The notifications that flooded my vision were only a mild surprise. I’d expected something when I hit that button.
I was mostly pleased that the auto?correction the interface did for my intent had kept it from throwing any weird warnings.
With a thought, I summoned up the entirety of the universe and quickly zoomed in by focusing my attention on various parts of the donut. The whole mental interface thing was pretty useful.
Unfortunately, not much was happening.
The sun was just appearing… a slow, glowing emergence from the spire, causing a sort of dawn.
I wondered what it looked like from the surface, but the interface didn’t seem capable of actually putting me on the ground from the viewpoint of a living being. That must be what the Avatar function was for.
As soon as I pondered how long I would have to wait, the three?dimensional window I was looking at manifested a Time Dilation setting. It was currently set at 1:1, which explained everything.
I was literally watching the first few seconds of my new universe’s existence.
It was a little overwhelming, and now I thought I understood another reason why my emotions were muted.
If this is how I feel with no real emotions… how would I feel in an actual body, witnessing the birth of creation? I wondered.
I savored the sight of a new world for a little while longer.
I probably went through the first few hours just watching it… seeing the sun travel across the sky. It probably would’ve been a little more majestic if the world weren’t made up of barren rock.
I’d tried to specify dirt, but it was more like gravel.
Only at this point did I remember that dirt had a lot of organic material in it. I wouldn’t have actual dirt – or soil – until I had plants.
Well, that wasn’t technically true, as it turned out. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
After just reveling in my success for a while, I upped the speed to about one year for every thirty minutes I spent watching. That gave me a nice view of the sun doing its complete course and, finally, the stars coming out.
After a few cycles, I frowned and sped up universe time dilation further to run through the first decade or two.
When I slowed it back down to 1:1, we were about twenty-three years in.
“It appears to be working just fine,” Orpheus noted, surprising me by saying something before I addressed her.
I shook my head. “No. I need to make a few tweaks… actually, several. But I think a couple of them can wait until a little later. I might be able to solve them in the Third Epoch.”
She looked at me curiously as I pulled up my interface and made a few adjustments.
It was much more expensive to do this sort of thing now that the universe was running live. Even so, my tweaks were so minor that it only took about three points total. I was still paying fractions of a point for some of these changes.
That left me with 9,001 Reality Points, plus less than a tenth of a point in remainders.
Those three points I spent did a lot of work.
All I needed to do was:
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Tweak the material the stars were made of so they retained their charge just a little bit longer
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Up their absorption rate slightly
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Lower the maximum distance at which they started absorbing
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Nudge the magicite in a few places to add more heat venting, especially along ocean floors
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And finally, I tweaked magicite routing to add a small level of randomization
This last part took over half of the three points for some reason.
“The weather was too predictable,” I explained to Orpheus. “Every year was almost exactly the same. And the stars were starting to fade before night was fully over. The first is kind of a big deal, because we don’t want a perfectly predictable climate. The second is mostly aesthetic.”
Orpheus nodded again. “Aesthetics can actually be very important,” she pointed out. “Natural beauty and wonder is one way to inspire sapient life.”
“Exactly,” I said, and winked.
I turned back to the interface and let it run again, returning to one year per five minutes, and watched another half-dozen years pass.
This looked more satisfactory, even if the weather was a little weird to me.
Clouds tended to be long and stringy. Storms also jetted across the surface in streaks. I didn’t see any signs of hurricanes or the like… just intense storms that struck like spears.
It was only then that I realized the weather would be very different without the rotational energy of the Earth causing everything to twist. I probably could’ve tweaked some values to imitate that… but after I thought about it, I didn’t want to directly copy Earth anyway.
Once more, I attempted to crack my knuckles.
Just like before, nothing happened. I frowned.
I wonder how long it’ll take me to break that habit.
I didn’t even have joints. Why did I still have the urge to do that?
Why do I still have the habit if I don’t have brain chemistry?
I really needed to stop trying to figure out my afterlife. It was distracting.
Instead, I concentrated on my interface.
