Chapter Text
Varda, who is also called Elbereth, was in a rush. She had stopped for coffee, and then had been delayed by a chatty acquaintance, and now she was late for her watch on the newly refurbished Arda Project2. The Arda Project was the most ambitious world-building project ever run — well, except for all the other ones, but they were the responsibility of other demiurge deities in other labs. The Arda Project was the pet research of Eru Ilúvatar, Father All-Mighty, and Varda, who may or may not have had Stockholm syndrome, was proud of being His second best star PhD student. She would have hated being the first one, as this was Manwë, and Manwë had therefore the unfortunate privilege of being whipping boy for the whole department. It actually took some skill to ensure Manwë remained Eru’s favorite and therefore the one in the lab with the most fucked up work/life balance. Things were only settling down after all of their jobs had been in jeopardy only a few months before, when some sentient beings in the Project had tried to escape their enclosure — it had been the first time in eons that Eru Ilúvatar had had to step in and do some actual work, and the damage control had been insane.
Therefore, Varda was running upstairs as fast as the non-newtonian dark liquid in her cup allowed, and she would have made it had not some big blundering oaf run into her.
Varda, queen of stars — one of the best terraforming nerds out there — fell down on her ass, cursing, as she was covered in piping hot coffee that had been of the expensive kind, flavored with strange new quarks just released for the season. Her assailant was in little better shape, as he had dropped what seemed like five-hundred pages worth of copies. He was groaning, too, and she would have recognized that voice anywhere, so that she didn’t wait to get a good look at him before bellowing: “Aulë you idiot! Can’t you watch your step?”
After some mumbled apology, Aulë scrambled to his feet and, since Varda wasn’t the resentful kind, she helped him collect his things. Despite his pleas to not help him, she kicked open the door to his office and dumped her pile of coffee-stained papers on a chair. As she threatened him with dire consequences if he didn’t replace her quark-infused drink, though, something caught her attention: a hum, a whirr, a faint noise that she would have recognized anywhere. The noise a simulation machine made when running at full speed. And when she next looked at Aulë, his large frame spoke of embarrassment, so she turned around a corner of cleverly folded space-time and she saw it.
It wasn’t any old simulation machine. This was state-of-the art, the kind you need several grants and two years of groveling to the higher-ups in order to get and then had to share it with twenty other people on the best days — the kind that was built by those who had left academia in order to make big bucks in the real world. Varda, as second-in-command in the local pecking order, was in on all the money-begging, and none had recently gone to Aulë. All thoughts of another coffee and being on time left as pure, unaltered, curiosity bit her. Let Manwë watch alone over the Project for a little more. He could always talk to his eagles if he got bored.
“What,” Varda asked genially, “is that?”
Eru’s name, Aulë was sweating harder than he would in his forge. Varda’s curiosity upgraded itself to the raging raccoon in a dustbin stage.
“You wouldn’t happen to run your own little secret experiment, would you?”
Aulë’s forced laugh would have been enough of an answer, but his very blatant lie finished to tell the truth for him.
“Ha ha,” he said. “No, of course not, I would never.”
Quick as a fox, Varda walked around the simulation machine and checked it out. It really was amazing. It ever bore the Archive logo. The Archive was, perhaps, the single company that had the best grasp on the simulation market. They were also famous for their disregard to intellectual property, which had resulted in their stuff getting banned from some of the more touchy demiurges’ labs. One of the vampire ones had been quite rabid about them for some time.
“What I wonder,” slowly articulated Varda, “is why you would need so much computing power for a sim. Unless this was a crossover…”
Before Aulë could stop her, she opened the control panel and cursed.
“Three universes?! Are you mad? You better tell me what this is about and give me co-authorship if it succeeds, or I’ll rat you out.”
A heavy silence floated for a few instants — eons, in real-world time — until Aulë relented. He asked if Varda remembered the time the second gen sentients had tried to break out of the enclosure. Varda looked at him, replying he might as well as her if she remembered the day he had nearly been kicked out for meddling with some sentient designs.
“You see, it got me thinking,” said Aulë. “The whole second gen rebellion was only started because Melkor’s ex sneaked into the Project, calling himself Annatar, and goading the first gen into making magical rings that could hack into the mainframe. So I thought, why not fix it by getting rid of him before he could do harm?”
Varda scoffed. “Unless you can build a time machine that would work outside the enclosure — which no one ever has ever managed, these things can’t exist in our frame of reference — and kick his ass away from the lab before he sneaked in, you can’t.”
