The Night’s darkness had begun to relent. If I’d been in eyeshot of one of Ward 13’s windows, I’m sure I’d have seen dawn approaching, however, I couldn’t see anything because I was sitting on a stool against a wall with my eyes closed and my thoughts set to high gear. My slowed perception of time brought with it a profound stillness. In all honesty, it should have been terrifying—a mind, unmoored from space and time. And yet, because I had total control, what would have been a (highly) stressful experience instead became calming—almost meditative. As long as I ignored the fact that I couldn’t move, I felt neither lagging nor deadness. I felt… complete, and in a way that I hadn’t felt for a very long time.

“Are you gonna do it yet, Mr. Genneth?” Andalon asked.

Yes, I thought-said, just give me a moment.

With my thoughts sped up and time slowed down, I could finally take an honest-to-goodness break. I couldn’t check into whatever remained of social media to stress myself out or make myself depressed. I was left to my own devices—figuratively speaking.

I did feel somewhat apprehensive, though, but in a surprisingly familiar way. Whenever I booted up new software for the first time, I’d always get a little nervous, worried that something might go wrong. Maybe my device didn’t pass the system requirements as well as they should have. Maybe the installation had gone wrong.

Lots of little worries.

At the moment, that anxiety was multiple several fold, given that the software (technically, wyrmware) in question was inside my mind.

Though Greg had told me the wyrmware came with a manual that would tell me everything I needed to know, he’d also given me a basic run-through of what I needed to do to get things started. In addition to that, he’d given me a goodie bag filled with useful doodads, as thanks for being one of Wyrmsoft 2.0’s first users, though this wouldn’t become important until later.

Anyhow, using Wyrmsoft 2.0 was surprisingly simple.

It was just a matter of saying three words.

Alright, I thought, here we go…

I spoke the words inside my mind: Open Main Menu.

At those words, a light blossomed in the darkness of my perceptions. The light was accompanied by a GameStation’s start-up noise and the feeling of my consciousness recentering from my physical body into a mental copy. All around me, the darkness melted away. A new world was filling my head with its space and light.

At first, there was no color, just endless whiteness, with me, standing in the middle. Apparently “Genneth in his work clothes” was now my default form. But the emptiness lasted only for a second. A blue spurt appeared overhead. It quickly expanded, pouring down on all sides like water flowing down a dome, painting my surroundings with the image of a boundless, midday sky. Tranquil clouds appeared, drifting across the limitless blue. Diaphanous aurorae formed around them, shimmering like sculpted glass. The ground gained texture and solidity. In a moment, I found myself standing on dark, polished stone, covered in a film of water that spread out to infinity. I felt the ground push up against my feet as the gravity finally kicked in.

“Mr. Genneth!”

Turning, I saw Andalon pop into existence right beside me.

“What is this?” she asked.

“It’s what Greg and I were working on,” I said. “I have a Main Menu now.” I smiled.

The crystals appeared a couple seconds after that.

As Greg had explained, his wyrmware was more than just a world-building tool. It was, as he put it, a general-purpose mod to Wyrmsoft 1.0 that added some much-needed quality-of-life improvements.

Wyrmsoft 1.0 was Greg's term for our “default” settings.

“You know what the problem with these abilities of ours is?” he said. “They don’t have a GUI. They don’t even have a terminal for crying out loud! So, naturally, I made one.”

My Main Menu wasn’t just a pretty place to stand in. In it, the myriad mental abilities my transformation had given me were made tangible. With Greg’s wyrmware, I could interact with them the same way that I could interact with apps on my console’s home screen, except in three-dimensions.

The first crystals that formed were mirror-plated cubes. These appeared midair about a yard or two from where I stood, in a cluster that hovered above the ground, oriented with a vertex pointing downward, around which they slowly spun. All but two of the cubes were translucent, like ghosts of themselves. The largest cubes were at the cluster’s exterior, where they were an arm’s length to a side. The cubes got smaller and smaller as they moved further inward, until they became little more than sand grains arranged in a curving lattice. The lattice moved every couple of seconds, as more and more cubes appeared in the center, all of them unfathomably tiny.

Doing what Greg had told me to do, I reached out with my hand. I could make the cluster move with just a thought. I sifted through the cubes as I wished. The cluster would gyre about, small cubes becoming big and big cubes becoming small. I focused on the two non-translucent cubes, bringing them to the cluster’s outermost shell.

“Oooh,” Andalon cooed, “that’s pretty!” She turned to me. “What is it?”

“My worlds,” I said.

The two cubes that weren’t translucent corresponded to the two worlds I’d constructed so far: my mind-office(s), and mangrove-clock world. Each displayed snapshots of their contents on their faces, enabling me to identify them at a glance. Accessing one was as simple as bringing it up and touching it. Making a new world worked the same way: just touch a blank cube.

