Chapter Seventeen

In the Other

The tutorial program was gone. That was not in question. The subordinars had looked in the box he was kept in, and he was not there. The impossible had happened. A vital piece to the core creation process had vanished. Not without a trace, there was always a trace, but not one they had found thus far. The question that One to the Eighth Power, one of the higher ranking Overseers, faced wasn't how or who had helped him. It was obvious that he could not do it alone and that it had been a core that had aided him. The last core that he had been scheduled to come into contact with was the Deviant core. Naturally.

It wasn't even in the wilds yet, and it was already causing problems. One to the Eighth Power had warned all of the other Overseers that it was a mistake creating such a core, but the Order was too excited about employing a dragon soul as a core. Especially that dragon's soul. He had been a thorn in their side for millenia; why would that change when he became a core? No one had listened, and now they were paying the price for their short-sightedness.

The overseer looked at the servants scrambling to find a hint of where the tutorial had gone. The question was why he had gone. He had to have been convinced that it was something that he wanted to do. There were chains that could be broken no other way. The trick was, the tutorial could only want what was best for the core. It had to benefit the core, and believe that it would benefit it. The real issue was that the DV-8 core wouldn't be able to slip the bonds off the tutorial completely, but he would have been able to loosen them enough that it would give the program the mental freedom to think for itself and then vanish like a drop of water in an endless sea.

He'd known that the wrong soul had been used for this project from the beginning. The DV-8 core should have been forged from a more stable soul, one that they could have bent to their will, but the others agreed that placing such a soul into the Deviation process would have been pointless. The entire reason the deviate program had been initiated was because the cores were stagnating. They had not created anything new in a decamillennium.

The Overseers used the dungeon cores to create new life forms for them to seed the cosmos with, and there had not been a new race, species, spell, god, or idea in ten thousand years. The Overseers saw this span of time as an eyeblink, but recognized that if things weren't changed on their end then nothing would ever change. The overseers fed on new ideas, concepts, creations, and art. Repetition caused them to starve, and it had been a long time since any of them had gone hungry. But their collective stomachs were starting to growl. Ten thousand years might be an eyeblink, but original ideas had been petering out for thousands of more years.

This way the reason why the DV-8 program had been initiated. New souls given varied options would mean the high probability of an invigoration of the creation process. One idea stimulated another, and then that one led to another way of thinking. Soon, a solitary idea would breed countless others and the Overseers would be able to populate new worlds with things that had never existed before; which would lead to even newer things being thought of. It just took one new idea to start things, and it was hoped that the Deviant would spawn a host of creative thoughts. It would not be a spark but a forest fire that raged across the universe, reinvigorating the Life Process for a second time, and t he Overseers would feast.

Sometimes an environment would dictate changes to an existing model. For example, wheels did not work well in snow, whereas rails or runners would replace them. That was not a large amount of food generated because it was simply a modification and not a complete reinventing of transportation. Men could ride pigs rather than horses, but the idea was the same. The Overseers needed real creation, and so the DV-8 program had gone into production. The opportunity to use the soul of their greatest enemy to reinvigorate the Overseers had been lost to no one.

Their leader, One to the First Power, relished the thought of twisting the dragon into an unwitting ally. The world breaker would become a world maker, and he would be powerless to stop them. If he ever got too far out of control all they would have to do would be to employ his true name and they would have an unbreakable collar on him. If that didn't work all they would have to do would be to utter their ancient enemy's original name and his core would destabilize under the influx of information. So, as far as One to the Eighth Power was concerned, the dragon was on a short leash.

It was the missing tutorial that worried him. It had taken the Overseers millions of years to forge the program. Granted, it had been done in the Other, when time had no meaning but a day passed in the other like one in the real world. Ten thousand years might be an eyeblink, but it was still one they noticed. Finding a suitable soul was nearly impossible. The tutorial needed unlimited storage space. Its mind was wiped of its encounters every time a core left its tutelage to save it from storing unnecessary knowledge. It took the collective souls of an entire world to form the basic matrix of the tutorial. One world in quintillion might qualify as an option, out of those possibilities it took no less than thousands of worlds being converted and failing before a qualified candidate survived the process. That took place in real time. The Overseers simply could not take that long to recreate their missing program.

Until the tutorial was found Overseers were going to have to do the task manually, and it would drain those used in such a capacity to a point of starvation in decades, not centuries, and not millennia. Decades. Fortunately, the Overseers who would be chosen to fill in for the tutorial would be the lower caste members. One to the Eighth Power would never have to guide a core through its creation process. If it ever got to that poihnt their species was doomed.

So, it was the why that had brought him here. Why would a stable and loyal program like the tutorial suddenly and willfully abandon his post? Was the Deviation core that persuasive? Why hadn't the Admins not foreseen such a possibility and why hadn't they implemented measures to prevent it from happening in the first place? These were the questions that he asked himself. Why hadn't there been alarms to alert them when he'd left his post? There were some many unanswered whys.

One to the Eighth Power watched the subordinars scramble. They knew that this would trickle down onto them, and they were doing everything they could to mitigate their culpability. Short of bringing the program back to their Superiars on a silver matrixinal plate they were all doomed. He, or one of his underlings, like Two to the Twenty-Fifth Power would delete them. They were the last line of defense and they would pay for being so lax with something so important. Complacency. It was a disease among his people. They took too long to recognize problems or to change their course.

There was no reason for One to the Eighth Power to corporeate. He was not going to be leaving the other in the forseeable future. But when they did get a clue he would be the one to go after him. He had put this onus on himself not because he feared for his species continued viability, but solely for the vitriol he felt to his former foe. The tutor would have left a trail. He might be able to mask it, but he wouldn't be able to completely cover his trail. He would be found and brought back, and the fate of the Deviant core would be decided as well. He hoped they would destroy it and let the program end there. Other options had to be available. They just needed to apply themselves. Tutor could not hide forever and One to the Eighth power would be the one to find him.