Chapter 12: Cohesion

  The 1:10 ratio gave me time.

  If I’d been a scientist trying to resolve everything, even with that dilation, the work likely would’ve taken so long that the rest of the biosphere would have died out before I came close to a solution.

  Fortunately, I could alter the rules of reality itself.

  The main question was: how do I do that to fix the problem?

  “The most straightforward solution would be to add all of the insects and bacteria I need,” I said out loud to Orpheus. “But do I really want to just copy Earth? That’s an enormously complex system that somebody else designed.

  “I like the idea of having Earth?recognizable plants like oak trees, just for my own sense of aesthetics. But that doesn’t mean I need everything Earth had.”

  This time Orpheus didn’t say anything. I didn’t expect her to, because this really was entirely in my hands. I knew anything she suggested would influence me.

  Still, it was nice to have someone to think out loud toward.

  I took a few deep breaths and considered my options.

  The important thing was not to panic.

  Even if the entire system died out, I’d only be out 300 Reality Points. That would hurt, but it wasn’t unrecoverable.

  I considered my options.

  Adding insects made sense. I didn’t want there to be some sort of perfect ecological balance that my civilizations would never have to pay attention to – tension made for good stories – but I wasn’t sure I needed bacteria and viruses and all the other things life had evolved from early on.

  I was creating everything from scratch. I didn’t need to go through the earlier stages, even if the idea of having a lost dinosaur island or something was pretty cool.

  I paused when I thought of that and frowned.

  “I should get a notebook or something,” I muttered, “for the ideas I have for the future.”

  As soon as I thought of that, a new tab appeared in my interface: Scratch Pad.

  I’d never needed it, so it had never appeared. Unlike some of the other tabs, this one wasn’t currently locked.

  I touched it and saw that it had a familiar interface… files to organize thoughts, folders to put those files in. Convenient.

  With this, I started putting down some of the ideas I needed.

  I wasn’t sure if my non?biological existence gave me an improved memory or not, so I felt I should write these things down.

  I jotted down a few of my ideas for the future – like a dinosaur island and similar concepts – but then I had to get back to the real task: designing the solution to my current problem.

  If I didn’t use bacteria or viruses, I’d need some other means of revitalizing soil, managing decomposition, handling nutrient cycling, and so on. I wasn’t a biologist, as far as I could tell. In fact, I wasn’t even sure what my previous job had been.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  I seemed to have a lot of generic knowledge spread across different subjects. Maybe I was just some kind of perpetual student. Or maybe my more specialized knowledge just hadn’t come up yet.

  I brushed the mental tangent aside and frowned at my current problem.

  I must have spent an hour looking through various menus, tweaking values, trying to get things to work… before the solution, which had been staring me in the face the entire time, just sort of reached out… and figuratively slapped me across the cheek.

  I didn’t want bacteria and viruses. But what did my world have that Earth didn’t?

  Technically, quite a lot.

  But what I immediately thought of was the Mana I’d spent so much trouble infusing into the whole world.

  Right now, it was in a steady state but constantly building up. At this rate it would trigger an expansion event relatively soon. I’d intended to tweak the flow once I had a better idea of how often it would happen, because I wanted it to be relatively rare on the scale of civilizations.

  But what if it didn’t have to build up so fast?

  A lot of the processes of living beings were a mystery to me, but I knew some general facts. Most animals took in oxygen and exhaled carbon dioxide as a waste product. Plants took in carbon dioxide and produced oxygen as a waste product.

  I knew there was a lot more to it than that, but I’d been leaning heavily on the interface to handle those details. I also knew they needed energy to do it. Plants could do this with photosynthesis, but they also needed nutrients in the soil… and who knew what else.

  I spent what was probably several hours locally tinkering in the menus again, leaning heavily on the interface to balance things automatically and fill in the gaps in my mental model by picking up on my intent.

  It all looked complicated with numbers and ratios and sub?menus, but generally focusing my will and intent worked a lot better than blindly tweaking values and checking for errors.

  I wouldn’t say it was easy, but at least I didn’t have to be an inhuman calculator.

  It did take some tweaking of the Mana energy, which cost more Reality Points than I wanted. Working on such a basic thing after world creation had been initialized was expensive.

  Yet it did do what I wanted… or at least, I thought it did.

  Now plants could draw Mana deep from the earth and respirate, giving it different forms of a sort.

  Animals also respirated Mana, and that helped circulate it, because their bodies would bring Mana from other areas, mixing the energy that had been tinted with their life force.

  This was, of course, a very basic explanation. The actual mechanics of it had taken quite a lot to work out.

  I didn’t want to have another horrifying mistake like what just happened, so I spent a lot more time making this safer.

  For one thing, I didn’t want plants and animals spontaneously developing the ability to channel and use magic… especially since I hadn’t really defined what I wanted magic to do.

  It took a lot of work to put limitations on mutations and biology, restricting the use of Mana to strictly biological functions.

  I wanted to leave a little leeway for surprises, but I definitely didn’t want trees that threw fireballs or something ridiculous like that.

  I rubbed my chin and looked over at Orpheus.

  “I’m thinking about making some magical plants, though. Do you think I should wait… or do it now?”

  She fluttered up from the end table where she’d quietly settled while I was deep in my work. It took her a few moments to respond, and I realized I’d been silent for so long that her attention might have drifted.

  That again made me wonder exactly how difficult I was making her actual job by asking all these questions.

  “I keep reminding you, I can’t advise you on anything,” she pointed out. “The most I can do is tell you that I don’t see any reason not to make a few prototype magical plants… if you intend to make them later in greater numbers.”

  That was a good point.

  I nodded to her and mulled over my interface.

  The question was: how to make some magical plants without giving every plant the ability to do strange things with that energy?

  I realized I needed some kind of limiter.

  The solutions were getting more and more complicated, and I browsed the interface for another hour before I could even conceive of an answer that satisfied me.

  I had to have some way to limit the actual manipulation of Mana beyond basic biological functions… and then have some way of limiting that gateway.

  The only trick was keeping things from evolving it into a direction I didn’t want.

  And that was just going to get more complicated once I put sapients into the mix.

  But I guess I was the only one who could do the job, huh?