Once the world-cubes had settled, my Main Menu filled with the sounds of wind chimes. Bipyramidal crystals trickled down from overhead. Starting a yard or two above the spherical cluster of world-cubes, they formed a kind of atomized chandelier.

Andalon pointed at them excitedly. “Are those…?”

“Yep.” I nodded. “Those are the souls.”

As Greg had put it, other than the demonic threat, the big problem with uploaded souls and mind-worlds and doppelgangers was the sheer disorder of it all. “There are no clear delineations,” he’d said, “the trigger conditions are ambiguous, yadda yadda yadda.”

The Main Menu system addressed this.

“Whereas Wyrmsoft 1.0 forces the user to orient themselves and figure out how things work, Wyrmsoft 2.0 will give you—and, hopefully, everyone else—the ability to easily utilize and organize your mind palace and all the powers that come with it.”

Instead of ghosts simply appearing to me at random, now, there would be a method to the madness.

“When a ghost appears,” he said, “you’ll get a notification, and you can immediately recenter your consciousness into a customizable encounter area called Daydream Alley. From there, you can choose whether to seal the soul away—like you did with that poor Frank fellow—store it for later, or begin interacting with them, and if you choose that third option, Wyrmsoft 2.0 will automatically create a mind-world for them to use for their afterlife. It’s super convenient, and you won’t have to worry about any ghostly surprises or the uncanny valley of not knowing what’s real and what’s just in your head.”

Really, it sounded phenomenally useful, and I couldn’t wait to test it out.

Much like the world-cubes, a quick glance at a soul crystal let you know the status of its inhabitant. Those ghosts that I had awakened and interacted with had soul crystals that glowed with a soft, pale gold light. Some of them, like the ones belonging to Markus or the Plotskies, were clustered together; that indicated that the souls within them were currently inhabiting the same world.

The awakened soul crystals made up only a tiny fraction of the chandelier overall. Most of its crystals held souls I’d yet to interact with, indicated by the swirling, silvery clouds that filled them. These were the ghosts that had yet to awaken, either by their own accord, or by my prompting. A third, even tinier fraction of the chandelier’s crystals were pitch black, like a piece of obsidian.

Those were the souls that had been corrupted, and I’d had to seal away.

The ones I’d lost to Hell.

Aicken’s.

Frank’s.

Last but not least, a small dais rose up from the ground a couple of steps away from the world-cubes. Standing on that, I would be able to manage my doppelgenneths, though, of course, since I didn’t currently have any doppelgenneths in action, there wasn’t anything to see.

“Open ,” I said.

To my delight, a little window popped up, just as Greg had promised.

Creation

Doppelgangers

Souls

Thin Worlds

Multiplayer [Beta Version]

Settings

User’s Manual

Credits

Suggestions / Report a bug [Beta Version]

Return to body

Here, Creation included all the god-modding abilities that came with running a world inside my head. I could use that feature to create whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. I could even preview worlds I’d made from the comfort of my Main Menu, without having to step inside them.

“Whatcha gonna do now?” Andalon asked.

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

“I have my project to work on,” I said. “I’m going to try building a world—one just for me.”

Hopefully, this would take my mind off the facts that there were more than one Angel, and that Andalon was God or whatever.

Walking up to the sphere of world-cubes, I sifted through it until my two worlds were up front.

Andalon pursed her lips. “Wha?”

I glanced back at her. “I’m gonna try to make more stuff.”

“Ooh! Ooh!” Andalon bounced about excitedly. “I wanna come! Andalon wants to come!”

“Then, come on,” I said, with a smile. I tapped my ill-fated mangrove-clock world.

Light erupted from the cube, flushing everything with white.

— — —

Andalon and I sat next to one another on a double seated version of the comfy reclining chair from my mind-office(s). The chair floated high above the clock-inlaid, leafless mangrove jungle rising up to infinity before us.

Andalon peeked over my shoulder once more. “Are you gonna do something yet?”

I held a copy of the User’s Manual in my hands, currently in the form of a document on a console. The Manual came in several versions; I’d chosen the simplest version (the “Heavily Diluted” Version), so as not to overwhelm myself. It was my first time reading it, after all. As I read, I began to get an inkling of just how much effort Greg had put into Wyrmsoft 2.0.

It was unreal.

For starters, he’d uploaded into himself the entirety of the DAISHUmaps database. As a result, the default option when making a New World was Our World, a near-perfect 1:1 recreation of the real world. He’d used the Imperial Geographic Society’s copious digital records as the basis for his simulations of plant and animal life, along with a helping of mathematical models for population dynamics, predator-prey interactions, and genetic drift.

