Neophyte World Builder

CROWN

With the realization that I’d actually thought through what I was doing, Artemis poked around with renewed interest. She couldn’t manipulate my actual interface or see everything Orpheus could, but she could review my projection if she knew what was there… or thought to look. Even if she looked young and inexperienced, she had all the memories of Orpheus, which meant she knew more about most world-building details than I did.

“You’ve already put a multi-layered topology in?” she asked with a note of approval in her voice. “Good time to do it. Much cheaper at the start. I would have advised you to think about it now if you hadn’t done it already.”

“Back when I first unlocked it, it told me that doing it earlier would be cheaper,” I noted. “So yeah, I put it in early this time. I know where I’m going with this one… mostly. Getting the emergent formation to work close to what I want is tough. You weren’t kidding about Pleiades being a genius, if he did this kind of thing to more precision than I did.”

“She, not you,” Artemis said quietly.

I looked over at her. “What?”

The purple-haired girl shook her head. “‘She wasn’t kidding’, not ’you weren’t kidding.’ I was made independent enough to think of Orpheus as a different person. She isn’t me. And I’m not sure I could even merge cleanly with her if she returned.”

She took a slow look around the room. “I’m guessing because Duck isn’t here, you know exactly what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

My eyebrow twitched.

“It isn’t quite what you think, but yes, I understand,” I replied once my flash of annoyance had passed. “You don’t agree with Orpheus on why she made you, then? Are you not going to be teaching me how to do incursions of my own? How to keep this cluster together now that I’m High Administrator?”

That had an effect on Artemis. The girl paused and gave me a long look, then tapped her finger on her lip. “You did mention being High Administrator. This wasn’t something my original self actually planned on happening. It does open up options… but your guess is right. I was put here to tell you how to do that.”

I turned and nodded to her. “All right, go on.” My thinking was that I could use the information to refine my own attack, or maybe understand if it was worth trying at all. Better to change course on this universe before it became expensive, if I was running down a wrong turn.

Artemis stared at me for a moment, then shook her head. “No.”

At first, I didn’t know what to say. Wasn’t this why she was put here? That was baffling, that she’d outright refuse her purpose.

“I’m allowed,” she clarified in a lighter tone. “I’m supposed to use my judgement and tell you what you need to know… but I matured in your world, surrounded by your soul. Orpheus is a very conservative and cautious administrator who wants to preserve doing everything the way Pleiades wanted… she only started loosening on that idea shortly before she created me.”

The young-looking Terminal swirled a finger in my projection, toying with a “bubble” that had started forming. “I’m not her,” she continued. “I know how Orpheus knew how to work, but I also know how dangerous and expensive those tactics are. I’m not going to tell you about them unless I see you going down that path. You’ve broken things and somehow come out better than your peers for it. I want you to break incursions. I want to watch you work.”

I frowned at her, but I couldn’t complain about her logic. She’d already as much as admitted my strategy should work. Ages ago, I would have been surprised it hadn’t been tried… but the Orpheus Cluster was much smaller than I’d thought. Sure, there were hundreds of universes, but that still left a lot of room open for new strategies.

Worlds were forming. I’d managed to set it up that they’d form in tens of thousands of years, local time, rather than the millions it took in Earth time, but it was still causing the clock to tick. In reality I knew my own world would be fine… it had the gods watching over it, and Akasha herself. They’d kept it going—if suboptimally—for thirteen hundred years without me. The handful of years this would take were nothing. I shouldn’t want to get back to it so soon.

I paused as I set into motion the development of animals. The universe kept running while I thought, of course. I made sure that some of the bubbles had a different evolution acceleration, so that they could have a few extremely weird worlds… but I also had already added mana of a sort into this world. I’d gone for a more classic alignment of the four basic elements plus life and death this time, which was easier for me to design.

With luck, the different mana density would create some truly interesting creatures before the mana evened out and settled into whatever pattern it would make. I liked being surprised, so long as it wasn’t another grey goo disaster. Or purple goo, as mine had been.

“Is it possible to create a Terminal and give them a mortal soul?” I asked quietly.

Artemis glanced at me, her lip twitching downward at the side. “I know what you’re thinking, and the answers… it’s probably possible, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Even if you succeeded, you’d bind the mortal’s soul to yours in a way that would make them… kind of your property. I know there are a few administrators who would be fine with that, but I have a good read on your attitude, and you don’t feel like the kind of person who would do that.”

I grimaced, confirming her assumption. “I see. Hmm. Well, I have other ideas. Especially if this one works…”

“Are you using the same System for this one?” Artemis asked, prodding me into talking about the things she couldn’t see.

