A lot of what I had just done wasn’t all that expensive, since I wasn’t directly manipulating things currently in the world. Sure, there had been several tweaks to what was going on, and I had added a few things, but I didn’t really have sticker shock. The total cost was 173 Reality Points. That wasn’t cheap, but I thought it was a bargain considering what I had done.
I pulled up my Scratch Pad and crossed off one task from the list—then immediately added two more. I had a feeling this was going to be a common thread: adding more things than I crossed off.
Closing that and sweeping my interface aside, I spoke up.
“Orpheus, I’m finished with that task. I’m about to do something directly related to what you asked if you wanted to watch. I think this is the last step before I add intelligence.”
Orpheus was awake quickly this time. Still perched on my shoulder, the only way I could really tell was in how she suddenly animated and lifted her head. She tilted it to the side for a long moment and then nodded.
“I see what you’ve done here. While the exact implementation is, of course, unique – as all of them are – this is a fairly logical progression to solve the problem you’ve had. This is neither bad nor good, but you expressed interest in knowing my thoughts on what you’ve done.”
“Yeah,” I said, still browsing through the interface, “pretty much.” I was trying to find a way to have decomposition without bacteria when I paused.
“In my world,” I continued, “what I did was basically how people used to think the world worked… although with different elements. In hindsight, I may have just tried too hard not to copy the theories they came up with, and make it my own. We’ll see if that was worth the effort or not later.”
Orpheus patted my ear with a tiny hand.
“I did tell you to be creative. But if the simple and straightforward solution does what you want, you should still consider it. Remember that what is simple and uncreative in your world may still be rather unique in this universe cluster.”
“That’s a good point,” I admitted. “A little too late now, but even if I may have overcomplicated it, I’m pretty happy with how things worked out here. But now…” I sighed heavily as I morosely flipped through the various menus. “Now I need to make things a little harsher. I don’t really look forward to dictating ways that people and animals can die.”
I glanced at the High Administrator’s tiny form.
“I understand why I have to. If I make it perfect there won’t be enough energy to run it and then everything dies anyway. But I don’t really have to like it, do I?”
Orpheus actually smiled.
“Not all Administrators have empathy. Often it is a liability. But I will point out again that we seek out variety. You understand the need for what you are doing, and that is good enough. If anything, as long as you can force yourself to make it properly dangerous, that means you will not add pointless cruelty to the system.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
I winced at her. “Is that a common problem?”
She shrugged and shook her head.
“I wouldn’t say it’s a common problem. But neither is it all that rare.”
Another heavy sigh left me and I muttered, “I also don’t know if you actually care or not. This whole thing where you are masking your real appearance behind this mental image I have of you makes me doubt everything you say. No offense.”
“I am an alien intelligence to you,” she pointed out. “I would be surprised if you knew all that I was thinking.”
She hesitated, and I recognized the pause this time as the look of her delving into my world’s standards. Then she continued.
“By your terms I am indeed very detached, and would often appear emotionless. But as I have said, I am not. My emotions simply work differently than yours. But I understand the concept of empathy, and why you would hesitate to hurt others. It may surprise you, but I share them in my own way. I simply take a larger view.”
She gestured around the room.
“You are concerned with the innocents of your universe. I am concerned with the overall health of all the universes. This will naturally make me less concerned over individual lives than you. That very fact makes me better suited to be a High Administrator than you… as you are now.”
I wasn’t really sure I liked that, so I dropped the topic and just nodded. I needed to focus on my next task anyway… namely, I needed to figure out a way for things to decompose.
This actually wasn’t that hard. Despite the lack of bacteria, I’d already made Entropic Mana. For this case, I just made anything that had been alive automatically begin to decay its Vital Mana into Entropic Mana.
My universe still had conservation of energy, which seemed to be something like a common law – one that could only be broken with an input of Reality Points – so the conversion took energy.
Basically, when something died, its Mana would flip from one type to the other, and that conversion process would take time and damage the body in the process.
Simple. Easy. Elegant.
Things could even be preserved, if someone applied Mana to clean out the remaining Vital Mana before it had decayed too far.
Unfortunately, now that I had solved decomposition – even if it had taken me an hour or two of tweaking – I now had to confront the big problem.
I had to design disease.
But here I was, adding this horrible thing.
I think part of me had wanted to skip it. But I knew that if I didn’t have something besides predation to kill off excess populations, it would lead to overpopulation, and “survival of the fittest” really wouldn’t work.
The only good thing about this was that I had discovered an incredibly useful function… one that I would definitely need to use later.
When I was investigating how to do this, I’d largely been working on the conception of animals, plants, mushrooms – whatever – with physical bodies. But this was my universe. And there was nothing really stopping me from creating a presence that was entirely Mana-based.
It wouldn’t operate the same way as animals and plants—my universe still had physics that required something to transmit these things—but I could make a mystical presence.
So that’s what I did.
First, I replicated infection.
I didn’t want it to be as horrible as it could be back on Earth. But I did make it possible for Entropic Mana to try to penetrate a body if there was an opening for it.
Healthy beings would normally circulate Vital Mana to stop this. But if they let something into their body that had other Mana colors in it – like dirt or tainted substances – it would be harder to fight off. It basically mirrored infection fairly closely, but it would probably be easier to treat and harder for anyone or anything to lose limbs from it.
Diseases were more difficult. I really didn’t know how to make a disease. I had the library of diseases from Earth to look at, but all of them acquired their transmission vectors through bacteria, viruses, or other carriers. Poison I managed to add fairly easily, as it already existed, but diseases were another thing entirely.
Here was where that “floating aura” trick came in.
I could define specific Mana configurations that had a detrimental effect on people. I could also define how easily they infected others and by what means they did so.
It wasn’t exactly like diseases on Earth, but it served the same purpose: a detrimental effect that was contagious, but usually not fatal unless the victim was already weakened or elderly. At least I hadn’t had to model old age and all that sort of thing yet.
And just like diseases on Earth, I made it so that something that was too fatal and spread too quickly would basically lose its food source and die off. Mostly, this was interesting to me because I could specify these weird, abstract, non-living yet replicating things to have a mutation rate.
This, depressingly enough, cost about 62 Reality Points to do, for all of it.
So cheap to do something so terrible.
I sighed as I looked at the results of my work.
Orpheus nodded. “That is an interesting way to encourage evolutionary pressure.”
I grimaced, but I knew she was right.
Reluctantly, I tapped my interface…
and unleashed the Horseman of Pestilence upon my new world.