164: Breakout
CROWN
Artemis wasn’t bound to my world, that was just where she’d been hidden. I was a little confused by this, because Duck had never been able to cross into my world, and she’d been a fully autonomous Terminal. I was pretty sure Switchboard couldn’t enter a world either… was it some power I had to deliberately grant a Terminal? Was it something Orpheus knew how to do but I couldn’t yet?
I pondered this while setting up my control room for my new universe, and I was embarrassed how long it took me to come up with the answer to my questions. I’d really gotten too used to working on this stuff alone. The answer was easy to get.
“Artemis, how come you can visit the world, but neither of my Terminals could?”
Yeah, I really should have just asked her from the start.
The young-looking slip of a girl looked up from where she sat and blinked. “Terminals are designed for specific purposes. If they didn’t need the ability, you wouldn’t have included it, even if you were doing it by instinct. If you really needed a Terminal that could go into a universe for you, I’m sure you could make one… I wouldn’t recommend it until you have more experience with Terminals, though.”
I nodded, then paused to just contemplate her for a moment. The evolution of my “perception filter” on Orpheus was interesting, now that I could compare what it was doing to what I knew. It was adjusting to my own subconscious and instincts, I knew that now.
When I’d first seen Orpheus, she’d been abundantly curvy and basically what my old human self had found “attractive” on some level, at least physically. Her first Terminal sent to help me out had been a tiny fairy version of that, in keeping with my viewpoint of her as a helper entity. Then, once she’d started visiting me, she’d lost the exaggerated and overly sexualized curves to become a pragmatic office worker woman, then a valkyrie-type warrior.
Artemis was something different. She still looked a bit like Orpheus, including the purple hair and general face shape. She’d taken that form upon entering my sanctuary, after a brief appearance as a creature that I could best describe as a bubble of angles surrounding the color purple. My filter had kicked in after a tiny delay and put her into this body instead of the elf shape she’d had inside my world.
This one was… a teenage girl. I’d wondered briefly about that, but being more in tune with my thoughts led me to understand it was because I saw her as something to protect. The original Orpheus had been someone my fading human desires had wanted to flirt with. The Terminal was more like the little sister I wanted to keep safe.
I sighed and finished carving out the sanctuary room. Artemis sat on the only piece of furniture I’d put in there, which was a huge circular leather-upholstered sofa. The sofa-ring was at the edge of the circular room, overlooking a dip in the area where I would put the projection of my new universe. Since it was a disc instead of a donut, I made it easy to just walk into the projection this time.
“This would be a lot easier if you could just tell me how they managed to kidnap your original,” I grumbled to myself. I spent a moment to adjust the door leading into and out of the control center. I’d matured enough that I didn’t even think anything of the fact that if I’d connected the two control centers architecturally, they’d overlap. My sanctuary “space” was purely conceptual.
Artemis shrugged. “If I stayed that connected to her, I’d have probably been taken along as well. At the time she created me, she only suspected it might happen, and still wasn’t sure how they’d do it. Obviously they need to push forward in some way to do it, or they wouldn’t have done the incursions to begin with… but unless they rushed the universes themselves and nobody noticed, they didn’t need any incursions into Orpheus’s worlds specifically.”
That was concerning, but obviously there had to be some kind of limitation or the whole incursion thing wouldn’t have happened to begin with. I set that aside as something to consider for myself. Just… later.
“All right, I had another cycle so I have some spare Soul Energy to work with,” I muttered. “I don’t like operating so close to zero, but I gotta do what I gotta do. Time to get this thing started. I guess with you here, it’ll be just like old times.”
Artemis thumped her heels on the sofa. “Would you like me to scold you for random things and insist I can’t give you advice while I sometimes slip in a little advice? Just to help with the nostalgia?”
I glanced back at her and arched an eyebrow. Orpheus had never had much of a sense of humor before, so the joke threw me before I could even chuckle at it. The innocent smile Artemis gave back when I looked at her was almost unnerving in how self-aware it was.
This was definitely not a Terminal that took after the parent.
“You’re very different from the Orpheus I met,” was all I said to her. I pulled up the new universe, still blank and filled with the silvery fluid. It wasn’t all liquid, but the thick mist thickened in places to become rivers… or that was the plan, once I got things moving.
“The Orpheus that created me was stressed at all times, and focused on her mission,” Artemis countered. “They also had no real understanding of you or the world you made. I was created from her observations, and part of my purpose is to be more relatable. I’m still nothing like a human or vaskan or elf… my true form isn’t well-suited for this space. I can understand you a lot better than they could, though. For example, you call me a girl because I appear as one… and I appear as one partly because that’s what I chose to be.”