“Not exactly,” I replied. “For Donut, the System is a limiter to help guide how growth is handled. Everything is all tied together, including how it interfaces with every living thing. It’s intrinsically part of how the universe works, because of how I wrote biology. That isn’t the same thing here, since the baseline is actually mostly Earth-based, at least for biology and such. I got too fancy eliminating bacteria and things, and had to sort of make a magical hack.”

I lazily tapped one of the bubbles that was still forming planets, watching the star sputter to life. Unlike most bubbles, this one formed the star off-center, where it began orbiting a large central earthlike planet. At least one of these bubbles was geocentric now, that was kind of cool.

“This one is different,” I continued. “Since it’s largely similar to a mundane world, I had to add the mana-processing organs into the evolutionary line myself, and allow them to enhance mundane flesh and blood. They’re currently dormant though, with a block on evolving usage. I’m adding a System that enhances instead of limits and substitutes. It’s mostly the same from their point of view, but the mechanism is different.”

Artemis remained silent while I looked over some of the other planets in my universe, just tilting her head at my focus. I knew she had questions, but she evidently could tell I was deep in my interface.

“There,” I muttered. “I’ve added management subterminals for now. I’ll have to attach souls to them later, but that’s not possible right now.”

“Have you noticed you aren’t using the interface as much?” Artemis asked quietly.

“Yes,” I agreed. “I did just now because I wanted some exact specifications, but it’s getting a lot easier to do things without it. I think maybe the cluster was relying on it too much. It’s great to train with, but it works even better if you don’t use it for everything. I’ve been trying to go by feel as much as possible, and it’s… let me do some surprising things.”

The Terminal didn’t comment on my revelation, but the subtle smile she gave me looked pleased. She turned back to my projection, strolling through the translucent display of the newborn but stabilizing universe, occasionally pausing to look at some spark of light or other anomaly.

Some parts I still used the interface for, though. It was easier to seed life—which I’d already done—and now it was easier to create intelligent life. I didn’t add it to every bubble, just in case one of them would evolve it naturally… but I made humans extremely common. This would be a more… typical universe than Donut, at least in some ways I considered typical. Typical fantasy, at least.

Elves. Goblin-like creatures. Dragons. Dwarves… both the “classic” kind and a variant of what I’d made for Donut. I queued up creation for all of them, along with some monsters, and sprinkled them throughout most of the universe in varying degrees. Only then did I get to work on the System and other factors.

I changed it up for this. Since I’d already created subterminals to handle various functions, I spread out the naming responsibilities amongst the various domains. Then, just to make things interesting, I gave mortal beings the possibility of naming the things they coined, with deities having an override. Each subterminal would be responsible for naming the abilities and classes that fell under their purview.

This System was also simpler than my other one. People could choose up to three classes, starting with one and choosing the two others later in their progression. I set the System subterminal with a queued task to come up with a way to allow people to change out a class, and I’d be letting whatever soul took that over figure out how they wanted that to work.

“Not that I’m planning on it, but could I use a soul from my other world to imbue one of these subterminals?” I asked in a random thought. “I had a related idea, but this one is simpler.”

Artemis tilted her head at me. “Didn’t you already draw out a soul from Earth and place it in Regalia?” She used the formal name of my world, one I still wasn’t used to. “Since you can just promote any soul to a subterminal, you could always skip the living portion and just put them into a subterminal. I do warn you though, I think that’s a bad idea. I like seeing you break things, but my memories can attest to how hard it is to run a place that you never really experienced.”

I chuckled. “No worry about that. I only have one crossover in mind, and it isn’t anything like that. I’m not sure if I can even do this, but if I am reading what Akasha said about her impressions from Pleiades correctly… I think it’s possible.”

Before I even finished reaching for the soul I had in mind, I stopped and frowned. “Switchboard? Let me know if anything bad starts to happen, all right?”

My Terminal sent a quick affirmative, and I relaxed to resume my task.

“What are you doing?” Artemis asked, finally too curious to remain silent and watch without full context. I didn’t answer, because I was concentrating.

I touched a soul, one that I knew well… but this one was different. Larger and more distributed than a typical one, even the high-complexity gods. With great care, I took a delicate thread from the soul, overlaid my worlds in my mind’s eye, and connected it to the System in my new universe. Only once the task was complete and seemed to have worked without even a hint of pain or distress from my volunteer did I answer.

“Akasha once said she had this feeling she was supposed to be an administrator,” I said, smiling. “But because of what she is, that’s impossible without tearing her from her universe. So I thought about it long and hard.”

I tapped my temple.

“There’s no rule that says she can’t handle the System subterminal in multiple universes, is there?”