SSD 5.01 - Existential Threats

Still going to try and keep up with one chapter a week, while squeezing in some editing here and there. Wrote quite furiously yesterday and today, and was able to get another chapter done, the first main character perspective of book two.

Still working on the dense lore bit that is supposed to be at the start of each arc, hopefully that won't delay a full chapter next week. Technically, the lore intro is supposed come before this, but Caden was in my head and wanted to let out all his worries.

And here we are:

“Leave lightning in the sky where it belongs. The Gods don’t like it when when you play with their toys.”

-Unknown survivor of a cataclysm,

==Caden==

An ant crawled across a blade of grass; I stood, looking down at it pensively.

There was no reason I had to be here in person, of course, I could have watched this ant, or any of the multitude of others, crawling across and through my tiny worlds. There was still something about seeing things in person that I enjoyed. Not just my perception as a human, flawed as it was, but the physical act of being in a place and feeling my feet on the ground.

Technically, I could now extend my touch, smell, taste, and so on to anything in the dungeon, as well, but quite a few of those sensations were peculiar. I was still practicing with it, because giving up useful tools was foolish, but it still felt strange to taste the grass or feel the ants crawling within the earth.

Tasting and smelling a large area is probably closer to how you see the world though, what with the pheromones. I think I remember some spider species tasting the ground with their feet…

My attention was drawn back toward the ant.

You shouldn’t be here.

That was the crux of it.

Humans being anywhere else in the multiverse was so ridiculously unlikely that it was essentially impossible, without the truly infinite, while made a mockery of probabilities. With infinity, even the smallest probability became a certainty. I had a line of reasoning for why I was here, in a universe with other humans. It was essentially the anthropic principle. Tam was trying to summon a human soul from outside his universe, for whatever reason.

Either that or his targeting solution was way off. Maybe he couldn’t get one from here because of The System mucking with things. GAIA said something about The System storing them.

Regardless, Tam was looking for a human soul, so in the, possibly, infinite multiverse, almost all universes would have been completely eliminated. That was enough to explain why the humans here matched the humans from home, rather than just being humanoids, or truly alien. It was a deliberate pattern match.

Even if that was the case, all the other animals should be different.

Evolution… was complicated, to say the least. There was, admittedly, convergent evolution, where things tended to evolve to have similar shapes. There was even this whole thing with cancerification… don’t think I have that word right, whatever, it was the tendency for things to take on the shape of crabs. Organisms could arrive there from a whole bunch of different evolutionary paths. If I had arrived here and all I had seen was a bunch of things that looked like crabs, I would have just waved it off.

And, I did, in fact have lots of animals and monsters that looked like crabs, of all kinds, amongst my vast array of summons. Hate that term. I’m not summoning them, I am… manufacturing them. Eh, easy to stick pattern.

That, right there, the tiny ant crawling along a blade of grass, shouldn’t be here. The grass didn’t bother me as much, because the body plan of a blade of grass was functionally very simple. I would have been surprised if something hadn’t evolved to have that kind of design. Nope, the real kicker was the ant, and spiders, and scorpions, and the fucking cats and dogs that I had found buried among all the patterns.

Convergent evolution wasn’t enough. This world was saturated in mana, with a ton of plants and animals that were nothing like anything I had ever seen, and that was what I would have expected everything to be like. I hadn’t had enough evidence to make any good conclusions. Sure, I could rapidly variegate organisms inside my dungeon, but they tended to die when they left.

In fact, that was something I was still cleaning up after I woke back up. In almost all the experiments where I put living organisms outside my dungeon, they died. Only things with practically no mana had adapted to just being in my aura.

Except, now I had more information. I had Zidaun.

One of my other shards was talking with him at the moment. I was the only one dedicated to having an existential crisis. Hardly the first since I arrived. Anyone teleported to an alien world that doesn’t have at least one BSOD moment is oblivious, an idiot, or somewhere that isn’t truly alien.

I had, of course, considered that I might be missing something. In fact, I had considered that all of these patterns from Earth might be from my soul. Just data that The System had pulled out like copying a file.

