“Have a seat.”
Orpheus gestured to my recliner, while she herself sat… a comfortable easy chair appearing behind her just in time to catch her. I wondered about that, since she had earlier indicated no desire to sit, but maybe it was for my mental comfort rather than something she needed. Even that would be odd for her, as Orpheus rarely showed any consideration for my comfort.
Regardless, I settled into my recliner, but didn’t kick it back. I laced fingers together and placed them in my lap, fidgeting, and curled my tailtip around to run thumbs over the fur. “This doesn’t sound good…”
Shaking her head, Orpheus placed her clipboard on her lap before continuing. “In the very short term, this isn’t something you need concern yourself with, but… hmm, first, let me handle something. Normally this happens upon achieving another milestone, but…” She tapped at her clipboard.
I tilted my head, but nothing else was forthcoming. No signs of what I could do now that I couldn’t before. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that… why unlock functionality like this? Why couldn’t I use an Avatar before, for example?”
Orpheus held up a hand… then she paused and lowered it. “That is a good question, and related to what I have to tell you. Perhaps I should explain more about how your universe works…”
I leaned forward, ears perking in surprise. Voluntary information from Orpheus? This is new.
“The ranks are not arbitrary,” she began, making an airy gesture with one hand. “They are… safeties, I suppose you could say. You are not closed off from options because of some prestige system, you are closed off because your soul cannot handle the strain of the new features.”
She tilted her head and rubbed her chin, considering. “Well, past Rank Four or so, that is true at least. The first four really are more of a guideline for you.” Then she shook her head, turning it to look at me again.
“You perceive yourself as a single being, but this is just a projection of your true self,” Orpheus continued, pointing at me. “The actual ‘you’ started off as a simple soul merged with the World Seed. This allowed your soul to expand, and to create a universe. You, as a being, are your universe and any universes that you create after this one.”
I started to open my mouth to ask more, but she held up her finger and gestured, making an image appear in the air. It showed several bubbles clustered together, then zoomed out to show multiple clusters of bubbles, all intertwined in a sort of foamy mess.
“This is why we did not have you simply take over a stable existing universe.” The image zoomed in on two clusters, but one of the clusters was really just a single sphere. “You need to start with something. While it is possible to transfer a universe from one Administrator to another, it is akin to carefully severing a piece of someone and grafting it onto another. A new soul without a universe of their own simply doesn’t have the strength to support a full universe.”
My ears flicked up in an elven nod as I considered this, and then it dawned on me. “When you said the penalty for failure was retirement, that wasn’t a policy… that was just because I AM the universe. If I failed, then my self would collapse to a soul again and… that’s why it is possibly damaging?”
Orpheus nodded and shrank the image, letting it hover to the side. “Yes. It is not a penalty for failure, it is the natural consequence of failure.” Her hands folded over the clipboard again. “As you expand your universe, your soul takes in all that power and expands upon what the World Seed gave it, becoming more and more robust. As it adapts, it becomes able to splinter parts of itself away to make Avatars and, eventually, Terminals like the one I provided to you.”
That made me think of Sub-Terminals, and wonder why they were easier to make than Terminals, but I held my tongue. “And I’m just viewing my Sanctuary this way because it gives my mind a way to contextualize it?”
“Exactly,” the High Administrator confirmed, her voice firm and elated. She calmed a moment later and sighed. “Which brings us to the problem. When you create your universe – your initial self – it is carved out of a sort of conceptual substrate. This sets down the meta-laws we know, such as how energy is generated and what constitutes free will, and so on. Your debt is meant to repair the temporary damage you do to the substrate. However…”
The image grew in size again, then it zoomed out to show multiple collections of bubbles.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“As I mentioned before, you are part of the Orpheus Cluster, because I am the High Administrator,” she explained. “Other clusters border our own. Some… ‘time’ ago, for lack of a better word, these clusters began cannibalizing our own, drawing the universes into their own clusters and taking ownership of them.”
“So they were basically eating your Administrators?!” I interrupted, horrified. Even with my numbed emotions, I felt disgust well up within me. “Is that what happened to the old High Administrator?”
Orpheus dismissed the image. “I see Diamon told you about that. And yes… something like that. Our High Administrator still exists, as their personal universes still exist. I have taken over their actual Administration with great effort, including the duties of Cluster Administrator.”
