Simulation: The imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. Simulations require the use of models; the model represents the key characteristics or behaviors of the selected system or process, whereas the simulation represents the evolution of the model over time.
-Muted Infinity-
-Arc Start: A Cruel World-
-A Cruel World: Ch 1-
Did you ever bite down on something cold with a rotten tooth?
Or crush up dry SweetTarts and snort them?
Well, connecting into full dive was a vaguely similar sensation. When you put on the metal collar, and it connected to the little chip in the nape of your neck to hotwire the signals being sent to your brain, it always had a very distinct feeling.
It was like someone popped open your skull and drizzled caffeine over your brain. You could taste colors, and smell the temperature. Every part of you had a prickly staticy numbness, like it had all fallen asleep at once. But almost as quickly as it came-
It disappeared.
Lucy jerked awake with a gasp, breathing desperately like she’d just broken the surface of the water. Muscle memory would have had her sit up, but that somewhat failed on account of her floating weightlessly against the backdrop of space, so all it did was send her on a slight spin.
Countless stars of every color, dotted the air above her like priceless jewels in a lost treasure chest, hugging the horizon as it stretched out into the unfathomable distances of the universe.
The treasures of the cosmos, laid out for all to see, so close it was almost as if you could reach out and run your hands through their dazzling glow.
Lucy blinked a few times and her breathing calmed down as she took in the familiar view of her bedroom. Well, not her physical bedroom, that was just a worn down, three foot by seven foot, concrete box with only a stained mattress and rusted dresser in it. But this… this was her real bedroom.
It was a Digital bedroom, a Dive Box, or really whatever you wanted to call it. It was the fully customizable space that you appear in when you enter Full Dive, which acted as your personal travel hub for navigating everything on the extranet, and was what most of humanity considered to be their “home”.
Lucy hummed along to the slow piano tune that echoed from all around her and lazily flicked her fingers, causing numerous screens to pop into existence in front of her. They lit up in all sorts of colors, showing her missed messages and sales on her wishlist, as she slowly floated through the void. But among the notifications, and the clutter of files she kept forgetting to delete, one thing stood out, it’s luminous golden letters glinting off imaginary sunlight.
-Lux in Tenebris: Muted Infinity-
!Free Opening Week!
Lumina, the world-famous VR tycoon, has finally released the long awaited sequel to its greatest masterpiece!
Labeled as a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon, LiT 2 was unveiled five years ago, only to face two subsequent delays. Since its initial online leak, the game had garnered an almost cult-like obsessive follower base. It had more eyes on it than some wars that were going on at the moment, and there wasn’t a single person with access to the extranet who didn’t know its name.
Then again, it wasn’t all that surprising, considering it was supposed to be the successor to the single most played game of all time. The original LiT supposedly had as much as a fifth of the world's population as active users throughout its lifetime.
She’d personally missed out on the original LiT, a combination of not being able to afford its monthly subscription and not having an up-to-date nano dive interface necessary to properly render its high level feedback.
But that was all in the past. She’d gotten better gear since then, and the hardware requirements for the second installment had dropped significantly. Given such a perfect lineup, there was only one logical option.
She clicked play.
[Loading]
[…]
[Your Extranet avatar is compatible with this game, would you like to use it?]
Well, she’d hope it’d be compatible- her avatar was literally just herself after all, nothing crazy like a six armed spaghetti monster.
One button press, and the screen in front of her shattered away to reveal a mirror image of herself, sans any clothes and jewelry. A cute blond in her twenties, with hair down to her waist, and cheerful blue eyes.
[Is this the avatar you want to use?]
“Yup.” She chuckled, waving her hand and watching her clone mimic her.
[This avatar is compatible with the race: Human. Would you like to change your character race? This will require mandatory but minor changes to your avatar.]
Lucy hummed as she idly scrolled through the races. Gnomes had slightly increased crafting quality for the trade in of low health and being tiny. Elves had a little more stamina for a little less health. Beastkin caught her eye, with increased health and stamina, but the decreased crafting quality seemed annoying in the long term.
“I think I’ll just stick with Human for now.”
[Loading]
[…]
[Please enter your username]
“I’d like to use my Extranet username, please.”
[Loading]
[…]
[Account Created: LuckyLucy114]
[Welcome to your Muted Infinity!]
[Please enjoy your stay!]
The screen fell away, and the blackness of distant space was replaced by the blackness of the void…
And then the world went white.