“That’s what I thought at first. But then, I had that thought. By living full time into the enclose, Sauron is now exactly like the sentients we’ve bred there. You and I, even when we’re inside the enclosure, we can’t be fully modeled, because we’re tethered outside. Sauron, well, Annatar, isn’t anymore, since he cut his backlink in order to hide. So we can treat him like any sentient.”
“That,” said Varda, “that is fucking brilliant, man.”
In truth, she was nothing short of flabbergasted. This kind of ideas was exactly why Aulë, despite his past blunders, was still a valued member of the team: he didn’t need to smoke illicit substances (or steal other people’s ideas) in order to get breakthroughs. Varda had always despised Sauron (who, by the way, had been one of Aulë’s undergrads), and she couldn’t wait to erase the little shit from existence altogether. That guy had been responsible for several all-nighters and a budget cut. Hell, she had been unable to go to two big conferences with free food aplenty because of him. He deserved it. But Aulë wasn’t done.
“So at first I did a simple sim where I just removed him, but turns out he had put safeguards against that. That asshole seeded ideas everywhere before he got in, so even if he’s not there it all ends up the same. Just takes a bit longer. So then I tried to tweak the settings around him: more suspicion in some sentients, higher threshold to new idea susceptibility… And I got not one but two civil wars. And still the same ending.”
Meanwhile, Varda started to look around the simulation machine. Damn, the Archive really did have some good tech.
“That must have sucked,” she said. “Is that why you went for a crossover?”
“Yeah. Switching sentients is always tricky, but I remembered Merlin. You know him, we used to share a dorm. His department’s been a mess since their prof went off her rocker sprouting terfy shit and, well, he told me how it’s now basically a game of who will pull off the weirdest alternate sim because it can’t be worse than the original. And, well, their security has been quite lax, so we, uh, we brain-stormed it and thought to kill two proto-birds with one asteroid.”
The simulation machine still hummed and blinked as Varda looked around and prodded it. She finally found the slots where the saves could be plugged in. Three supporting universes out of, damn, six slots available? Her mouth watered at the thought of that much computing power. She wondered if, when Aulë was done with it, she could borrow the machine and rewrite the laws of quantum physics to be even fuzzier.
“These are only partial mainframe saves,” explained Aulë. “Full universes still can’t run on this. I trimmed the saves to keep only the causality trees leading to the situation switch.”
Standard procedure for sims — otherwise they wouldn’t be sims but full-fledged projects. But there was something weird around the character slots, and it took way too long for Varda to realize the LEDs blinked green and not amber. She was, after all, used to LEDs blinking green, because she only ever worked on the Arda Project itself and her own private universe sims were empty of sentients (and therefore had no blinking lights).
“Wait,” she said. “This isn’t right. You can’t be using master character saves in there.”
Aulë had the good taste to look embarrassed.
“It didn’t work with partial copies,” he explained. “They made everything buggy. But don’t worry, they’re duplicates. The originals masters are still in the labs.”
Varda rose to her full height, her squinting eyes full of the wrath that those who play by the book feel when confronted with idiots who consider safety rules to be more like hints than absolute laws.
“Aulë. Master saves are sentient. Are you running an unsanctioned experiment on sentients, some of which you pilfered from two other labs?”
“Of course, when you say it like that it sounds bad, but I swear I’m treating them humanely! Look how cosy they are in their new universes!”
“Aulë. You sit on the goddam ethics committee.”
“Which is why you can trust me when I say I’m not submitting them to anything cruel or whatever!”
Varda breathed out of her nostrils, trying to calm herself.
“Aulë. You stole sentient saves from three different universes to chuck them into your own bootleg sim, which is mistreatment in itself, which is why this is only allowed with partial saves that are not self-aware. Can’t you see how your being on the ethics committee makes it a hundred times worse? Do you have a death wish? Because that’s career suicide. I have to report you, man, if only for the sake of the poor things.”
Pacing back and forth did very little to soothe Varda, and not only because of the non-euclidean architecture of Aulë’s office that caused her to switch from makeshift secret lab to copy-laden desk and, a bit further, a traditional forge with an open fire of all things. Thankfully, he had gotten rid of his bioengineering bench when Eru Ilúvatar had caught him building sentients from scratch. The only thing that kept her from pulling at once the literal plug on his latest experiment was the fact that it would be murder to those sentient saves trapped in the machine.
Finally, Varda spoke, and asked Aulë where he had gotten the Archive machine. He gave one of his embarrassed grins, and in turn asked Varda if she remembered her ex.
- Read here for reference. You must, or I'll get out of the computer screen and rub your eyes in until you read it anyway. I swear on my cats that it's funny.