While I listened, I spent a little energy to sprinkle a number of powerful gravity wells in my new universe. They weren’t literal gravity wells… they only attracted the viscous mist I’d filled the place with, thickening it and giving it motion. I set a property of the universe to form these when the mist became too thin in an area, with a few rules to prevent runaway creation and to add some variation.
“What exactly are you doing?” Artemis finally asked. She hopped off the sofa to wander into the projection, taking a better look at the universe with curiosity. “This looks kind of dull. Are you adding matter later? Or doing something strange like your home universe?”
I shook my head. “I’d love to see an emergent intelligent life, but I think it’s too risky for me to try to intentionally set up the development for that. It would take too many cycles, and I can’t spare the time.”
A soft giggle sounded from the girl. “Really? You have one of the highest dilation rates in the cluster, you know. Even with the new universe tethered to your original, you have quite a lot more time than anyone else. Even Ember’s is less extreme.”
That was something that I’d always wondered about, and never got around to asking. Now was as good a time as any to figure this out, while I was further defining the rules. I started time in my new universe, set the dilation up as high as it could go relative to my torus universe, and then turned toward her as my initial age began to flow.
“I still don’t quite get that. Do you mean time flows differently to me relative to the rest of the cluster? What happens when I speed up time flow, or slow it down, for me?” I asked that with an honestly confused frown. “That never made sense to me.”
Artemis shrugged. “Yes. Your time flows differently, and it only advances at the pace you set yourself. When you accelerate time, the rest of the cluster’s time also goes more quickly. When you slow it down, not as much happens in the rest of the cluster… or in any universes, really.”
I squinted at her. “Are you saying I control the time flow of the entire rest of the multiverse? That seems… excessively powerful.”
The answering laughter wasn’t mocking, Artemis genuinely seemed amused. “Is it? Everything else flows as well, just at a different rate. It only becomes obvious when you interact, and everything is synced up. Are you controlling the flow of time… or is every single person controlling it? Terminals, if built correctly, are sort of outside of this effect and take on the local time flow.”
It clicked then. Everything was synced up to the proper time, it was just my perspective that interacted with everyone else. I still had questions, but I’d been an administrator long enough that I got the idea.
“I see now… and my default flow is at a higher rate than everyone else’s. Now it makes sense,” I muttered. “Only I have no idea why my time flow is faster. What did I do to make it that way?”
Artemis shrugged again, her hands spread on either side. “I have no idea. I know how to do a lot of things, but even my original didn’t understand how everything worked. If she had, don’t you think she’d have selected people with high time flows to become administrators?”
She had a point. Even the so-called gods that ran universes were bound by rules they didn’t really understand. I knew that, and I’d known it for a long time, but that didn’t make it less depressing.
I sighed and went back to her original question about what I was doing.
“This world is made to be flexible,” I answered. “I’ve set up a number of rules and so-called constants, but they are only constant within the universe as a whole. They can be modified on a local level, but that local modification is strictly bounded.”
Explaining that, I pointed to the swirling vortices that my adjustments had created.
“These gather in the ether around them, concentrating it to form a shell around the center. As it condenses, it adds pressure, forming a bubble around the center. Each bubble has slightly different modifications and local effects, and the pull inward causes the ether to flow rapidly, sometimes even faster than light… and I’ve added some alterations to how that works. In time they’ll form their own planets and systems and stars, each with different levels of magic—which I’m still refining—and even different physics or behaviors in extreme cases.”
Artemis poked a finger through one of the swirling whirlpools of ether, watching the silvery mist condense into multicolored fluid, then a fully black shell that slowly expanded. “I see… you’re setting up different worlds and unlike your own universe, you’re giving the inhabitants a way to visit one another within their lifetimes.”
Her comprehension made me smile, and I continued. “Yes, they don’t need to spend years upon years to reach the nearest new planet, even if they’re lightyears away. They can follow the flows and get there much faster. Presuming they figure out a way to enter the ether and escape their own bubbles… but I’ve set some baseline assumptions about magic, so they should be able to use that to make the crossing.”
“Baseline assumptions,” she mused. “But why alter the parameters each bubble? They’d have difficulty interacting with one another because of differing standards and-”
Abruptly, she cut herself off as she mentally worked through everything that implied. I waited patiently for the newborn Terminal to process it all, watching my universe develop over time. I’d need to seed the right parameters to trigger world formation, and I was still tweaking things for that.
Artemis mumbled, “I get it.” She looked over at me and laughed again, her smile widening. “Incursions are accepted freely, but not as new rules. They’re seen as just a new incarnation of a change. They get a foothold but never expand because they’re always seen as local. And the denizens…”
Her eyes widened.
“They’re just used to handling different rules. Every time they go somewhere,” she breathed.
I winked. “Exactly.”