-Muted Infinity-
When Lucy slowly opened her eyes, it wasn’t to the colors of the cosmos, but to a serene blue sky, with white wispy clouds, and distant birds flying far overhead.
It was pretty…
Such a sight, of course, was immediately interrupted as she smashed into the hard stone ground with a painful thud. Humans tended to like standing on the ground, and coders didn’t usually have to account for someone floating in space when they decided to warp in.
Lucy blushed in embarrassment and grumbled to herself as she slowly pushed herself to her feet, gingerly rubbing her back, and pointedly ignoring the laughter of people around her. Now that she wasn’t just staring up at the sky, she could see the world around her.
“Wow…”
And she was breathless.
This was the billion dollar game of the century that everyone had been scrambling to play!
…
It looked like utter shit.
The ground was made of shoddy and uneven brown bricks, a jankey wall made of vertical wood logs sat in the distance, cutting off any natural scenery. And even though the game had only been launched for all of ten minutes, numerous ramshackle dirty brick huts were being thrown up by players literally just pulling the bricks out of the ground- the resulting pot holes, just making it all look even worse.
But the scenery wasn’t what really had her attention, no, that honor went to the people.
People, so, so many people. There had to be thousands, with more spawning in every second in a flash of light. A practical swarm of players, a sea of white shirts and black shorts, all blending together as they rushed about.
Most were human, but she could catch the occasional Elf, Beastkin, and Dwarf mixed in.
Everyone knew how successful the original LiT had been, but she’d still had doubts about the model. A game without any NPC’s or plot lines, entirely dependent on nothing but player input and interaction- surely there had to be something else going on that kept people hooked!
But this… this really put it into perspective. That many people, all building, exploring, and trading. All of them adding to, and weaving their own stories, would wind up making a more compelling experience on accident, as they interacted with each other, than most devs could probably do on purpose.
But as Lucy was gawking, she was drawn from her reverie by slow, sarcastic, clapping from her left.
“Geez, forget making it out of spawn, you didn’t even make it out of your loading point before getting knocked over. That’s gotta be a new record!”
[BloodieRubieSmoothie]
You could typically tell a bit about a person by their username, it was a giant fluorescent sign hanging above their head after all, and this was no exception.
Spiky red hair that dropped past her shoulders, red eyes, her username had two words for red, the only part of this girl that wasn’t red was her clothes. She had the default white shirt and black shorts everyone else was wearing, and Lucy had a distinct feeling that would change as soon as she found some dye or crafting materials.
“W-Well I don’t really see how that’s my fault,” Lucy stammered, “It dropped me, it was out of my control!”
“You’re really gonna blame the teleport system for your own inability to land on your feet?” The girl raised an eyebrow and gave her a look.
“Yes!”
“Ha! Then this must be your first time playing LiT, the original game’s TP system was notoriously wonky. Anyone worth their salt knew to have both feet firmly on the ground before doing anything.” This girl, “Bloody Smoothie” smirked and cocked her head, which shifted her fluffy crimson hair and revealed a slightly pointed ear. An Elf? What kind of low health high stamina build was she going for?
“I never played the original game.” Lucy admitted as she scratched the back of her neck.
“Well, in that case, welcome to LiT, newbie! Call me Rue, I’ll be your tour guide!” Rubie tipped an imaginary hat, and spread her arms. “First on the list is Spawn, which you’ll see if you use your eyes for a brief moment in any direction you choose! Ignoring dungeons, this is just about the only important non-player made structure in the entire game!” She gestured to the area around them before wincing and giving a pained laugh. “‘Though considering how it looks, that’s probably for the best. Geeze, even some randomly generated hills would look better than this.”
Lucy panned around spawn, and had to agree, but something else caught her attention. “Isn’t having spawn, just… free like this, a bad idea?” She asked. “People are already trashing it, couldn’t they try to take it over?”
“Of course people are gonna try to take it over, it’s the center of the map, after all!” Rue laughed. “About a million different groups tried to take spawn in the original LiT, but no one could ever hold onto it for more than a month- too high of a priority target.”
“Ah, that makes sense I guess.” Lucy winced. “I guess there's a lot of pvp in this game, isn’t there?”
Rubie beamed in response. “Yup! There’s a lot of pve stuff, but most of the fighting is pvp, after everyone gets their stuff going. The game’s all about competing for resources.”
