The First Mage

I looked at “my world” intently, but even though the other guy had told me that I would know what to do, absolutely nothing came to mind. I guess I should try to go in there... but how do I do that...?

It had looked like he touched the other sphere before he disappeared, so I carefully placed my hand on this one... and absolutely nothing happened. I tried it a few more times, I poked it, I slapped it, but the result was the same. Interestingly, it seemed to be suspended in mid-air perfectly, as it didn’t move at all, despite my abuse of it.

Looking around myself, I picked another random world and walked up to it to touch it, but when I placed my hand on the sphere, I received an electric shock. “Ow! Fuck.” Okay, got it. No touching others’ worlds. I guess that rules out taking a peak at earth...

I walked around my world’s sphere cluelessly for a little while, getting more frustrated by the minute. “What. Do. I. D—” I started, but when I was about to lose my patience, somehow, I suddenly knew how it worked. “Huh. A mental command interface.”

As I placed my hand on the sphere again, I thought Enter DL-115-063-017, and my vision went white for but a moment, before I was standing in a wide, open grass field. There were a few hills and mountains, and I could see forests in the distance. It looked similar to the area between Alarna and Cerus, just without any roads or other signs of civilization. What finally confirmed my earlier suspicion, was when I turned around and saw a water source, just standing there, in the middle of nowhere. You’ve got to be kidding me... It was really me who created this world...?

It was hard to explain away the evidence. I had been told this was my world, I felt like I was standing right in the middle of one of my projects, and unless water sources were somehow normal in other worlds, this had to be Tomar’s world. Does this make me... god?

As soon as I asked myself that question, however, I realized that that wasn’t accurate. I instinctively knew that, while architects create these worlds, they can’t actually interact with them outside of certain testing scenarios. And once a planet is locked in, that’s it. No more changes can be made. No day-one patches... no after launch fixes... how old-school.

I wanted to know more about this world, and a vague feeling washed over me. When I acted on it, waving my hand through the air and thinking Log, a translucent screen appeared in mid-air in front of me. “Oh dear god...”

I was looking at a window with nothing but one huge textwall inside it, aside from a counter on the top left, that showed a number so large that I didn’t even know its name, and it was rapidly increasing by the second. I touched the screen and scrolled through the messages, most of which seemed like gibberish, like cryptic error and log messages. Although I could make out a few that made sense, like “Specimen 6414-533-066-157 manifested” or “Specimen 7355-734-466-144 perished”.

This looks like it logs literally everything that happens in this world... without any filtering... How is this supposed to be useful to anyone?

After scrolling through the log messages for a few seconds, I waved my hand and closed the screen again. These logs wouldn’t get me anywhere, and all these hard to decipher messages were just frustrating.

If I worked on this world for any amount of time, I would’ve done something about that... I thought. I would’ve kept my own logs, maybe written documentation on what I was doing here, anything but try to use that. No knowledge about some alternative logging mechanism came to my mind, but if I had developed it, it naturally wouldn’t be part of the instinctive architect knowledge. Assuming I could add commands of my own... what would I have called my own app?

On a whim, I waved my hand and thought, LogX. Just like before, a screen appeared, but this time it was a window with a text prompt and a virtual keyboard. “Haha, of course I protected my diary with a password.”

I entered my lifelong default password for sensitive information, and when I pressed Enter, the password prompt faded away and a dashboard appeared. “Wow...” I said in daze, when my eyes fell on a counter labeled “Humans,” which displayed the number 1,012,377.

There are over a million people living on this— I thought, when the counter changed to 1,012,400. “... you’ve got to be kidding me. Is this in octal!?”

There wasn’t a single number with an eight or a nine in sight, and it seemed unlikely that twenty-three babies had just been born at that moment. “These guys are using octal... is that why Tomar’s world is using it?”

There were more counters, like “Monsters,” and also graphs that apparently showed things like population growth. Finally, all the way at the bottom, there was a progress bar that was filled all the way and displayed “Complete” on it. What is complete though...?

Looking at the menu on the left of the dashboard, I finally found what I had been looking for. A button that said “Logs.” When I pressed it, a wall of text appeared once again, but it looked a little more organized than the other one, with the messages being spaced out properly and with tabs for different categories. I looked at the very first message in the first tab and let out a chuckle.