It had made my current avatar out of my former human form, so why not everything else I had ever been. After all, I had apparently been a ridiculous number of other things.

However, I verified that it wasn’t just from me. People had brought in spiders to the dungeon, and others had sacrificed things I knew. Plus, Zidaun recognized the forms of the spiders, ants, and so on.

Possibly, souls frequently moved between universes, and The System had simply pulled out all that data and recreated it, or something else had.

Maybe Plato was right, and there was some ideal concept of creatures that we shared in our souls, and those ideal forms were replicated across the multiverse.

That could be true…

However, if it wasn’t, then that had implications.

Dungeon breaks could rapidly send stable monsters out into the world. No doubt some of them would carry seeds and things stuck into fur or eaten by various monsters on their way out. And this would only happen if they were not properly delved.

Something about doing it killed the dungeon, though.

Thanks for another nightmare scenario, Zidaun.

Of course, dungeons didn’t truly die. They were reborn later to try again. Which meant that dungeons were the terraformers keeping the world going. I had had that thought before, that dungeons might add some diversity to the world, but I hadn’t properly understood the scale… because Zidaun had also shared what he knew of the cycle.

Apparently the world ended, more or less, with some regularity. The Adar were much better at keeping records going, even with the cataclysms, because their dungeons acted as shelters. Most human civilizations had scattered records from before the last cataclysm, some 2140 years ago, with some variance in the calendars of a few years. The Adar had records that stretched back more than 15,000 years.

Regardless, this planet had things that should have been on Earth… or a parallel world.

And I thought that was what happened. This dimension was a parallel to my own, and probably much easier to reach. Assuming reaching for more foreign multiverses if more difficult, anyway. The System was obviously artificial, and life simply could not evolve on this planet on its own. The years were not even consistent, with the days at the end of calendar changing. They just started the calendar over each year when the fucking black hole started draining the sun, which happened twice a year and made for some very odd seasons.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the entire planet was artificial, crafted by The System to give people a place to live.

There were… a host of things massively wrong with this world, and how it worked.

It would be one thing if the planet swung through a massive asteroid field every few thousand years or something, and the same kind of disaster brought civilization to an end repeatedly. Nope, nothing so predictable. Twisted Tip, the very mountain I sat within, was formed as part of the last cataclysm, when the caldera ruptured in a super volcano eruption. And, to add insult to injury, apparently the volcano had some kind of elemental mana that had disrupted magic across the world, destroying much that should have been protected.

And that seemed to be the point. The Adar knew exactly what made the cataclysms come back.

Technology.

The level of acceptable tech would go past a certain point and then the world would be hit with a cataclysm. Several times the Adar had seen that new tech end the world as something went massively wrong, but the other cataclysms also happened at the same level of development.

Based on everything I had seen, I thought I knew what was going on. This was some kind of terraforming project that had gone horribly wrong. The System was a rogue AI, and I had to figure out a way to fix it.

Honestly, that was only possible because The System seemed to want to be fixed. It had conflicting directives and was doing its best to do both.

A system, based on all the evidence, that could trace its origins all the way back to some parallel version of Earth.

So… yeah.

I’m not ready to deal with this.

Understanding the problem, if I actually understood it properly, just underscored the importance, without changing the difficulty.

No pressure, just have to save the world.

Not that the human’s solution to the problem was making that any better for me.

Human civilizations had found they lasted longer if they didn’t expand too much, and controlling food production was the easiest way. Farmers were a noble class here, both socially and as an actual class people could have. So the production of food was carefully contained, as were the methods to get the class. Normally that would just result in a ton of starving people, revolts, etc… except that civilization here had an outlet for the excess people.

Dungeons.

Most of them killed ninety-nine percent of the new people that went into them. We functioned as a way to kill all the excess population.

The Adar were coordinated enough to simply keep themselves below a certain level of technology. They had done experiments with higher technology, keeping it constrained to only one dungeon, only starting when a cataclysm was likely to come soon. When the cataclysm finally arrived, only that dungeon was destroyed. They repeated the experiment one more time to similar results. After that, they simply accepted what was best for them as a whole.

Humans had a lot of fantastic qualities… as individuals.

