The next day I had to deal with Mayor stuff. Vera had gotten a message from Joyce, my secretary, that people had posted concerns about several issues in the city, so it was time to actually hold a town meeting, though this one would be virtual. There were five main categories; age restrictions, both age of consent and drinking age, gun and armor restrictions, immigration, housing, and the status of Sanctuary. I started a conference call with the entire town council and started recording it, so that it could be posted on the bulletin board for the interested citizens to watch.

The first issue I took a look at was housing. Tony and Tom explained that the main issue was that they couldn’t run large enough teams. Plenty of people in town could help, but with only the two of them as supervisors, they could only run two teams of fifty people each. That limited their building speed. I asked Tony to look for other people with both supervisor and building experience to make new teams, but that would take at least a few weeks to implement. I did have one idea on how to speed that up. In Sanctuary I had used Builders turn the carved stone into actual living areas. While it wasn’t quite the same, one human builder could manage many System Builders, and those Builders could work 24/7/365 on a project as long as they had the raw material and energy to make something. There were plenty of pre-designed housing units in the System files, and it would be a simple matter to order the builders to place a specific building in a specific location. Builders even had a limited ability to dig, so that they can flatten ground and add basements, so they didn’t even need to prepare the ground ahead of time. I asked Olivia if she could send each of the build teams at least five Builder units preloaded with all of the humanoid buildings, and teach them and their teams how to use them. She was currently at the shooting range, training new mage recruits, but would do it when she got back to the office. Once you got five hundred meters down the rock was mostly calcium based, so just digging out level two of the dungeon provided them with enough concrete to build enough housing for everyone in the town.

The second issue was Immigration. Many people that were moving to town were living in Sanctuary, as it had enough housing, but people moving into what was essentially a Suburb instead of the main town wasn’t the only issue. There was also the issue of people moving here from around the world and not speaking English or having wildly different customs. For example, around six hundred people had moved here from the middle east and yesterday at noon they all stopped working to pray, tieing up businesses and even some public locations until they were done. While my position was that as long as no one hurt anyone else, I didn’t care how they lived, but that disrupted business in town. I suggested that we work it in as a break, maybe even a lunch break. While I’m sure more serious cultural disputes were incoming I had a solution to the religious issues. I told them about the church I had cleaned out and offered to let them use it as a generic religious building, kind of like a military chapel. We hadn’t had to do it earlier as most of the people in town just used the teleporter to go to town for religious services, but now that we had multiple religions that were represented in town, we could let each main group reserve the sanctuary for their services and other uses. As we didn’t exactly have a division to handle that, I had Harold at the Department of Leasing handle it, as that was the closest matching department. As for the language issues, Di volunteered to teach an English as a second language class. The Translation skill only gave you the literal meaning, but everyone in class could download it, then learn to speak English better in the class.

Next I brought up the age restrictions. As there were no longer rules about it, many people had been operating outside the boundaries of what society and the government would have accepted previously. Not sure how to handle it and what options I had, I asked Vera how the System normally handled those issues. She informed us that, among most humanoid races, the System divided people by whether or not they had went through puberty. Those that hadn’t were children, those that had were adults. But for those that were going through it, there was essentially a slider that progressed as their body and mind developed. For the purposes of sexuality, while some species had different mating arrangements or number of biological sexes, if there is more than a slight difference in development between the people involved, the less developed one(s) would receive a notification that they may be getting taken advantage of, and will need to verify that they understand the situation and certify that they aren’t, while the more developed one(s) will receive a notification that they may be taking advantage of the other person/people and will need to answer questions to certify that they aren’t. If the difference is large, however, they will receive a notice that one or more participants are likely being taken advantage of and that they should wait until the development is closer, such as adulthood. If one was an adult and the other wasn’t at least in the final stages of puberty, it would automatically be reported to law enforcement. For the consumption of intoxicants it is usually “only adults can”, though some races set it at a point near the end of puberty. We debated the issue for thirty minutes before deciding that, for now, it was better than the current system, so we would implement it the way most humanoids did and revisit the issue later.

Then the issue of weapon, armor, and military hardware ownership. It was pretty much decided that such a ban would be meaningless for two reasons. The first was that we needed people to defend the town from invaders, so people needed to be armed and trained just in case. The second was that anyone could download skills which, with a little work, were just as dangerous as a gun or military hardware. Guns, armor, and even tanks were essentially just tools that let you carry something to do a job instead of having to learn a skill to let your nanites do the job. We decided not to restrict anything, though if people misused these tools for crime, any court may restrict them as part of a punishment.