She paused to consider how to explain that. “Think of it like moving their body like a puppet, to keep it functioning. It is clumsy and often imprecise, but it works. It would be much easier for me if they returned, but their actual consciousness is nowhere to be found.” Another pause. “I say ‘nowhere’ as if it is a physical space to search rather than conceptual, but I believe you understand my meaning.”
I flicked my ears in a nod. “I get the idea, even if it’s hard to picture it. But what does this have to do with me? Aside from your obvious need for energy. I heard you were using my tithe to make some kind of protection?”
That got a slight nod from Orpheus. “In part. It is also holding the cluster together. Diamon tells me that you believe my methods are inferior. I readily admit that they are likely to be. I simply do not understand souls from this cluster well, my own universes are borderline in this one.”
“So circle back around to that,” I interrupted. “Given what you said, I’m guessing my spike of production is drawing the attention of other clusters, and whatever you’re doing to protect me won’t be enough? Am I going to have some kind of cosmic monster eating my donut?”
That last sentence sounded a little absurd, but I couldn’t rewind and rephrase. Fortunately Orpheus was likely too alien to pick up on the silliness.
“Not exactly,” she countered, shaking her head. “This is done by incursions, and as I said before, they are more like a chess game.” She gestured to her image. “What defines a cluster are conceptual similarities, not physical space. It is even possible for one Administrator to straddle different clusters, if their universes are diverse enough.”
I looked aside at where the display of mine had been. “I made mine pretty different… and don’t they have to be different or they get absorbed by similar ones?” I realized that was another fate that befell other new Administrators… literally having their self subsumed by another being.
I shivered.
“Indeed,” Orpheus confirmed, oblivious to my discomfort. “However, clusters have certain baseline assumptions. They can drift from these assumptions, but on the whole they usually have certain things in common. This cluster, for example, tends to have transitive distance in the spacetime manifold, with only localized exceptions, and tends to have a limit to the speed at which information crosses the manifold. Changing base assumptions like that will cause a universe to drift toward the nearest cluster that better matches those altered assumptions, and if enough are changed – or the difference is severe – it could move into another cluster.”
That explanation had a lot of words I didn’t fully follow, but I grasped enough of it. “So we’re talking fundamental things like having geometry work differently. Got it. I think. Go on, if I got that right.”
“Close enough,” she agreed. “And an incursion is, simply put, a foreign power making a localized change to one of those assumptions.”
The image she had made changed to show my world, the torus ‘opened’ to show the inside of the tube. A bright red smudge appeared on one part, tiny but large enough to cover a large island or so.
“It begins with a small change,” she explained. “Subtle. Yet things work ever so differently in that localized region. And this is where it becomes hard to combat. Alone, this does nothing, and could even be eliminated without any of your own action. I use much of your tithe to create a sort of armoring of your universe to prevent this from happening in the first place… but that armor can be penetrated with enough intent.”
A few small green blotches appeared around the red. “If you imagine that these are inhabitants, they encounter this minor strangeness. Perhaps they don’t notice, which causes it to grow slowly. Worse, perhaps they do notice something strange, yet accept it as being normal, just beyond their understanding. Then it expands quickly.”
The red blob grew, deepening in color, and spread across the entire torus.
Orpheus frowned. “At this point, it is stabilized. While you as an Administrator can change it back, it usually takes a much larger amount of energy than if you had made the change yourself.”
I sighed, “Too many of these, and my universe – me – slides into another cluster. I think I get it now.”
“Exactly,” came the reply. “As you can see, the way to combat this is twofold. Construct Avatars can make it possible for you to conduct localized corrections and remove the change by force, which is difficult when you are not present.”
She pointed to the green blotches. “Or, you can somehow convince the inhabitants that this is not normal, and they can deny the change. This is risky, because belief is difficult to control without affecting free will.”
I rubbed my chin. “I think I get that. I was a little surprised to see that belief can somehow power the Sub-Terminals, I couldn’t quite figure out why that was an exception to everything needing Reality Points.”
“I anticipated this question and believe I have an answer you can understand,” Orpheus offered with a smile. “You already use belief. Your Reality Points are just your method of categorizing the energy you can use. Belief is the driving force behind this, even subconsciously. To compare it to something in your previous life, Reality Points are the power of electricity, but belief is the fields that generate that electricity.”
That explanation was still a little fuzzy, but I grasped the general idea, so let it slide. It did bring me to a topic I needed to cover though.
“So about that,” I began.
“We need to talk about your onboarding process… and then I have a favor to ask.”
Reunion and Choice