[Hello, world! After trying to get their weird systems to do what I want for like a month, I finally decided to whip up my own tools, and I just finished the personal log function. Hurray <_> This job sounded pretty neat on paper, but I’m already kind of regretting taking it. If I have to re-implement everything from scratch for what I want to do, this is going to take forever, and Dave is already on my ass for taking too long for the initial setup. Well, let’s see how this goes...]

“Dave... Huh. I didn’t even ask for his name earlier.”

***

I felt calm and at peace, and somehow wasn’t thinking about anything else, while I was going through my logs in this place. Wasn’t there something else I was supposed to do...? I thought, but I went right back to reading the next paragraph.

I didn’t know how much time had passed when I finally looked up from the screen again, having gone through dozens if not hundreds of messages I had written while working on this world. Although time felt weird around here in general. A minute could pass and it felt like an eternity, and the next moment you believed something took forever, when it realistically couldn’t have been more than a few seconds. According to the logs, this had thrown me off before, when I was originally working on this world.

[Dave just appeared again and told me that apparently ten years have passed since he last checked in on me. The time here makes no sense, and even though he tells me I will adjust to it eventually, it just feels all kinds of wrong. I would’ve believed him if he had said a month, but years? Nope. So, what have I done in the past “ten years?” The system is coming along, though it’s way more annoying to implement than I anticipated. Bypassing their restrictions and affecting the natural world even after locking the planet in is key, and I believe I finally found a way to do that, though I don’t know how to mask it yet. Dave seems to not have seen through what I’m doing here yet, so it’s possible they won’t even notice, but hiding it a little can’t hurt. Maybe I’ll have a working prototype in another ten years? Or a hundred? Or ten minutes.]

My logs were spotty, and sometimes I didn’t quite understand what certain things were about, but from what I could piece together, it seemed like my idea had been to create a fantasy world. Knights, Clerics, Mages, monsters to fight, the works. Essentially like an MMORPG come to life. However, magic was apparently not a thing. Nowhere. In none of these worlds. They all followed the same physical rules that I knew from earth, and there was no way to just create a Fireball out of nothing, that you could throw at someone, or to reshape the ground and make a wall rise up for defense in a snap. But a fantasy world without magic wasn’t very fantastical in my mind, so I naturally decided that I would find a way to create magic. This was way easier said than done, however.

While architects had the power to make basically anything happen during the development phase, I had wanted normal humans to be able to do it, and it was supposed to be possible after the planet was locked in, so I had to tap into that power somehow, and it had to happen without Dave noticing.

Architects could also create “gods,” which had a certain level of power to manage and moderate worlds afterwards, but they were only supposed to keep everything running and act as a bridge between the worlds and the Outer Realm once the architects couldn’t enter the worlds themselves anymore. Since I had never been a fan of omnipotent beings, I had apparently decided early on to not have actual gods at all, though I had yet to find anything about what I had decided to do instead. I knew from personal experience that god-like beings existed in this world I had created though, so I had evidently done something.

All of this sounded kind of wonky. I had clearly been trying to bend this entire process to my will, and I did things to this world that weren’t supposed to happen. My “monsters” were buffed up animals, because things like slimes and dragons couldn’t exist. The job system I had envisioned implanted memories and abilities from other souls into people, effectively leveling them up. And to make magic a thing, I basically hacked existence. I had yet to read about how exactly I had made that work, but all of this appeared to be one huge hack job. I’d had an idea and tried to make it work, but looking at these notes, I could tell that I had been getting more and more frustrated with everything.

[I finally created the basic planet, a sun, and a moon to shut up Dave, but since the building blocks they’re providing don’t yet play well with the changes I made to make my system work, the sun currently looks purple from down here... I can practically hear him complain about it already. Maybe I’ll be able to fix that before he comes back, though I could use a motivational push instead right now.

I added a day counter to my brand new dashboard, and apparently thirty years have passed since I started implementing the system for real. The backend seems to be working, but even though using Omega to control it seemed like a great fit, and I pictured it to be really fun to use, this was yet another thing that wasn’t really supposed to be possible. Makes you wonder whether any fantasy authors or game developers ever thought about how exactly their magic circles worked. How are they appearing out of nowhere? What are they made of? And how do they do... anything? I guess that’s why magic is not a thing, you have to bend over backwards to make it work >_>

I finally made painting in the air with mana possible, and everything is hooked up. I’ll be testing the very first mana-powered Omega script in a bit, and I dearly hope that it will work, because if I don’t see some success soon, I might scrap this whole idea after all. See you on the other side, imaginary reader!]

“Of course I never anticipated that anyone would ever actually read my logs...”