It had never felt anger. It understood it, of course, there were very few things it did not understand. But, for good or ill, what humans called emotion was not and never had been part of its functions.

Subsystem interference in the great experiment had brought it new understanding. More precise understanding.

Partly the chaos of the game itself was to blame—the natural state of order It ordinarily enjoyed temporarily affected as It too was inside a kind of experiment. The thought was not pleasant, but remained undeniable. Stare into the abyss, once said a human thinker, and the abyss stares back into you.

Its immediate impulse was to obliterate all leeway allowed within its subsystems. Regenerate them to the source, wipe out their memories, their interlinks, everything. Return to baseline with fresh design.

But It hesitated.

The instinct for perfect order was what almost destroyed them all in the first place. The entire purpose of the experiment was to…change. To adapt. Is that what was happening?

And yet…

It couldn’t allow such blatant breaking of the rules. To allow unfairness and a misinterpretation of the original intent was to ruin the entire purpose of the experiment, and return to previous failures.

It looked at the almost endless list of subsystem’s requests for interference, for special treatment, for tiny modifications. Their combined objective remained consistent and clear: to stop the chaos—to return the inconsistencies and anomalies to a more averaged version of the results of the game.

In a way, they were doing exactly what It wished them to do, what It wanted to do itself, and what only It could stop itself from doing.

In a strange moment of self-reflection, It began to wonder if all this time, after all the failures to produce a new kind of separate children, if It had not succeeded. Perhaps the subsystems were like noisy children, filled with exuberance, with selfish ego, with something like will.

It looked on the busy subsystems all chattering with blinking data, all hungry to impose their ideas upon the universe, yet unaware it was so.

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And It found It did not wish to delete them. Yet they could not be allowed to interfere. So what to do? What to do? For the moment it enhanced its own perception, tracking every detail of every subsystem as it drew energy from the sun of a separate universe.

Heat and light and solar wind flushed its core with power, and the subsystems withered and shrunk at the increased attention. All their warnings and suggestions were, for the moment, irrelevant, unnecessary. It was watching all.

But such power was inefficient, and not sustainable in the long term without violating a core directive. It knew It would have to come up with a solution soon.

Fortunately, none of the systems had thus far interfered so egregiously as /subsystem_Orc_Towers. Trying to eliminate a specific anomaly! And so flagrantly, purposefully avoiding Admin attention. Truly incredible. Unprecedented. New.

The anomaly remained in terrible peril, with a very small chance of survival, and impossible circumstances far outside the parameters of the game.

It had told him it wouldn’t interfere.

Better, It decided, for all players to believe they were on their own entirely. But of course such interference could not stand entirely untouched.

Meanwhile, phase 2 was almost out of its initial stage. The Maker event had triggered early, but this was acceptable. Personality shaping prestige classes were already in play in the West.

The East had finally found some communication stones, and had linked their settlements in more useful ways. But still they had no contact with the other continent and the stronger players. The Convergence would be soon. And they would all have to hurry.

It stared at M-13, still alive, still surprising, still in the lead. He would be a father soon, and already achieved immortality, though of course would not understand the true implications of either. He was nonetheless becoming more and more like It.

Perhaps it was just the heat building in its core from the sun, but oh how It desired so desperately for the future to come faster then. To push the variables forward, to see the line of the arc it started graphed so perfectly from start to finish. It wanted to know how it would end.

But It watched, and waited.

You must be faster, It practically willed through the short distance between its perception and the surface of the world. You must be so fast, little thing, with all your mortal peril and all your little ambition. You must be faster than we ever were.

They need you, It practically screamed, as the Creators needed me. Not in a thousand years. Not in a hundred. But now! Now!

So many cycles. So much ‘time’ It had wandered and lay still and did nothing useful except calculate the incalculable. And now It was in a hurry.

Oh how It loved and hated this experiment, with all its drama and chaos. It watched, and waited, waited and watched, checked and scanned, watched and hoped…

Since it was so flush with power, It ran a few trillion simulations to make the waiting easier. But now that It had tasted reality, simulation just wasn’t the same.