians upon Earth now came to me intuitively, and Regalia likely had the same advantage.

Just because I called him an idiot all the time didn’t mean I believed it.

“Okay, time to get to work. Make the universe more and more information dense without expansion, huh?”

Again, my intuition worked for me. I knew the term, but the math escaped me. The mere concept of a fractal is all I needed, and my instincts guided me into creating it, structuring it as a single “blob” of space to start with. As the universe aged, smaller blobs would form within… pieces of space where things would operate. Each of these smaller blobs would hold exactly as much space as the initial blob.

And the initial blob could of course be reached from inside the smaller blob, because it was also inside each of the smaller blobs.

My mental picture wasn’t a clear shape any more, it was a concept and nothing more. An idea given form, but the subtle drain on my Soul Energy told me the idea was taking form. I could also feel it was a little “leaky” somehow… much like an open universe in traditional spacetime.

I shouldn’t think of it like that. It wasn’t “traditional” spacetime, it was just the kind that I was familiar with.

Of course, I also knew that what I was doing would be hard to grasp for anything in my old world. It was simple though. Impossible, maybe, but all I had to picture was taking a box and putting that box in itself.

Easy.

Well, the picturing part was easy. The concentration required to actually build the universe was a lot more difficult. Keeping it all in my mind’s eye long enough for it to come together was considerably different than just letting the World System handle it.

No wonder most administrators failed before they had the System.

I rubbed my head and sighed. “This would all be a lot easier if I had a Terminal of my own. I can’t wait to get high enough Rank to…”

I heard myself trail off as I realized what an idiot I’d been.

Maybe I was still closer to Regalia than I’d thought.

Hands clapped over my face as I let out a deep groan. “Stupid Duck. Ranks are there to represent understanding and power. Even as a piece of Regalia’s soul you’re still more mature than some baby mortal soul they might pluck out. You know how to do all this stuff!”

Regalia had made a Terminal while the World System was down. I hadn’t been there, but I also hadn’t been surprised. I already had a feeling I knew how to do it, and if I didn’t get one working I’d go insane trying to handle everything myself.

New administrators would fail for many reasons, and maybe I’d stumble into those as well… but it wouldn’t be because I was overwhelmed.

Of course, a Terminal shouldn’t be able to do that, but I hadn’t been just a Terminal in a long, long while. My soul was complete enough to do what I wanted. I could get this running.

With a careful and tense focus on my inner self, I set aside a piece of my soul.

Then I stepped away from my new self and got back to work.