Chapter 40: A Problem of Numbers

  ADMINISTRATOR POV

  I settled in at my new work desk. Of late, I had been trying to track so many things in the interface that my vision had become cluttered. I’d managed to find in the Sanctuary purchase list a way to set up a multi-monitor desk where I could place and organize the elements of my interface.

  Given how bureaucratic this universe-building had proved to be, it made me feel more like an office worker than ever. Maybe this wasn’t the best idea for my mood, but it did help me keep things organized. I told myself I’d keep sane by only using it when I actually needed more than one view of the interface.

  More importantly, living as Tastka had given me a lot of insights into why certain things were going wrong. My project over the last few times I’d stayed awake while my avatar was sleeping was to try and address some of these issues.

  It had been pretty obvious once I started reading Tastka’s status screen. Her culture had developed language and even had some representation for numbers already… but that didn’t mean they had developed anything like mathematics or proper counting. They were still counting on fingers and toes, because they hadn’t really needed to do anything more complicated.

  This was why they had started to slow down dramatically in gaining levels past the teens. My elves only had three fingers and a thumb on their hands and four toes. Thus, they could really only count reliably up to sixteen.

  It was hard for me to imagine not just continuing to count, but I had to remind myself that these were concepts they simply hadn’t dealt with yet. It was easy to understand in hindsight, but hard to make that initial leap into abstract numbers.

  My avatar was young and quite intelligent, but still couldn’t really grasp that sort of thing. It was also just a little disorienting if I tried to look too deeply into her memories, because she could instinctively count in octal – that is, base 8 instead of base 10 – and I was still working in decimal. Despite Tastka’s ability to count in eights, that didn’t give me any ability to actually translate between the two systems at all. I was lucky I understood the concept of octal, really.

  Unfortunately, fixing this was hard. If they couldn’t comprehend numbers above sixteen or so, then it was difficult to convey to them why one number was larger than another. It was frustrating because I thought they could obviously tell one was bigger than another… but that just wasn’t how their minds worked yet.

  Of course, this did mean that when they eventually developed mathematics, I’d likely see a surge in energy production, which was why I was only working on it halfheartedly and once in a while. I might need to make a new species, and it would be nice to have them get a bit of a jump on things.

  The bigger problem was what I had mentioned to Orpheus before.

  Now that I could see it, the problem was obvious. My elves had been made from the dominant species in their region, and that meant they were basically in charge of their domain in most places. A few of the smaller communities were in more difficult positions, and the Sylen elves – at least some of them – tended to be more risk-takers. Yet even the Calen elves just didn’t want to go out of their comfort zone.

  I could kind of understand it now that I thought about it. I’d given them a biological sanctity for life, and that also included their own. They weren’t exactly cowards, but if you had no need to move beyond where you lived – and where you lived was safe – why would you go anywhere else?

  This was a cultural phenomenon, of course. My avatar was still young enough to be called a child in most cases, and like many children, she was curious and liked to explore. Many of the other children were also like that, but they were also obedient… and in adulthood, most elves became cautious.

  There simply wasn’t a lot of incentive for them to go anywhere. The world was so large that the real threats were too far away. If their population had grown faster, maybe they would have been suffering from resource starvation and forced to wander. As it was, most of their environmental pressure came from things they could work around, like seasonal flooding, which could be mitigated by their normal migratory patterns.

  And this was just the elves.

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  The dwarves were really not working out well. Then again, I hadn’t expected much from them in energy generation. They were currently more of a set piece, and while I was interested to see how their culture developed, they were mostly there to serve as something for the elves to eventually encounter. At this rate, the dwarves would likely encounter the mushroom people first, and that might be interesting – and provide some energy – but that hadn’t really been my intent.

  The only thing saving me right now was Downside. The core-eaters that I had created had a natural inclination to go out and hunt things. That was part of their biology, so even if they tried to play it safe, they were always doing something a little dangerous at some point in their lives.

  I hadn’t really looked closely at them lately, because I was concentrating on this generation, and time was moving so slowly relative to them that the cultures of Downside just hadn’t had a chance to develop yet. That was why I was focusing on the elves for now.