Lucy just sighed. “Great… I don’t suppose you have any tips for the new girl who’s mostly only ever played city builders before?”
“Well you should probably get going. There’s already a lot of people here, and there's gonna be a lot more coming. So unless you get out now, or figure out how to magic resources out of thin air, all the good stuff’s gonna be long gone.”
…
Lucy’s eyes widened as Rubie’s words registered.
“Crap!”
-Muted Infinity-
The rolling green hills outside of spawn’s walls seemed to go on forever in the direction she’d chosen to walk, the beautiful grassy steppes only being broken by the occasional tree, stream, or rocky outcropping.
Luckily the occasional tree was all that she needed… Well, all that she thought she needed, Lucy hadn’t exactly played LiT before, but she was fairly decent at picking up context clues.
The tier one tools that she had available in her crafting tech tree were all made of wood, so it was obvious she needed wood. What was less obvious was how she was supposed to actually get it.
She had wandered off into the grassland of rolling hills that stretched out from around spawn, and once she was confident in her distance from other players (which was complicated due to the sheer number of them), she immediately beelined to the nearest tree…
And promptly realized she had no idea what to do next.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
She’d tried punching it, but that only rewarded her with a bruised hand. Kicking it had yielded similar results.
The juvenile tree in front of her just sat there, mockingly.
Originally it was just to get wood, but now… now, after bruising bother her hand and her pride, it was personal. A challenge of this degree required a fundamental shift of operations, innovative new strategies capable of pushing forward what was thought to be possible, and a breakthrough unlike any seen in modern history.
Luckily, she’d found an unlikely ally laying in the grass, something uniquely fit to deal with this situation.
Humanity’s oldest weapon-
A pointy rock.
“Hiya!”
She slammed the sharp rock she’d found on the ground into the trunk, but aside from scraping off some of the bark, it didn’t really do anything.
“Hiya!”
Again, she slammed the rock into the wood.
“HIYA!”
Then again, with more power! But this time, her grip slipped from the force of the impact, and the stone cut open her palm as it tumbled to the ground.
“Ow, fuck.” Lucy hissed as she clenched her hand, before sighing and leaning down to grab the rock, blushing in embarrassment at the laughter that came from behind her.
“You know, you could actually help me, instead of just sitting off to the side and laughing!”
“Aww, but why would I do that?” Rue, the absolute villain who’d followed her for some unholy reason, said with a smirk. “You’re providing such good entertainment.”
“Entertainment? This isn’t entertainment!” Lucy waved her wounded hand at the tree. “This isn’t even entertaining! The game told me to find a tree. Well, I found a tree, but don’t have any way of actually doing anything with it!”
“Well I can see that, and it’s pretty funny, believe it or not.” The red haired girl bit into the apple that had fallen during the half hour Lucy had spent at the tree. “You should try punching it again, it was funny when you did that. Besides, what could I do? I’ve been busy tagging along with you, it’s not like I’ve made tools or anything.”
“You could help me.” Lucy pleaded, making puppy dog eyes without even realizing it. “You said you played the original Lux in Tenebris, you know how to play the game… Please?”
Rue gave her a blank look, before shrugging and tossing the apple over her shoulder after a moment of consideration.
“Sure, why not?” She said, yawning as she swiped the rock from Lucky’s hand. “Helping newbies by making them feel stupid is par for the course in these games, isn’t it?”
“Hey!”
Lucy would have protested further, but her words died off in confusion as Rubie walked right past the tree, and towards a patch of tall grass, which she used the rock to cut out a bundle of.
“What, uh, what are you doing?”
“I’m actually bothering to think.” Rubie whistled as she strolled back up to the tree before jumping and grabbing ahold of a branch. The weight caused it to bob up and down, but two lazy swings caused it to snap in half, dropping the girl to the ground.
The red head vanished the items into her inventory, and turned away so Lucy couldn’t see what she was doing. A few moments later she turned around and made some exaggerated “magician moves” with her hands, before clapping and slowly pulling a new item out of her inventory as she moved her hands away, making it kinda look like she was pulling it out of her sleeve.
“Rule 1 of LiT: Use your head.”
Rubie laughed at Lucy’s expression, and twirled her new axe around in her hand. It was a simple thing, with a sharp rock tied to the end of a stick with some thatch, but it was no less gobsmacking to Lucy.
“Wait, wha- That wasn’t in the crafting tree!”
