Chapter 5- Strezza: Finally Moving Under Rules
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“Okay, the girls. I sent five of them off, lackadaisically, 36 hours ago when I first started so that they could gather information as they did their tasks… At the main hideout are the boss and my main contact… So let’s see here… What’s the best move?”

            My eyes glanced at one of my top panels.

            5 Megaunits per hour (5MU/H), 200 MU stored.

            I’ve got 200 MU I can use up to influence my pieces' actions.

            I was able to watch over Lacey because she had called out to God and asked for protection. Thanks to that, it became feasible to create a scrying node that was linked to her soul so that I could watch over her. But now that she was down, the node disappeared and my methods to watch Alfred also disappeared. I could try to create a new node in the vicinity that Alfred was in, but that was too expensive.

            I wish there was some kind of iconography in the area… Wait.

            I pulled up a map of the city Alfred’s body was in and overlaid atop of it the locations of small animals. I found a crow and directed it by drawing a line over to Alfred’s location. Animals without fully established sentience were cheap to influence, the action only took half a megaunit.

            First thing; I need to see what that guy is doing.

            It was tough; I was still getting a hang of looking at the world from the perspective of screens and values, but it was still all too much. On top of that, if I didn’t know what I wanted to see, finding that function was difficult. Creative interfacing with the world was going to be an exceedingly valuable skill.

            The crow flew along the path and landed near a hole in the roof of the abandoned dojo, expanding the crow’s view before me. Which incidentally was another energy-consuming task.

            “WHAT?!”

            I could barely believe the sight.

            “Is he just meditating?! With a dead body in the room?! Dick! At least bury her, you ass hat!” I began frantically bringing up panels. “Come on, come on, what would it take to suddenly make a brick or some beam in that building to fall on his head? I could take him out right here with divine intervention… Ahh. I could take him out with a piece of the sky… But that would take 90,000 MU if I divinely intervene, 126,000 MU if I try to do it through a chain of cause and effect. Damn it”

            “Divine Intervention is extremely expensive,” I recalled God saying, “We’re better off trying to use causality through denizens than do something ourselves.”

            “In this case, creating a causal chain of events is more expensive than just ripping a piece of the sky out… So I guess you could say the sky dropping would be an extreme miracle? But a contrived series of events would be even more so? Ahh, dropping a beam on his head would only be 13MU though… He’ll probably live though. Can I bring up a forecast?” I brought up the panel that told me how likely he was to die depending on where the beam landed. “So this a forecast based on what we know thus far, in other words, a forecast based on Alfred’s body… There’s a lot more question marks though.”

            The systems were doing their best. Because of the difficulties of interacting with foreign properties, the systems were practically being updated as Alfred’s behaviors were observed. What that meant was that if Alfred wasn’t doing something that interacted with the world, we’d have no way of updating his profile. For instance, that fireball earlier? I only got some info on it after he casted it. I did however know all of that fireball’s variables such as speed and temperature and how much energy was used to create the fireball in the real world. Also, since Alfred’s body was of this world, I knew all of the Alfred body’s vitals. The only confounding factors would be modifications he was doing thanks to his own rule and of course, the crux of the matter, the energy consumption rate.

            “Dang. We really are blind to the most important factor… God, how did you even manage to stay sane?”

There were rules. Rules that both God and I had to abide by. One set of rules made it so that certain factors of a denizen’s soul were hidden from us. Three notable factors were their history of incarnation from outside this world, their history of special experiences from outside this world, and their soul’s existential statistics. Furthermore, as a simple causality module, factors that didn’t help causality were things I didn’t have access to. The reason as to why the rules existed?

“We must respect the sanctity of the soul.”

It was ultimately to ensure fairness. While it was a good principle, it did make things harder. If we could get access to the energy consumption rates we could definitely filter out the millions of denizens and scrutinize the highest cost people.

            “I wish Alfred could be as open as my Veloqui Family. But ahhrg! The system can’t interpret what it doesn’t know to measure and it can’t interpret what it doesn’t have permission to interpret! I need to live with that... But at least we have a spy on the inside in the form of the body… I wonder if I could pinch a vein in his brain… What?! A million megaunits?!”

            “We must respect the sanctity of a denizen’s body. Denizens don’t typically want to die after all.” Another memory of God’s words rang in my head.

            “Yeah… It’s good to know there’s protections against just being killed because some God doesn’t like you… But okay, Alfred is meditating. That gives me time.” I flipped back to the girls at the hideout. “Okay, time to get to work.”

 

Hey, sorry, this was meant to be connected to chapter 4, but I screwed up my pasting over. Next chapter are the Veloqui Family characters.

 

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