The problem, of course, was that we also had lots of terrible qualities as individuals. And a group of people that were angry tended to start taking on the worse qualities collectively.

No. Tell humans as a whole that cataclysms show up because of technology progressing too far, and most would just shrug their shoulders and do whatever their leaders said, just like they did for everything else. A small percentage would question, be smart, and do what would keep them alive. Some would loudly proclaim that nothing bad would happen if they did it, because the people in the past had just done it wrong, they were just incompetent. No facts would change this viewpoint, but they were usually loud enough that a government could simply execute any that failed to bow to pressure.

The last tiny percent were the real problem. They would be a mix of all kinds of people. Some of them would simply rebel, unable to accept restrictions, going against it simply because they were told no. Some would push just a bit further, saying to themselves ‘Surely, this tiny extra bit of progress won’t cause a problem,’ and millions would be right, until one wasn’t and the world ended. Some geniuses would push the limits without even intending to, pushing out an idea they had suddenly understood… and well, people didn’t do well at not using something once they discovered it.

And even beyond all of those, if science progressed far enough, it became a tool of the government. And crises had a way of stripping away the bounds that ought to restrain us. A war would come, and the government would push for better weapons, better defenses, and better logistics. And progress would come, though its first use would be as a weapon of war, the tip of the spear writ into mana and fire.

And then the world would end, again, because politicians couldn’t keep it in their pants when it came to a dick measuring contest. Or for anything else, really.

I had hoped to introduce technology, but I was moving away from that with remarkable alacrity. It was unlikely that anything I used would develop far enough to trigger another cataclysm soon. Zidaun had consulted with Izradi, his advisor, and he expected that the world had at least a few hundred years before they got close, and that was only if tech started to advance more rapidly. They might have as much as a thousand or two if things moved much slower.

Zidaun didn’t know much about tech levels. He, like all Adar, knew that technology could end the world. Since he wasn’t an inventor or innovator, he hadn’t needed to know more. Izradi had been raised to govern, he had read through the Adar vaults. He didn’t know exactly how everything worked, but he knew what it looked like.

He had known enough to show alarm when I described electricity, because that was right around where the cutoff started.

Victorian era steampunk with some electrical guns? That was just fine. Start going past that into radio, assembly lines, and telegrams? The world ended.

That had all started, just by talking about designing a city.

I, personally, could handle everything that a city needed. Except, I hadn’t wanted that. People did better when you provided them the tools to do things for themselves. I wanted to let the people take over, running the city. Sure, I would be the ultimate authority, well, me and Exsan, but I can’t imagine him caring about how the city is run, but I wanted to let them manage it, only there to ensure things stayed up to my standards.

I had access to electricity now. It had come in a number of the trap plans that I had received for free from my various bonuses. I hadn’t actually made any magnets yet, but that was the quick use of some copper wire and iron bar away. Once I had magnets, an electrical engine was easy. It would be clunky, but it would serve it’s purpose.

Some people had lightning magic, and various forms of elemental control. I intended to use that. It had started with the idea for some kind of public transport, subways below and trains or trolleys above. Set up some gears and connect them to an electric engine, and then have someone feed electricity through it to make it run.

I knew enough to end the world, and for the stupidest reason I could imagine.

What the hell even made the AI like this? Was the planet supposed to be for some kind of extra-dimensional Amish?

I could see that. This place was isolated. We were not even part of the galaxy, we were orbiting outside it. You didn’t see a galaxy head-on like you could here, unless you were well outside the galactic plane.

God, I’d love to see the civilization that made The System, though. Too bad the people here don’t get to go on sabbatical to see an intergalactic civilization. What do the Amish call that… Rums something? Doubt anyone here would ever return, if they had the chance to leave.

If I’d had the chance on Earth… I’d only come back if I could fix it.

Speaking of…

I wouldn’t be able to add technology to my city. I would be relying completely on my powers as a dungeon to run all the transit systems, though I hadn’t had a chance to redesign exactly what I wanted yet.

It’s going to be glorious, no matter what. Need to test out everything new, and everything that was untouched for too long.

I had a lot to sort through, and it was time to get to work.