Charles Thrun walked thoughtfully through the mindscape again. The factories had returned relatively quickly after Skylar had assumed the throne, and it wasn’t long before a semblance of chaotic order had overtaken the mindscape. Lights had been reinstalled, buildings reconstructed, and ghost workers re...generated?

Thrun wasn’t yet clear on what the people were.

Crusty and Phogic were in a perpetual state of organization as they desperately tried to repair the damage caused by the war. They had no time for Thrun’s questions, and Thrun had no patience for their eccentricities.

For the time being, all that was necessary was to observe. A basic framework of understanding needed to be built up before any proper hypothesis testing could be done. The mess, smoke, and rabble irked him, but he patiently controlled the annoyance lest it steal any of his cognition.

Thrun returned to the rebuilt throne room, once again marveling at the spherical nature of gravity in this place. Skylar fidgeted on the throne, but her eyes were elsewhere. Beside her, a steel desk had been built for Thrun, which housed a single battered monitor.

Currently, the display showed the visual stream from Skylar's left eye. He didn’t have the sophisticated technology necessary to merge the data streams from both eyes into proper stereoscopic vision. The audio was also notably lacking, but there was a small crusty microphone resting beside the keyboard and mouse.

A silence fell over the mindscape. Thrun paused, then shook his head as he settled into the torn armchair in front of the monitor. Factories belched black smoke in the distance as workers upped their pace from swift walks to sprints. A shuddering vibration started up beneath his feet, and he grimaced as he lifted his legs to sit cross-legged on the chair.

Skylar was fighting again.

The changes to the mindscape during combat were gripping. It was an astounding phenomenon that caused nearly every system to go into extreme — and potentially dangerous — overdrive. Trying to watch the monitor during this time was practically impossible, as the speed at which Skylar moved far exceeded Thrun’s capacity to follow.

Studying the changes, however, revealed that not all systems were increased while Skylar fought. Long-term memories and several strange sectors believed to be related to social interaction were suppressed, with resources rerouted toward coordination and, disturbingly, nightmares.

The nightmare hall was Thrun's most frightening discovery during his short stay in the mindscape. Rows upon rows of desks containing workers drawing up designs of brutal monsters and deadly injuries. It had seemed like a pointlessly masochistic area until Thrun had spent more effort studying the sector.

The nightmares changed during battle. Instead of meaningless forays into torture, pain, and fear, the hall became razor-focused on envisioning Skylar's demise. Comparing the nightmares to the dusty monitor in the throne room revealed that every scenario nearly happened before Skylar pulled off some insane move to circumvent it.

It was a remarkable system that reminded Thrun of his work on earth. One that he immediately tried to understand. Unfortunately, he quickly ran into a problem. There was no rhyme or reason to the horrific possibilities produced. Anything that might possibly go wrong was generated, no matter how unlikely. This then led to downstream errors that directly caused Skylar to take additional damage.

The workers were inscrutable. They didn’t follow a procedure or an algorithm. It seemed as if they generated whatever they felt like without any consideration of how effective it was. And yet, despite this glaring weakness, the ghostly figures somehow managed to do what millions of dollars of research funding struggled to do.

It was deeply perplexing, but no matter what Thrun tried, he couldn’t get a straight answer from the ghosts. They simply said they were following their intuition.

How...imprecise.

So Thrun had begun his work. He’d coerced Crusty for a basic computer setup and plopped beside Skylar in the throne room. He’d attempted to replicate his algorithms from Earth on the struggling computer, but the machine wasn’t nearly powerful enough to perform even basic model generation, let alone pruning and optimization.

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He’d then attempted to call upon the power Skylar seemed to possess and found himself in utter shock when he was capable of similar results. He was weaker. By several orders of magnitude, but he could still shape the earth with mind. Controlling physical reality with his thoughts was exhilarating and frightening in equal measure. For a time, Thrun forgot his frustration with being locked in a prison.

He reached into himself and reconstructed the throne room. The grime and soot melted away to form polished linoleum floors. The harsh fluorescent lights were replaced with more efficient and pleasant LEDs. Desks were placed periodically, with sound-dampening foam along the walls to drown out the harsh clamor of the factory outside.