  I was pretty sure I had a solution, and I’d already slipped it into the world. It was a bit of a system tweak, so I needed to give it time for the dragons to get to classifying everything. Fortunately, they were largely through the backlog, so they managed to get to my changes within a few years of their time. New additions always got priority over revisions, thankfully.

  I was still proud of my dragon system. They generated energy inconsistently, but when they did, it tended to be relatively large amounts for their small population. Naming something was even more important now that there were creatures out there using those names, and it gave an increase in the amount of energy generated. Too bad it was relatively rare that new things needed to be named.

  My current problem was with the Aravel elves. I’d found a solution to one of the problems I’d had with them, and I should have done it to begin with. Now it was going to be incredibly expensive.

  With all the messing around I’d done, I’d burned through most of what I had earned, but I still had over three thousand Reality Points left. Unfortunately, the change I wanted to make, when I had first prototyped it, would have cost me almost a thousand Reality Points.

  I had figured the Aravel elves were having problems because I had made their memory so good over so many generations. Putting in some level of memory decay would probably be a idea. Particularly strong impulses and memories would linger, but the details of older lives would fade away.

  At least, that was the plan… but with such an expensive change, I had balked.

  The solution had been simple, of course, as these things often are. It was still somewhat expensive, but a mere hundred and twenty Reality Points was cheap compared to the previous price, and I had finally finished tweaking it.

  I applied the change so that, in future, any Aravel elves born would have the memory degradation occur. Since they only had a lifespan of about three hundred years at best, once the older generation had died off, the problem would be solved. The elves would still have memories stretching back centuries, but they’d grow more vague the farther back they went, just like someone old would have trouble remembering minor details from adolescence.

  I could wait three hundred years to see some progress. That was nothing on a geologic time scale, and not very long on a civilization’s time scale either, at least, not in the Stone Age where we were.

  A vague memory reminded me that Stone Age was not a very accurate term, and there werere plenty of very specific terms for the incredibly broad range of what most people think of as the Stone Age. My previous self had known this, so that meant that I did. Unfortunately, my previous self didn’t know those differences, so Stone Age it was.

  So that was one more project done. I wasn’t actually sure if this would fix the stagnation problem with the Aravel, but after I had thought about it for a long while, I realized that maybe having memories stretching back to the beginning of time was not the best idea.

  I already had dragons that could last for thousands of years. If some of the elves wanted to know what happened a long time ago, they could go find a dragon – or better yet, learn to use their writing on something that would last longer than tree bark.

  Maybe I should have started all the civilizations out in medieval times or something. Then again, I had no idea what they would think of just appearing with knowledge and technology. Was that something I could even do? I didn’t know.

  It also seemed weird to me. If the whole point of this was to generate energy through struggle, they should probably figure some of this stuff out themselves.

  I scratched at my thigh with my tail and sighed. It had been a productive day, but I couldn’t even test my solution for a couple more years of avatar time. If I just went back to sleep the moment Tastka did, that time passed swiftly for me – if only because it felt like her life was almost separate from mine – but it was still time I had to live through. Sort of.

  Maybe for more experienced Administrators, living through years like this was just the norm. I probably should keep sleeping for most nights anyway. I was pretty sure that my hijacking of the dream realm to do this whole backdoor into my Sanctuary meant that Tastka herself didn’t dream. If I just went right back to sleep, I was giving back her time to dream.

  Even if I felt a weird disassociation between her life and me as the Administrator, she was still me… and I’d rather remember having a decent life.

  I waved my hand, and the monitors I’d set up blinked into blank, lifeless screens. I didn’t actually have a computer here, so it wasn’t like they were powered by anything. The screens were just places to project my interface so I could concentrate better.

  That was enough procrastinating. Tastka had a big day coming up. I knew that, but I didn’t really know what the result would be. I’d set up the system, and while I could manipulate it to some extent, a lot of it was now emergent and automatic behavior.

  It made my life easier… right?

  Provisional