“Bwah bwah, da cwafting twee~” Rue mocked. “Sure the game starts you off with some basic tutorial stuff, but the rest of it you’ve gotta find yourself.” She lazily tossed the axe up and down, before lobbing it to Lucy, who caught it with a fumble. “Use that to chop down the tree, cut some tall grass, and break a sharp chunk off a big rock. Then go ahead and make your own, well, whatever tool you want, just literally anything that’s not the crappy wooden tutorial tools.”
Lucy quickly scrambled to do so, nearly getting flattened by the tree’s final act of vengeance (IE: Falling at her) much to the amusement of Rubie. But she soon ran into another roadblock.
“Uhhh…” Lucy glanced between the items in her inventory and the crafting grid, while repeatedly scrolling through her barren crafting tech tree, which very much did not have the recipe Rue had made. It let her turn the logs she’d gathered into some sticks, but that was basically it besides the wooden tools.
The girl in question just watched her flounder about aimlessly, for a while, with an amused smirk on her face.
“You know, the crafting system works outside of the crafting interface.” She eventually said. “I actually think it’s easier to get the hang of the system by using your hands, rather than the terminal.”
“You could have said that sooner!” Lucy hissed, hating being made to look like a fool, and promptly went back to ignoring her ‘companion’.
“I didn’t hear a thank you~.” Rue sang in a sing-song voice.
Lucy sat down on the grass and put the jagged stone shard to the end of a wooden stick, pushing it down slightly against the ground so the stick would stay up. Then she began carefully winding the bundle of grass strands to connect the two, finishing it off lamely with the only knot she knew how to tie- a bunny knot.
As soon as the knot was finished, the whole thing was engulfed in a white glow, causing Lucy to “Eep!” and drop it in surprise- much to Rubie’s amusement.
The blond sent a scathing glare at the redhead, and showed her a choice finger, but that just caused her to laugh harder.
[!FEAT UNLOCKED!]
[Open Ended Game Design: Craft Something Without Using The Crafting Interface!]
[permanent +1% quality to all crafted items]
Lucy pushed aside the popup and looked back at the tool, to find it had turned into an almost identical replica to what Rue had tossed to her, and when she reached down to grab it, its item name popped up.
[Primitive Axe]
“Rule 2 of LiT: Don’t trust that shitty crafting tree! There’s always better gear you haven't learned how to make yet. Go ahead, open it back up.”
Lucy huffed at her, but followed the instructions. When she opened the tree though, it had expanded to include a whole lot more than just the wooden tools she had originally. And it wasn’t just the axe either, a whole branch of ‘primitive gear’ had unlocked in her crafting tree, ranging from a shoddy shovel, club, and pickaxe, to poor quality arrows.
“You don’t just get new recipes as you find materials for them,” Rubie explained, “In LiT you have to unlock crafting trees. The simple ones are really easy to find, make the tutorial tools and it’ll unlock the next tier, etc etc. But the good ones you get by trying to craft new things on your own, and stumbling onto huge tech branches that just seem to keep going forever! Those are the ones that stuff just keeps getting better and better the deeper down them you explore. It really plays on that dopamine rush of discovery.”
Rue hummed to herself happily before frowning and tapping her chin in thought.
“Don’t worry about running out of new stuff, or not knowing when you’ve run out of content, really… just don’t bother. There was, frankly, an absurdly overboard amount of crafting tech trees in the last game, and most people think the devs just kept adding shit in without telling anyone.” She sighed and scratched her neck. “Honestly it was kinda ridiculous. Everyone thought runes were a joke item, but then some random guild found an advanced tree for them literally two weeks before the servers shut down- in a game that had been running for FIFTEEN YEARS! And then there was the stupid Legion, who had those weird ass lances that no one could ever figure out how to replicate.”
Lucy just nodded silently, as the crimson haired girl continued on her rant, suddenly realizing just how out of her depth she was in this game, as her brain processed everything.
So the game’s gear, and entire item system for that matter, was entirely based on discovery and exploration. If someone was really clever, or just dumb lucky, and discovered how to make something advanced before anyone else, they could completely control the market- selling it to people at incredible prices. Or even worse, if it’s something powerful, they could hoard it between them and their group, using it to gain a huge advantage against other players.
Whereas the best way to be “good” at most games was through grinding, stat maxing meta builds, and pure skill, LiT apparently valued information and craftiness more than any other- it rewarded information and craftiness more than any other.
