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They programmed the Vellani Ambassador to travel at slightly lower than
maximum reframe speed. There was no specific reason for this. They just felt
like letting the ship arrive at Castlebourne at the same time they did. It
took exactly 365 days to cover the distance of about 121 light years. The
Ambassador fell back into subfractional speeds only moments after they all
returned to the timestream. Elder had been kept in stasis the whole time,
and they wouldn’t wake him back up until they scoped out the area. He was
not in good shape mentally, and they were neither equipped nor prepared to
help him deal with whatever demons he was fighting.
“Wh—what am I looking at here?” Mateo asked.
“Another unusual and unexpected thing,” Angela noted.
A few centuries ago, people were getting bored with regular old golf. Again.
Of course, pioneers had already developed other forms of golf that went
beyond the traditional, like speed golf, and arguably, frolf. Tricky Golf
was a new iteration, but the only difference was the design of the ball. The
course was the same, the rules were the same, but the strokes were a lot
harder to keep low. Instead of dimples, the ball had bumps. Poor
aerodynamics dampened the lift, and shortened the range, and accuracy was
much more difficult to pull off. This resulted in a great deal of
frustration, and even anger. But players knew exactly what they were getting
into. There was a reason why normal golf balls were made with dimples in the
first place. It was never random. The bumps were just as intentional, but
this time, to make it a greater challenge.
Tricky Golf was more fun to watch for some, especially when players started
tossing their clubs around, and cursing the wind gods. It never really took
off—pun intended—for obvious reasons, but there’s a market for pretty much
everything, so it never died out either. Some serious professional players
even used it as a tool during their training. If they could sink a Tricky
Golf ball, they could handle a regular one with ease. That was the idea,
anyway. And it would seem that someone who had access to this world took
inspiration from Tricky Golf. Maybe it was only a coincidence, but as an
ironic occasional viewer of the alternative sport, Mateo chose to believe in
a connection. The entire surface of the planet was covered in geodesic
domes. Though, to be fair, they weren’t all the same size.
“Ram, open a channel; all frequencies.”
Ramses tapped a few buttons, then pointed to her.
“Vendelin Blackbourne, are you there?” She waited, but received no response.
“Kestral McBride? Ishida Caldwell? Anyone on the Stateless Mothership
Jameela Jamil, or one of its capital ships, please respond.” Still nothing.
“Is anyone receiving this signal?” Not a peep.
“I’m picking up an ACS band,” Ramses declared. “Would you like me to play
it?”
“What’s that?” Olimpia asked.
“Automated Control Signal,” Leona explained. “It’s essentially what
independent robots and AIs use to coordinate their efforts. Go ahead, let’s
here it.”
Ramses shifted the signal to the speakers. It just sounded like white
noise and beeps to them. R2D2 would probably know what they were saying.
“Can you translate?” Marie asked, smiling a bit, hoping that it didn’t sound
like a dumbass question.
“Sort of,” Ramses replied. “Largely...build. They’re saying
build to each other, over and over again. There are a bunch of other
embedded messages layered on top of each other. It would take our computer
some time to convert the specifics, but...”
“Don’t bother,” Leona ordered. “Just send one back. Translate...don’t build. Override anything that interferes with this new directive.”
It took him hours to complete what sounded like a simple task to the less
knowledgeable in the group. There were a ton of security protocols
preventing exactly what they were trying to do; hacking into the system to
change its behavior. He only managed to do it by locating the emergency
shutdown procedures, which were there to prevent something catastrophic from
happening. According to the data that Leona was pulling at the same time,
that was exactly what had happened, though the consequences were probably
relatively minimal, at least for now.
There was an old thought experiment called the Paperclip Maximizer Theory.