Finally we decided to tackle the issue of Sanctuary. The problem was that it was as large as AR, and by many metrics just as successful if not more. Many people in town felt that it was essentially a separate town instead of an outpost of this town, and wanted to split it off from AR. Most of those that wanted the split lived in Sanctuary, but that wasn’t surprising. Sanctuary was starting to develop its own norms like a subdivision or gated community might. While I didn’t want an HOA to crop up down there, Sanctuary having its own town council would be fine. We discussed this issue for over two hours before it went to a vote and, in the end, decided on splitting it off as a separate settlement by a slight majority of votes.

I had Joyce post our decisions and the video of the meeting on the AR and Sanctuary Bulletin Boards, thanked everyone for coming, and ended the meeting. I sent a message to the Sanctuary outpost core to start making a settlement core to replace itself, and that it would be transferred to the Dungeon to oversee the creation of several other theme based dungeons. I had realized while I was down there that forty eight teams per day visiting it at most was too few if we wanted it used for training and entertainment, so I decided to make at least a few more. I even decided to make one just for the military at the mines, so that they could train their troops down there.

As I had the personal funds to do so, I bought a conservation core, ten autominers, a medium nuclear reactor, and several other things I would need to make a new dungeon and took them to the mines. With the rock pulled out of the dungeons providing us with all of the material we needed to make everything, the mines pretty much served no purpose. So instead I asked if the mining company wanted to oversee the construction of dungeons. I would officially found a dungeon construction company that could go around the planet and build dungeons for anyone that wanted them. When the people in other cities had heard that I had built one, many of them had sent requests to visit it, so I was certain that the company would have enough demand to make it work. The head of the mines was already worried about losing his job, as the mines had essentially been superseded by other mining operations, so he agreed to work for my company immediately.

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I quickly went through the System process to register an organization, named it Dungeon Crafters, transferred one million of my personal funds as well as the equipment I had bought to make a dungeon, and hired the mine head as the current manager. He then hired about half the people at the mine to work for him, the ones he said knew the most about their job and were the hardest workers, and promised to get started at once. I told him to talk to Paul about what he should put in the one for the military, as well as work out rental fees or some other way to earn a profit from this, though in the beginning the minerals they dug out would more than pay for it. I didn’t know if they needed to make this one a stealth dungeon as well, but I taught him what I knew about only allowing the teleporter to go to certain locations, hiding the energy signal of your equipment and the like, just in case they needed to hide a dungeon for a client. After all, many people wouldn’t want their military training facilities being a known location.

Now that I had someone else handling the Dungeons outside of Sanctuary I returned there and set up three others for the settlement. It would take over a week per floor, but I set up a post on the bulletin board asking for suggestions and before the autominers had even gotten to their starting location I already had several. A week later, after the first layers had been dug out, the top three suggestions were puzzle dungeon, kid-friendly dungeon, and extreme dungeon.

The first would be full of traps and puzzles for you to solve, and you would be rewarded for solving the puzzles. It would include mazes, riddles, physical puzzles, trivia questions, etc. Because of its nature, I set it so that you could only be rewarded for solving a puzzle once, but I hoped to implement over a thousand into it eventually.

The second would be large open areas with interesting views. The enemies would use what were essentially sci-fi holograms, nanites taking the form of enemies but disappearing and leaving behind an item when they were defeated. The adults wanted it to be more like playing laser tag or, at worst airsoft, and not put the children at risk. The first floor would be for age seven and below, and every level below that would be for people one year older. I had to basically implement HP, MP and SP into the simulation and make enemies immune to the players if they were “dead” by being at zero HP. They obviously weren’t going to be at zero HP, and likely wouldn’t drop below full unless the tripped or twisted their ankle, but the virtual enemies would do imaginary damage to them, which could be treated in different ways.

The third was going to have the danger level cranked up to eleven. I would have traps of all kind, including lethal varieties. The enemies would start at the level of wolves at the easiest, and would use ambushes and pack hunting to try and injure those that entered the dungeon. I even had an autominer digging down to try and find a hot layer where I can build a lava level or at least a desert level. I would also have an ice level, but that would be done using System devices to cool everything down into the negatives. I would have to have everyone sign wavers before entering such a dungeon, as their was no guarantee that the System could revive you if you died in there.

For that reason I asked Vera about ways the System had to restore people whose lives had been lost. I was already familiar with how nanites could repair your body and restore any memories that were lost due to brain damage or your brain dying, but I learned that the Vaniir had actually developed a superior version of that around a million years ago. It basically exploited research they had done into the nature of the soul and sapient life, as well as a loophole in the System’s rules about creating sapient beings which allowed for full body replacements to be grown. Normally alone these two discoveries would just be meaningless. Even a perfect copy of the mind didn’t always guarantee that the person would be the same after revival, so that loophole wasn’t reliable, and knowing how to see if a soul was present was an intellectual exercise, as sapient beings had permanent souls but non-sapient beings didn’t.