With this system, arms races weren't just something that could happen, they were a damned near feature!
No wonder she couldn’t find anything about the game online other than just a basic outline and people raving about how she should try it! No one wanted to spill anything!
It also explained why the original LiT was so popular for so long. If everything from items, to combat, to the market, and the very world itself, was entirely generated by players, then the only real ‘depth limit’ to the game, was how many players it had playing it- and the devs had sure as hell done everything to support that little tidbit, if the numbers at spawn were anything to go by.
And now it made sense why Rubie was humoring her, tagging along, and flat out not taking her seriously! The old players were at a stupidly huge advantage, and Rue could probably make more progress in an hour than Lucy could in a day!
A playful knock on her forehead brought Lucy out of her thoughts, and upwards to Rubie’s grinning face. “Is anyone hooome?~”
“Stop that.” Lucy pushed away the hand, with a cute pout, and pushed herself to her feet. “Ok, it took me an hour to get a starting tool, what’s next on the list?”
“Well now that we’ve got some wood, I’ll make us a basic crafting station, and get you something to defend yourself with, thennn…” Rubie's smile quirked mischievously as she pointed off to the side. “Let’s get you some basic combat training so you don’t die horribly in your first encounter.”
Lucy followed Rubie’s finger and raised an eyebrow at the large herd of wild boar drinking from a small stream of water. She looked back to her maybe-friend-maybe-tormentor and gave her an unimpressed look.
“And how in the world are we supposed to fight all of those? Do you have some sort of special strategy? Maybe a cheat code from the original Lux in Tenebris?”
“Oh please, no. Maybe in a shooter, or story game, you can beat a bunch of stuff before you’re supposed to, via cheese, or something, but if you try that in LiT, you’ll wind up dead and lose all your stuff.” Rubie leaned forward and held up three fingers. “Rule 3 of LiT: Don’t fight a battle you’re not absolutely sure you’ll win.”
Rubie placed those fingers on Lucy’s chin, and turned her head off to the side, where two hogs had wandered off from the herd.
“Rule 4 of LiT: Take advantage of every opportunity you’re presented with.”
Lucy just sighed.
“This is going to go horribly, isn’t it?”
Rue laughed and slapped her on the back.
“Only if you’re bad!”
The blond newb whined, and Rue couldn’t help but grin at how easy she was to tease.
-Muted Infinity-
Thunder echoed in the distance, as lightning flashed, illuminating discolored raindrops as they fell from the smog choked skies to the cracked and scorched surface of a war torn world.
Dr Howard R. Faust dispassionately watched the acidic rain through the thick glass window of his office, with a far away look on his face. His mind thought, but worked on nothing, merely delighting in the act of thinking itself.
The musings of nothing, he called it.
The talk of a madman, his employers would mutter behind his back.
But he didn’t care what they said, or what they thought- he could turn up carrying a headless corpse, and it wouldn’t matter. They would keep him around as long as he produced results, and results… Well, results were what he did best, considering it was almost the only thing he cared about anymore.
And the need for those results, was what had led him to the present.
“Sir.” A mechanical hiss sounded as the door to his office slid open, and one of his subordinates stepped in. “Everything’s in place, and all fields are reporting green across the board.” The young woman looked up from her tablet. “We’re ready to begin on your command.”
Yuyara Ito was the odd one out of the group of scientists under Faust, and it wasn’t just because of her artificial minty light green hair that hung down to her waist. She was the new hire for a team that hadn’t taken on members in almost three decades, the youngest by almost 50 years, and was the only one with a doctorate in the more… human fields.
“Good, good. Very good.” Faust muttered to himself. “What are your thoughts on this operation, doctor?”
“The technology in use has been tested thoroughly, we have double backups for every crucial component, and the paperwork is clear that we have complete legal immunity for this.” The assistant rattled off, robotically, as if reading from a script. “The only variable left is the test subjects themselves, which of course we can’t influence without invalidating the experiment.”
“Hmmm… that’s not what I mean, and you know it.” The old scientist watched the rainfall with a pensive frown. “You were specifically brought onto my staff for this experiment, due to your expertise in psychology and sociology- the only two fields of science that I have never been able to truly grasp. Your inputs are valued for your ability to understand the human thought process, and your ability to think with more than numbers. So again, I’ll ask, what are your thoughts on this operation, doctor?”