The richness of his inner life was… astonishing. It was as impressive and finessed as my beasteaten infinite mangrove-clock jungle world was, tawdry, discombobulated, and crude.

“Mr. Genneth…” Andalon grumbled.

I set the User’s Manual down on the seat. “Alright, alright, I’ll do it. I’ll do it.”

I reached out with my hand in a dramatic gesture. “,” I said.

The chaos froze. The pangolins by the mangroves’ roots ceased their wanderings. The bejeweled pendulums dangling from the tree branches stopped mid-swing. Flocks of soap-carving gryphons halted midair.

Next, I summoned the Creation Menu, pulling it up with two words and a pointed thought.

“,” I said.

The window that appeared in front of me was an almost identical copy of the menu I’d used in Greg’s voxel world, only filled with even more detail. Thankfully, the wyrmware sensed my intent, and immediately pulled up the option I was looking for:

Purge

With a sigh, I reached out and pressed it. Tendrils of pure, white non-substance exploded out from the back side of the menu screen. In an instant, they grew impossibly large, and then lashed out at my world like the arms of a squid seizing its prey. Their mad flurry erased everything they touched.

“Bye-bye!” Andalon said, waving her hand. “Bye-bye silly stuff! See you later!”

In mere moments, everything was gone, leaving only a white void that dwarfed Andalon and I with its immensity. You’d think the emptiness would lash out and snap at our legs as they dangled over the edge of the seat.

“So,” Andalon turned to me, “whatcha gonna do?”

“Wait for it…” I said.

A window popped up in front of us.

Enter World Name (This can be changed later):

Despite Andalon’s bubbly suggestions (“The World”, “The Good Place”, “The Neat Place”, etc.), I eventually managed to settle on a name:

Lantor

The window vanished, and another took its place.

Set Level of Metaphysical Naturalism (“MN”). (If unsure, set it to “Occasionalism”, or better yet, go read the ****ing User Manual.)

Andalon stared at the words for a moment, and then leaned toward me and gave me a troubled expression.

“Those are… big words, Mr. Genneth.” She hid beside me. “Scary.”

“They just look scary,” I said. “Mostly.”

I’d discussed this with Greg. The MN setting was a sliding scale that controlled the extent to which your world would develop over time according to its own facts and rules, provided it was running. (You could always pause a world until you next returned to it.) At one extreme, you had Occasionalism, where nothing changed in your world unless you, as its creator, had either allowed for it or otherwise preordained for it to happen. Entities would follow their pre-assigned paths like a monorail down its track. Characters wouldn’t age, wars wouldn’t start (or end). Resources would return to their prior, unused state after use. Technology wouldn’t change, politics wouldn’t actually accomplish anything (only as a feature, rather than a bug). That vain, condescending jerk you programmed whose behavioral repertoire consisted of sleeping in an inn, drinking mead, and wandering around town all smug-like, insulting people he passed would still be doing those things in those places even after a billion years had passed.

At the other end, you had full-blown MN, which meant that the world would develop realistically over time, following whatever rules you’d given it. So, unless you specified otherwise, resources wouldn’t respawn—and specifications had to be done on a case-by-case basis. Life-forms would age; seasons would change (if they had been enabled); wars would be waged, won, or lost of their own accord. AI would govern entities’ behavior, and evolution and natural selection would work their magic on biology, chemistry, language, culture, behavior, and ideas. When MN was fully enabled, things would develop and change whenever you fast-forwarded a world’s timeline, be it by years, decades, millennia.

At first, I considered setting it all the way to “Occasionalism”, but then decided to go only two-thirds of the way there. I figured if I really wanted nothing to happen, I could just put Lantor on pause. There were quite a few other settings of that sort that I had to go through before I could begin world-building in earnest. Fortunately for me, Greg had explained most of it to me himself, and, for the rest, if the information hadn’t gotten directly uploaded into my mind when he’d transferred the wyrmware to me, I could easily find it in the manual.

“Why did you choose the okayshully thingie?” Andalon asked.

“Well…” I sighed. “I figure, if I’m going to be God inside here, I might as well try and actually be involved with my creations. You can’t learn how to do things hands-off unless you’ve already got a feel for how your choices would affect long-term outcomes.”

Andalon frowned at my explanation. Rayph would have, as well—and Rale, too.

“Erm…” I scratched my head, “I need to figure out how to do at least some of this stuff on my own. I need to be more responsible.” I nodded resolutely. “I want to be more responsible.”

To be frank, I didn’t want to see another world abandoned by its god, only for that god to seemingly return at the last minute in the worst possible way. (Hint hint.)

“Mr. Genneth?”

“Sorry, I got distracted.” I shoved my somber thoughts out of the way. “Well, let’s get started.”

After finishing getting the basic settings in place, the actual work of Creation could begin in earnest.