To his utmost surprise, Skylar reacted greatly to the new environment. She calmed, both in the real world and in the mindscape. Her need to rush waned, and the anxious twitching was replaced by patient poise. Her reaction radiated through the entire mindscape. Silencing the panicked, overworked voices into a healthy city's calm -- if still noisy -- soundscape.

The response invigorated Thrun perhaps more than the improved living environment. He continued working, smiling occasionally as he transformed the throne room into a small condo, complete with a kitchen, bedroom and lounge.

Eventually, the novelty of magic faded, and the weight of the prison returned. Stepping out of the condo revealed a dark, grim world that was so wholly alien that it may as well have been a fever dream. Thrun had no friends in this place. No colleagues or family. He didn’t even have his work with Atlas to distract from the fact that he never agreed to come here in the first place.

He was taken with no memory of how or why.

As Skylar fought Iroth Grimskull in a sisyphean struggle, Thrun pondered existence. There was little doubt that Skylar’s world — Gefaengnis as she called it — was a simulation. Trying so hard for something so transient seemed silly when just a few numbers changed in a mainframe could achieve the same result. Perhaps silly wasn’t the right descriptor. Pointless was more apt.

The mindscape was something wholly different. Rules were fluid here, and there were none of the procedural hallmarks of a simulation in this realm. The numerous unknown questions were intriguing, and despite himself, Thrun itched to try and figure them out.

And yet...he wasn’t sure if he was willing to engage with either world in the first place. He’d been brought here like a puppet and commanded to dance.

Why should he?

“Oh my god!” Skylar gasped from her chair. Her eyelids flickered as she looked around, unseeing. “Look at all the wolves, Thrun!”

Thrun glanced at the monitor, then reached for a microphone sitting beside the desk.

“I see them,” he said morosely. Skylar ignored his tone and raced off to fight them, commenting on various aspects of the chunk as she did so. Thrun watched through the monitor but eventually found himself distracted by the young woman herself.

Skylar clearly didn’t care about the details he agonized over. Or maybe she had, but not anymore. She took everything in stride, from the war in the mindscape to the ever more difficult challenges brought about by the system.

She reveled in the challenge; the harder, the better. In that sense, they were the same. Thrun, too, loved work. Work wasn’t an unwanted task for him. It was a series of challenges that engaged his mind and fulfilled his soul where the mundanities of real life could not. Jealous people called him a workaholic. As if insulting him could take away the joy of watching Atlas walk for the first time.

Preposterous.

Perhaps then, he shouldn’t fight his translocation here. If Skylar could find joy here, why couldn’t he, too? He’d left nothing of true value back on earth, and his truly valuable work was stored safely in his mind. Sure, the precise details might be lost to time, but those could be recovered at a fraction of the original effort it had taken to get them.

Thrun stood and stepped out of the condo. The constant roar of the industrial city greeted him like a gasoline-soaked rag to the face. He grimaced, curling his nose as he looked out over the mortifying arrangement of factories and roads.

“This place is completely unlivable,” Thrun said. “But perhaps...”

Yes. Perhaps it could be made livable. It had secrets to be discovered, and he had the power to make it into a paradise. One where he could work as much as his heart desired without pesky nuisances like grants and investors getting in the way. He could recreate atlas if he wanted, but first, he needed a tidy place to work.

With a firm nod to himself, Thrun leaned down to the grimy pavement and closed his eyes. Controlling the mindscape’s magic didn’t come naturally to him, but as seconds turned to minutes, the oil-stained asphalt slowly morphed into polished chrome. His power radiated out in a sphere, cleansing the air of impurities and ridding the surfaces of the gunk that had accumulated over the years.

Perhaps he would change his mind in time. Perhaps the mindscape would surrender its secrets all too soon, and he would lose interest. Skylar might even discover a method to return home before he was done here. The future was necessarily uncertain.

For now, at least, the mindscape was interesting enough.

And perhaps that was good enough. After all, what was the rush?