“Well.” Yuara took a few moments to put together her words. “I- What we’re doing here, this experiment is- I don’t like it.”
“You disagree?”
“...Yes.” She hesitated for a moment before affirming.
“Disappointing… but ultimately expected.” Faust drawled. “What points exactly, might I ask, do you find unpalatable about our actions?”
Yuyara blinked, and actually had to take a few seconds to fully process the absolute audacity of the question.
“What do I- SIR! We’re going to murder tens of thousands!” She exclaimed. “You plan on putting well over half a million people in an environment without the resources to sustain them all, and then slowly taking away those as well, just to see what they’ll do!”
“No.” Faust cut her off with a pensive frown. “I made sure to have more than enough resources to not only sustain the population, but to allow for expansion. The high material cost of the gameplay loop will cause the pool to gradually shrink. Excess resources followed by rapid expansion, then by scarcity, and finally extreme depletion, is vital for the simulation to match our world’s situation.”
“It’ll be chaos!” Yuyara shouted at him. “People fighting wars for food, and mugging each other for whatever survives the conflict! We’d be turning normal people into killers and thieves!”
“A Resource War: The intentional mass burning of resources in order to forcibly seize resources from others. A fascinating concept and one I wish to document and study in full detail.”
“I- You- How!?” Yuyara seethed, pulling at her hair in exasperation. “You’re insane!”
Lightning struck, thunder echoed, and Yuyara’s eyes widened in shock as she realized what she’d just said.
…
“...Tell me doctor…” Faust drummed his fingers against the window glass. “How did scientists as early as 1972, accurately predict that humanity’s industrial output would peak in 2040, followed by a decline in both population and food availability?”
Yuyara instinctively took a step back as Faust turned away from the window, his unnaturally gangly height overshadowing her by almost two whole feet.
“Uhm, they uh,” She buffered as she tried to recall the oddly specific vague fact, “They built a primitive computer from the ground up to run a simulation thousands of times over, controlling the whole thing with punch cards.”
“Indeed, though they never were able to tell if their model was predicting a drop in food production due to a decline in population, or a decline in population due to a drop in food production. Truly a shame, perhaps they could have prevented everything before it even began.” Faust let his fingers slide off the window as he began slowly walking away from it.
“Another question then. How did we come to our current theory on how the solar system formed?”
“We simulated it thousands of times on a computer.”
“Correct. What was it we used to replace clinical trials?”
“Medical simulations of human anatomy.”
“Indeed, Indeed. Correct once again. Now here’s a free question.” The scientist paused, now only an arm’s length from the doctor. “What exactly do all of those examples have in common?”
“They- They were all simulations.” Yuyara choked out, forcing herself to say it even though she knew exactly where Faust was going with this.
“Yes, simulations.” Faust took his last step forward, and Yuyara was forced to take a step back as his withered face and cold gray eyes centered on her, only to find herself pressed against the door. “Simulations are science’s greatest tool, allowing us to harvest data and information that we should have no way of knowing.”
“But this isn’t a simulation! You’re killing real people!”
“Simulation: The imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. Simulations require the use of models; the model represents the key characteristics or behaviors of the selected system or process, whereas the simulation represents the evolution of the model over time.” Faust defined the word as dry as if he had a dictionary on hand. “It is a small-scale replica of the situation we are currently facing. A model of the collapse we’re barreling towards. It is, by definition, a simulation.”
“Then why not use AIs! Why put genuine lives at risk!”
“I tried AI, it was inconclusive, we need to know how humans will react. It was a simulation that predicted this world would collapse, that we’d eventually run out of both food and materials.” He leaned down so that he could look her dead in the eyes. “It will be a simulation that shows us our way out.”
As if on cue, a lightning strike shook the building, and echoed Faust’s declaration with a roar of thunder.
The scientist held her gaze for a few moments more, before he slowly rightened himself, and walked back towards his window.
“H-How…” Yuyara struggled to find her voice. “When will the simulation be complete? How long are you intending to run it?”
How many lives was this madman going to feed into a grinder?
“For as long as I need to. And if I don’t get the results I need, I’ll run it again.”
Yuyara nodded in affirmation, her mouth completely dry.
“And how long do you predict each test will last?”
“Entirely dependent on the subjects’ ability to think long term, and how soon they realize that finite resources in a game that requires infinite expansion to survive, has catastrophic implications.”
-End Chapter-