Specify World Shape:

Round

Flat

Polyhedral

Hyperbolic

Diffuse

More Than 3 Dimensions [Under Development]

Other (Please Specify).

I chose Round.

An oblate spheroid with a smooth, completely featureless blue surface appeared in front of us. It was about the size of a watermelon.

Is it more or less like our world (Y/N)?

“Yes,” I said.

Pale wisps spread across the world’s surface, forming clouds. They looked like stringy cobwebs. In a moment, both oceans and sky were fully in place, giving Lantor a lovely, marble-like appearance.

One more message screen appeared after that:

Alright, have fun!

Then it vanished, only to be replaced by a battery of translucent screens, arranged around me like the panes of a bay window. Text, menus, and icons of all sorts scampered across the screens and settled into place. It was enough detail to give even the most obsessive tabletop RPG Gamemaster a heart attack.

“Wowwwww…” Andalon said, mouth agape.

Fortunately, I had read the manual. Well, a bit of it—mostly the stuff at the beginning.

“Let’s start with some land,” I muttered.

A brown light appeared at my fingertips, which I then traced across the center of Lantor’s upper hemisphere, outlining an irregular shape. As soon as I formed a closed curve, naked landmass rose from the empty seas in precisely that shape.

It was Lantor’s first continent.

A prompt appeared:

Problematize your coastline? (Y/N)

After a few moments of hesitating stares, a separate window popped up next to it:

Tip: Hover your finger over something you don’t understand to make an explanatory tool-tip appear.

I did as it suggested, putting my finger over the “Problematize”. A third window appeared:

It makes the coastline look realistically jaggedy. Click here for the math.

I closed the two extra windows with a tap of my finger, and then pushed the “Y”. Instantly, the smooth, almost blobby-shaped coastline of my continent became jagged and realistic looking, just as the tool-tip had promised.

“This is amazing…” I muttered. This was how you went about building a world. It simply blew my previous attempt out of the water.

“What now?” Andalon asked.

I spent a moment in thought, and then answered, directing my thoughts toward the Creation menu.

“Swamp,” I said, thinking of the marshes at the edge of Elpeck bay. Immediately, the brown light coming out of the tip of my finger changed to a grungy, muddy green. I doodled over part of the continent’s fringe, and lo and behold, it turned marshy and overgrown right before my eyes.

I quickly started filling in other biomes, guided along the way by the wyrmware’s helpful suggestions. “Mountains. Oceans. Canyon.”

Andalon watched it all, transfixed.

“Ooh,” I muttered. “How about some floating mountains?”

I doodled them onto my world near the continent’s southern coastline. Shadows bloomed as a flock of hovering mountains appeared over land and sea.

A window popped into view:

Tip: You just created something physically impossible. Unless you specify physics or magic or gods or something to justify these [Floating Mountains], if you ever enable MN, at 50% or more, they will be pulled down by gravity and… destructive things will happen. You can always prevent this from happening by activating the [A Wizard Did It] setting for your [Floating Mountains].

Hmm…

That got me thinking.

Sea serpents. I definitely wanted sea serpents. Now that the world was ending, I would never get to go sea-serpent-watching in the Strait of Édrug. (We were planning on doing it next year, in celebration of Jules’ high school graduation.)

That was the historical name for them. In truth, they were actually related to monitor lizards, not snakes, which explained their distinctly lacertine appearance.

I decided I’d add them to my world, to make up for that.

Andalon let out a surprised yelp as a window popped open, displaying exactly what I’d imagined. It was almost like a real-world sea serpent, but I’d opted for some pizazz in the form of a mane of fins running down its back, as well as stubby little remnants of claws jutting from its paddles.

Andalon bounced excitedly in her seat. “It’s kinda wyrmy!”

I pressed the button and released my creation into my world’s seas.

“Wait…” I muttered.

I needed people!

“Add humans,” I said. I pursed my lips in thought. “Oh, and anthro-pangolins.”

I started placing settlements on the continent with careful taps of my fingers. I could zoom in on my world by waving my hands to either side as if I was opening curtains. That helped when I wanted to be more deliberate about where I put things.

“Oooh,” I cooed, as an idea came to me. I glanced at Andalon before leaning forward toward my world.

I was getting more and more engrossed with it with each passing second.

“You can’t have a fantasy world without a long lost civilization,” I said. “They need to have had super-advanced technology, and magic. They’ll be called the Precursors. And robots! They had robots. Some of them are still around. Ruins and scattered bits and pieces of the Precursors’ magitechnology are found by the people of Lantor, often with great consequence.”

In the oceans, I saw my eyes reflected back at me, glistening with excitement, my troubles all but forgotten.

I felt my eyebrows rise as I glanced at Andalon.

“I think I’m going to have fun with this,” I said.