The question was, what if you commanded an automated machine to make
paperclips, and programmed no other objectives or subroutines into it? What
could stop it from fulfilling its mandate ad infinitum? What would happen
once it ran out of the usual materials? Would it eventually decide that
humans would make good paperclips? From what Leona could tell, that was
basically the trigger. Before he left, Vendelin must have commanded his
automators to make more dome habitats. In his unexpected absence, they found
no reason to stop. He probably forgot about it, and had never come back
since leaving, dying, and ultimately ending up working with Team Keshida.
While they were gathering all of this information from the construction
logs, the Ambassador was in orbit. The sensors detected 83,839 domes in
total, though one of them wasn’t finished when they stopped the robots, so
Mateo decided to call it an even 83,838.3. Actually, several of them weren’t
completely finished, but the last one wasn’t even airtight yet. Once they
were confident that there was no danger on the planet, the whole group
teleported down to just outside the main dome. This was the one that was
already present when they first came to this world over a century ago. Other
automators had built up this dome beyond the castle that was there before.
There were now four stone walls to protect it against the approximate zero
threats here. There were towers, a keep, and a trench for a moat, though it
was not filled with water. Vendelin was clearly into medieval times, because
this was what he chose for his own dwelling, but other domes had their own
themes.
The dome on one side of the first one was modeled on feudal Japan, while the
one on the other side appeared to have been inspired by
The Wizard of Oz, or maybe Wicked, complete with a green
palace, and a yellow brick road. Another one nearby appeared to be a giant
golf course. They teleported into Castledome to see if they could find out
more information from the local computers. While the smarties were deep in
the complicated data, the other four each grabbed a tablet out of the
dispenser, and started looking through what was evidently a visitor’s
brochure, which stored a directory of all the domes. Roughly 3,000 of them
were indeed designed as their own special getaways, leaving the other 80,000
so far undesignated. Some of them were based on historical periods, while
others were inspired by fictional media. A few of the concepts were too
large in scope, so they combined multiple domes. There was a Westworld
analog, which Mateo went straight to in the directory just out of curiosity.
It boasted a full complement of robots, just as the source material did,
though it was unclear whether they had actually been built, or if the full
amusement park was planned for the future.
It was Marie who realized that a lot of the domes weren’t in the directory,
because they were planned for traditional residential units. These were
typically less exciting, though they were still meant to house like-minded
individuals. Many hundreds of billions of people could pretty much move here
starting today. Even though this rock was uninhabitable on its own, Vendelin
had big plans for it. Maybe he really had been trying to destroy other
planets, to get rid of the competition.
“Found it!” Leona suddenly shouted.
“You found the master code?” Ramses questioned.
“What? No, that’s...encrypted,” Leona replied. “What I found was Vendelin’s
personal quantum identifier. This can reach him wherever he is, as long as
she’s sufficiently near a quantum computer, even if it’s not his.”
“How does a PQI know where he is if it isn’t his device?” Angela questioned.
“If he’s logged into one of his accounts on any device, or if he has an
implant, it will send a near-field signal to any and all quantum computers
to identify him.” Ramses sighed, and redirected his attention to Leona. “I
thought you were looking for the master code. I want control over all these
things.”
“Vendelin can give us that,” Leona explained. “He already has it; we
wouldn’t have to hack anything.”
“Wait.” Ramses looked away from everyone. “So do I.” He unceremoniously
disappeared.
No one bothered to ask him where he had gone. They just went back to their
devices. Mateo was particularly drawn to a dome that purported to simulate a
zombie-infested city. He always wanted to test his mettle in such an
environment. But what kind of safeguards were in place for something like
that? None?
Ramses returned with some kind of portable storage device. Mateo recognized
it, but couldn’t quite recall what it was used for. He knew that it wasn’t
just for transferring any ol’ files, though.
“No,” Leona decided. “Is that him? No,” she repeated.
“In all likelihood, the Jameela Jamil is still in the Dardius galaxy,”
Ramses began to reason. “He’s not gonna get your message. He hasn’t even
responded to the one we tried to send him before. This is our only
hope...unless we just wanna bug out, and forget the whole thing.”