The Vaniir had discovered, however, that in every sapient mind there were one hundred and thirty two abilities that the mind had, though the neural pattern this took varied wildly between species. The neurons which expressed these abilities would show anomalous behavior if a soul was attached, as the soul, by definition, could influence the behavior of the body. This usually amounted to spontaneous, unpredictable neural activity commonly referred to as “Free Will”. In humans these were clustered in seventeen areas, in Vaniir thirty two, in Jotun nineteen, in Alf sixteen, etc. If one of these clusters were transplanted into a cloned body, however, then the removed section regrown in the original, those areas would go from predictable to slightly unpredictable, indicating that the soul was connected, but wasn’t in control. In this state, the clone will not be capable of becoming conscious until the neural activity in the original drops below a certain threshold, at which point the soul essentially reconnects to the healthy body and the body can wake up. As long as you transfer the memories fully to the clone, the person will wake up feeling as if they died somewhere else, but were revived, with identical views and personality to their old self. Since that discovery the Vaniir have used this method to virtually eliminate death from their society, outside of dangerous criminals that needed to be executed and people that chose to not have the procedure done. I would need to implement this method into the extreme dungeon and make sure that they have a proper clone ready before entering. I just needed to prove that it worked before asking others to accept it.

For that reason, after using the gene therapy I had Tim make for me, I gave Bob a genetic sample and asked him to perform the procedure on me. If your DNA didn’t match the clone, the procedure had a higher chance of failure. The only changes would be in the implants. I would have a quantum entangled communication and power transfer device in the clone from the beginning, so I didn’t have to go through the implantation procedure, as well as an updated Node in my brain so that I could control ten billion nanites at a time in that body.

It took Bob a week to clone the new body for the test, and to verify that everything was perfect with it. I sent Samantha a message about what I was going to attempt, and she understood, but I wanted to make things more personal for Di. It took me five different attempts before I had a message that I was happy with, but in the end I explained the procedure to her, why I was doing it, including the fact that it could end all loss of human life, and stating that once I was transferred she could decide whether or not I was really me. I wouldn’t be killing my old body, but it would be in cryostasis in the back of the clinic in case she decided it wasn’t me and I needed to be woke back up. In order to transfer back, the new me would need to be placed in cryo or killed, and Di could decide which one.

After informing Tim of all of this I had him oversee the removal of one of the soul nerve clusters in my brain and its regrowth while I was unconscious. Once it was removed, Bob dropped off my new body and Tim oversaw the implantation of the biopsied tissue. We both would have preferred to have a brain surgeon oversee the process, but none of the ones he knew were willing to oversee an optional “experimental procedure”.

After the procedure, while we waited for my new body to develop the connection, I felt like something was off. I had to work harder to control my emotions, and I became obsessed with the development of the Extreme dungeon and designed several death traps, far more obsessed than I used to be with my projects. Tim looked into it and found several papers on how the area of the brain where the biopsy was taken from was tied to self control. The effect seemed to fade over the next four days and at the same time I felt that I had recovered, I got a message from the System that my replacement body was ready. I went to the clinic, sent the message I had recorded to Di, made one last check over my body on the exam table, transferred all the items in my inventory into my private section of Sanctuary's Warehouse, and climbed into the cryopod.

I felt a bone-chilling cold go through me, and grew tired. Then I woke up naked on the exam table. “Ok, that was a weird experience.” I said, climbing out of the bed and walking over to the cryopod. There I saw myself laying there, frozen. The new body was as close to the old one as possible, but there were some minor differences that made it feel a bit weird. The new body also had the full effects of the gene therapy, as it had been completely grown from DNA with the improved genes, so the proportions weren’t one hundred percent identical. Anyone that saw the new me will know it is me, but will have a similar feeling to seeing someone that lost a lot of weight or has aged a bit since they last saw the person. Honestly, it’s probably how I felt when I noticed that Di was a lot younger looking than when I first met her.

I pulled my belongings out of storage and reconfigured my equipment sets to what they were before the change. Just as I was done and equipped my gear, Di entered the office and started banging on the door of the room we were in. “I know you’re in there, Tim. Open up.”

I nodded at him, so Tim went over and opened the door. “I’m just finishing up a medical procedure, but the client is willing to let you enter.” he said.

Di stepped in and was about to say something when she saw me. “Oh,” she said, looking me over. “I see that you’ve already finished this ‘transfer.’ she said, staring at me.