Chapter 8: Night and Day

  The first thing I had to do, of course, was add some atmosphere.

  This was a lot easier than I expected. I could simply select it from a list and determine the depth along with various behavioral properties.

  While I was doing this, I belatedly realized I was missing some important elements. In this case, “elements” was literal. Turns out, making an entire geosphere was just one more complication on top of another.

  I also almost forgot to set the atmosphere to the correct values. Since Earth’s atmosphere was already in the system, I very nearly just copied it. But after a moment of thought, I lowered the oxygen level and raised the carbon dioxide level.

  I didn’t completely eliminate the oxygen, but I was going to need to run the planet for a while without complex life. I'd just guessed at how much it needed, but the plants should be able to balance things out a little, and I could always tweak the final values before I added animals.

  In the meantime, I added some properties to the cylinder. Along the edges, I needed to introduce wind, and since I didn’t have a moon – at least nothing massive enough to cause tides – I added a very slight motion to the magicite underlayer when certain thresholds of mana storage were reached.

  I’d probably have to tweak these values later too, but setting them now would at least remind me.

  These things were all easy to say, but a lot harder to do.

  For each of these minor adjustments, I had to go through piles and piles of menus, adjusting values.

  Take wind, for example. Most of those values dealt with fluid dynamics – how easily the wind was shifted, what would shift it, how rapidly it adjusted to heat differentials, and a hundred other details.

  I was learning to use the interface much more fluidly now – no pun intended – and generally tried to just picture what I wanted instead of tweaking values directly. That usually got things in the general ballpark.

  The interface also had a primitive "simulate" function, which showed how the air currents would look. In most cases, it was filled with all sorts of tooltips and warnings that the simulation was not 100% accurate.

  I sort of wondered about that, but I supposed that doing a full simulation was basically the same as running the world itself… and that would involve a lot more energy.

  Orpheus confirmed this when I asked her about it. Her response had been a single word – a simple “yes” – but when I turned to ask her about it, I noticed that she was hovering right over my shoulder.

  That was puzzling, given her earlier disinterested behavior.

  I turned back to my interface and scrolled through some of the other options. While I did that, I had to ask, “Can you see my interface?”

  Orpheus shook her head.

  “No. I have no idea how you are interacting with your world. As I said before, each interface is customized to the user. I have my own interface, which I am using from my personal Sanctuary. You are speaking to a terminal that relays my answers.

  “My own interface shows the changes you are making, and it can also tell me roughly what area you are currently considering.”

  She paused again, thinking, then added, “To make an example… if we were both using an interface that was equivalent to a journal, my own journal would have a section on the page showing what you were writing in yours. It would also have a simple summary of the kind of information you were looking at on your own pages.”

  “I guess that makes sense,” I muttered. “You probably wouldn’t have the context to use my interface anyway. If it were a book, and you were from a species that didn’t use vision or didn’t have glyph-based writing, then my book would make no sense to you.”

  The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  The small fairy bobbed again in her usual affirmative. “Yes. That is correct. It is impressive that you were able to consider such alien physiology. Most new Administrators make assumptions of what senses are available to me. While I doubt you would be able to truly comprehend my natural form, you would likely handle it better than many new Administrators of your species.”

  “Thanks, I think,” I replied, glancing over at her. “You’re also hovering a little close. Did I do something interesting?”

  “Not exactly,” she replied. “I have seen several Administrators try the tactics and planning that you are doing, but never quite like this. It is novel enough that I am curious about it. To put it in your terms, it is also mildly impressive that you are quickly correcting small errors that would not immediately cause problems but would likely need correction later.”

  I grinned. “Oh, so I’m a prodigy at this, huh?”

  “I would not go that far,” she countered. “You are a far more talented specimen than most random selections. However, need I remind you that your own universe was created by simply setting universal parameters and then dumping a large amount of matter into it, letting the entire universe evolve several intelligent species naturally over billions of your years.”

  My face fell. “Yeah… I’m pretty far from trying something wild like that. I take it that wasn’t a normal means of creating a world?”

  “It is relatively unique in this cluster. On the rare occasions that I speak to other Cluster Administrators, they have mentioned other similar experiments. We do not generally trade full statistics for specific things like that, but I am of the impression that it is relatively rare.”

  That was certainly interesting.

  I wasn’t sure exactly how bureaucratic this whole situation was, or if they had the equivalent of office politics. Being the low man on the totem pole… or low being on the totem pole, I corrected myself with a mental sigh.

  Either way, I should probably stay out of it for now and just focus on doing my job.

  Speaking of my job, I really needed to get to the sun.

  I was particularly proud of how I handled this. It was a little tricky, and I definitely needed the interface to help me through it, but after a few tries, I managed to create what I had envisioned.

  Since each side of the magicite divider of the torus each had a spire, I used them to project and reabsorb the sun.

  The sun, of course, was small, since it had to travel through the central vacuum tube in the middle of the donut. Every 24 hours, it would manifest from one spire and travel down that tube, taking a full 24 hours to reach the other side, where the opposite spire would absorb it.

  The divider in the middle of the cylinder served as a wall, keeping sunlight mostly from spilling into the other half, creating a day and night cycle.

  After a bit more thought, I also adjusted it so that over the course of 360 days – a bit less than an Earth year – it would subtly vary its speed as it traversed the torus. This meant it would spend more time illuminating one half than the other, depending on the time of year, which would in turn create seasons. It also followed a track slightly offset from the true center, since otherwise the portion of the torus along the inner ring would get much more heat than the outer.

  I’d almost forgotten about that.

  Maybe I should’ve made a heliocentric model so it would have automatically handled all of this… but no. I really needed to be creative. And besides, that would’ve involved a lot more space. I didn’t have the budget to make a full cosmos – not with my starting resources.

  The sun was actually a giant ball of mana, which emitted both light and some amount of heat. It wasn’t nearly as hot as my old sun, but it would still incinerate anything that got too close.

  Yet it wasn’t actually physical.

  On a last-minute whim, I also added small floating debris that stored mana when in direct contact with the sun’s path. They didn’t release that energy – just stored it – until they were no longer close to the source. Once no longer taking in energy they would gently emit it at low levels over the course of the night.

  I set each of them in a circular orbit around the center at various altitudes.

  In other words, I made stars.

  And the stars would shift their position over time – well, most of them. Any that happened to be directly on the central axis would appear as static stars.

  I was pretty proud of this setup. It still didn’t provide a moon, but I figured I could get by without one early on.

  Maybe I wouldn’t make one at all, I thought.

  I stepped back and paused, skimming through the menu for the universe.

  I found the settings for units, as I suspected, and with a little fiddling around I changed the length of a year from Earth’s length to match what I had set in the world.

  This changed a lot of other measurements slightly, since I was also changing the measurement for light speed – even if the actual speed was the same.

  I briefly wondered how it was handled for those worlds where light immediately arrived after emission, but even trying to comprehend how that would work made my head feel muddled.

  That was probably the equivalent of my non?physical body getting a headache, really.

  Regardless, I now had a full world. At least, I thought it was complete.

  Not bad for a beginner, I thought.