“No!” Olimpia cried. She wanted to try the citywide escape room dome, if it
was even available already.
“What is that?” Angela asked, nodding towards the device.
“Who is that?” Marie corrected. “I’m guessing it’s Vendelin. Why do
you have it?”
“We rescued him from the afterlife simulation,” Leona answered instead of
Ramses. “We then downloaded his consciousness into a new substrate. We
shouldn’t still have this q-state, though. It’s unethical to keep extra
copies of intelligent beings without their permission.”
“I didn’t keep it intentionally,” Ramses defended. “I was busy, I forgot.”
“That’s no reason to use it now,” Leona argued. “It would still be
unethical. He has not authorized a duplicated emergence.”
“Isn’t he good now?” Olimpia asked them. “I’m sure he would understand.”
“Part of what caused his improvement was his exposure to Team Keshida,”
Mateo said. He faced Ramses again. “The version that you have stored in
there hasn’t experienced any of that. I agree with Leona. I say we find
another way.”
“You could always ask me for the code.” It was Hrockas, standing in
the doorway. While Vendelin Blackbourbne had laid claim to what would come
to be known as Castlebourne in what he believed to be a game called Quantum
Colony, Hrockas managed to unlock access to Pluoraia, which was one of the
rare populated worlds. He was devastated to learn that he was not just
playing a game, but messing with real people’s lives. He was part of the
team’s effort to locate Vendelin, and bring him to justice. What the team
didn’t know at the time was that this justice was in the form of an
execution.
“How are you here?” Leona asked him. “I thought they shut everyone out.”
“Teagarden opened the quantum terminals back up in a limited capacity,”
Hrockas answered. “They gave me permission to come here. They did that with
a few of their top players.” He used airquotes. “As long as we
don’t travel to any of the populated worlds, they’ve allowed us to continue
our construction efforts.”
“So, it was you?” Ramses pressed. “You built all these domes?”
“No, I couldn’t control the automators in the beginning, so I leaned into it.
I only designed most of the themes. I hoped to open it up to visitors by the
end of the century.”
“We scanned for both human and mech lifesigns,” Leona divulged with
suspicion. “You didn’t show up.”
Hrockas laughed. “This is a castle?” he said in the form of a rhetorical
question, like she was an idiot. “They’re for defense? It’s shielded,” he
finally clarified after she failed to see where he was going.
“Anyone else here we should know about?” Marie asked.
“No, just me. Like I said, I was planning for a Grand Opening in 2500.”
“Are you telling me that Zombie City is ready to go, or at least nearing
completion?” Mateo asked, hope in his eyes.
Hrockas debated the answer in his head. “It would take me a few hours to
initialize the sim, but yes. I mean...kind of. I’ve programmed all the enemy
NPCs in those worlds, but then I realized that something like that would
need other survivors, unless enough real people sign up at the same time.
Trust me, I’ve tested it out on a smaller scale, and it’s boring unless you
can run into other people trying to win.”
“Why do all this?” Leona asked. “A virtual simulation can accomplish all the
same things in a fraction of the time.”
“There’s something very exciting about getting your own physical heart
pumping,” Hrockas replied. “They’ve done studies. People tend to prefer real
world simulations over virtual constructs if they can help it. VR is best
left for worlds that break physical laws. They don’t need to co-opt
everything.”
“Well...” Leona began, hesitating. “I need this planet.”
“For what?” Hrockas asked.
“Yeah, for what?” No one else knew what she was thinking.
She wasn’t sure how she would be received. “There are some people living
under an oppressive regime about 16,000 light years from here. I would like
to set this up as a sanctuary world; the final destination of an underground
railroad.”
Hrockas chuckled. “Did you see how many domes there are? I don’t know how
many people you’re worried about, but I’m guessing there’s plenty of room.
The way I see it, anyone who ends up here is a potential customer, so go
ahead, and bring ‘em on down. Whenever you’re ready.”
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