I slowed the world back to 1:1 and browsed through the tabs.
There was, in fact, a new tab labeled Life – pretty catch-all, but fortunately it was also subdivided in a way that made sense to me, just like the Sanctuary menu.
I was quickly able to divide it up between Flora and Fauna, and I started browsing Vegetation.
To my delight, dirt was actually in there… plenty of types of dirt, too.
I spread it liberally over the places where I thought it made sense, vaguely changing fertility and nutrient values more or less at random.
I was halfway through this before I thought to ask Orpheus about it.
“If I just spread this around with varying degrees, natural processes will move it to where it actually makes sense, right?”
The fairy – who was currently perched on my shoulder and didn’t seem to want to move from there — gave a vague nod.
“It will still stabilize over time, so long as you haven’t done anything that makes no sense at all. Looking at your world’s parameters… you may want to tweak a few settings to increase migration rate and run your vegetation for a few centuries.”
I blinked in surprise. That was an actual suggestion. I hadn’t expected that from her.
I hesitantly asked, “Is it okay for you to suggest that?”
She nodded again.
“It was a natural extension of the question you were already asking. While it was technically volunteering information, it was the information you were actually looking for, even if it wasn’t exactly what you said aloud.
“This terminal does not convey emotions very well,” she added, “but you should know that while I am not your companion, I do have a vested interest in your success. And I have no reason to be too literal. I can make a natural assumption of what you want to know based upon context, though our differing mindsets may make that difficult to guess at times.”
That was a relief… to know she wouldn’t be a literal genie or something. The last thing I needed was an advisor that acted like a monkey’s paw.
I paused. That reference wasn’t quite right, I thought. I knew that, but my memory was still a little weird about very specific references like that. I couldn’t put my finger on it.
For some reason, just thinking that made me chuckle.
I took a breath and went back to work.
I roughly knew what I needed to do. Before I placed anything, I adjusted the mutation rate globally – so instead of millions of years, we could see a result in a few centuries.
Then I basically smeared algae everywhere and looked through the menu for anything else interesting.
The menu was expansive… way more so than I expected. It had numerous subsections, but they made sense once I started clicking on them. Even so, it was still a little hard to navigate.
Algae had been pretty easy to find, and I belatedly realized I needed to seed other kinds of bacteria as well.
Then I paused.
Did I really need to seed every kind of bacteria? Many hadn’t even been discovered for most of human existence. I could easily make it work without it… or maybe use something else for diseases instead.
I shelved the idea for now and focused on putting plant life in.
The list had so many kinds of trees and bushes, vines, mushrooms… everything. They were organized into ever?smaller groups, but the groups just kept going.
After browsing for a full twenty minutes, I realized that many of these were probably extinct in my time. This might be organized like I would have done it in my mind, but the data had to be from my world, not my memories. I certainly didn’t recognize most of these plants.
With the mutation rate high, I didn’t need everything. I selected a few trees I did know, along with some bushes, flowers, mushrooms, vines, molds, and so on. Quite a few of these things I would never have thought of myself, so having them in a menu was nice.
I didn’t try to place everything though. I just tried to get a good variety and spread it around.
This was, once again, easy to say… but I was working on a whole world that was much larger than Earth. Even with the thought interface that let me carpet entire islands and even continents with vegetation at once if I wanted to, it took several hours of dedicated work.
I still had more plants I wanted to add, but for now I could rely on the relatively random generation.
At last I sat back in my chair and regarded the massive, virgin expanses of green, yellow, and other colors… mostly green.
I knew enough to put conifers up in cooler areas, but I could only guess what areas would actually be cool in the long run. I’d run the universe long enough for snow to form in some places, so I had a vague idea.
Most importantly, I didn’t have to sit through the whole era of nothing but bacteria in the sea, forming algae and molds and then eventually bushes and trees. It was more like a video game again, where I could plant a tree that was obviously a hundred years old if I really wanted to.
Rubbing my hands together, I admired the completely untouched wilderness for a little while longer.
“Lovely,” I said.
Then I reached for the Time Dilation.