My experience of memory was very different than when I had been an ordinary human.
Memory no longer faded.
What memories I had of my human past were as clear as they had been on the night my lizard friend sent me here, which is to say, muddled and confused like all human memories are. But every memory formed since I arrived was crystal clear, able to be called up at will, if I could just pick the right way to call it up. Even if I no longer forgot anything, there was still the indexing problem of recall.
And I did not sleep.
Day after day passed. And I never slept, nor did I become tired. I needed no food, though I wished I could eat for the pleasure of it. Sometimes I daydreamed for hours, when I gave myself permission to take, like Marcus, a little time off from desperately learning everything I could about the world and the ways I could influence it.
I sometimes daydreamed of cheeseburgers with the bun charred just right and the meat well done. I dreamed of gyros stuffed with shredded cabbage, slightly burnt chicken, and spicy hot sauce. I dreamed of coffee, rich dark roasted coffee, full of flavor and caffeine, with just enough milk to turn the color hazelnut. I dreamed of beer, cheap Eastern European beers, American style IPAs, and thick heavy German beers from Munich.
I remembered the first time I tasted a good beer, while at university. I remembered the taste every woman I had kissed.
Those days were over now. Physical sensation no longer was mine.
Social contact no longer was mine.
I am not a man who needs a great deal of society.
But I need some. And now I had none, I had nothing but my own mind and the expectant voices of the council members when we met. And they could never hear my voice in return, nor see my eyes.
Eventually I began to speed up time.
At first I resisted the desire to just make everything go faster, so I could get to the interesting parts where there were things I needed to do. The function of the world which allowed me to slow down time could be shifted so that I could make time run faster for myself like a YouTube video. I figured that out almost immediately.
However, I knew I should spend every second I could trying to figure out how to get any small edge. For the first month of my leadership, I actually had time slowed perpetually by half, since it did not cost much spiritual energy, so that I could study and figure things out more efficiently.
But eventually I had read tens of millions of words of supplementary information. The help files were designed so that much of the data could not be looked at unless I already knew to search for it and searching for random ideas grew boring, painful, and it was almost useless.
I feared I was going mad.
I had read news stories about men kept in solitary in prison for most of their lives after they had murdered someone in prison, or engaged in a hunger strike, or otherwise offended the prison guards. It was, for most men, one of the most horrifying psychological tortures possible to be kept alone, isolated from all human company.
I was not in such a bad situation.
I had chosen to be here, I controlled my own time, I controlled the people, I controlled a great deal. But still, I was going a little mad as the months passed without a single direct communication with another person.
So I gave in eventually, and I started speeding time up when I became bored with reading and fiddling with things that didn’t need to be fiddled with.
Mainly I was waiting for archery to complete.
And then I would be waiting for something else to complete. I knew that.
The research system in this world was similar to how the first Master of Orion game played. There were several fields of invention and research, and research points were allocated towards each field separately.
Once a certain amount of work had been poured into discovering a technology or technique, there was a chance that the technology would be discovered on any given day. At first this chance was very small, but the more research was placed into studying the subject, the more likely it was to be discovered in the next day, until eventually it became almost certain that you would discover it.
Also like in Master of Orion, you did not completely control what version of the idea you would discover. For example, if I wanted to develop something like British longbows, the longbow was only one of several developments of the basic bow technology, and there was a random determinant which would decide how, when they invented archery, my elves would make their bows, much like how there were many different ways to make stone axes, each with their own advantages and disadvantages, but the culture in my settlement consistently made them in a specific way.
Once a technology was developed and in use, there were constantly chances for it to be improved, and the use of this technology added a small amount of research points towards the discovery of similar technologies.
Some of these improvements showed up at a constant rate — that meant, among other things, that how long it had been since the last boost made no difference. Each time one of my workers used the technology, there was a fixed chance that an innovation would occur. This chance could be raised if the worker had been ordered to think about ways to improve their job, though giving that order substantially reduced their work efficiency, it could be increased if the worker was highly intelligent or creative — which were separate, but related variables on the character’s screen.
Which made sense to me. Increasing intelligence increased creativity on average, and vice versa, but there certainly were people who were highly intelligent with no creativity, and again, vice versa.
It took a great deal of fiddling before I managed to get the information I had now about the underlying mathematics of how the world worked. And there was in all of these features an important amount of randomness. For example, intelligence did not linearly increase creativity, for example. Instead with every point increase of intelligence, there was a moderate chance that the creativity would increase by a similar point.
Other improvements became more likely the more work was done with them, as experience led automatically to knowledge. It usually made a great deal of sense which one was which.
Finally, there was the option to focus on the technology. I could assign workers to just try to figure out the technology. I did this with archery, telling everyone who was intelligent or creative to try to figure out archery.
This caused lots of research points to go towards what on the subscreen that governed it was called the “long distance Stone Age weapons” tech tree.
According to the city status panel, I got one “unit” of science every day, based on having a thousand citizens without any bonuses to learning. Archery was rated at having a median number of units, as being 5,000 units of science, before it was discovered. So if I simply let my people do their own thing, build huts and the like, it would take almost twenty years before one of them happened to figure out that using a stick and a string to throw small spears was a really good idea.
This seemed rather too easy on reflection. Famously the Australian aborigines, descended from a population of travelers who had bows, had lost the knowledge of archery, and in ten thousand years of separation never rediscovered it.
However when I assigned people to think about the technology, even though they had no bonuses to thinking it up, and there were no libraries with specialist slots for researchers, or the like, each person still added ten times as many points to the research as going about their normal daily activities did.
Now the way that they were assigned to think about archery was roughly by telling them to find better ways to hunt animals, or better ways to kill barbarians, or better ways to make throwing spears.
As a result in tandem with the research going towards archery, I was also developing research towards general hunting skills, towards throwing spears, towards the design of spears, etc. I had popped several minor hunting technologies while pursuing archery, and Marcus was pleased, though not with me, when a better five foot long throwing sp
ear had been developed that could be carried like the old Roman javelins in bundled packages of three.
He had everyone practice with them for several weeks, while also making the men practice switching quickly from using them to using their standard heavier six foot long fighting spears.
This actually was alone a really useful technology.
The amount of extra research points I got from assigning men to focus on archery was not just affected by their creativity and intelligence, which both linearly added to each other, rather than multiplicatively improving the likelihood of making discoveries, the way I had expected. As this was a military technology, experience as a soldier improved how many research points a man could create towards archery, and so did experience as a hunter.
Thus by assigning my best people, who were intelligent, creative, and had hunting or scouting skills to do this, I had made the speed that the research was increasing to be about fifteen times the passive rate. This was increased even more when I started placing my blessing on the most capable researchers once I had filled up the supply of spiritual energy again.
It still would take around two years to develop archery. I just hoped that would be fast enough.
Chapter Fourteen
Our land proved to be very much a four season climate.
I had no way to track what month of the year it was at first — calendars after all need to be invented. That happens before writing in Civ 5 and way after writing in Civ 4. And it was not a Stone Age technology that the elves were allowed to keep or given.
But I could watch and look and see what was happening, and I’d travelled far enough and often enough to have a pretty good sense of what the environment was like.
Where I grew up in California had mostly green plants all year round. And it had warm weather by the standards of everyone who hadn’t only lived in Southern California year round. I was far enough inland that it was dry and hot in the summers, but otherwise, we had two seasons, the hot season and the mildly warm season.
Of course they had it even better on the coast in San Diego where there was one year-round season: Pleasant.
Los Angeles of course has its own single year-round type of weather: Smog — though that was far better when I was pulled from Earth than it had been when I was a kid.
Where our people had settled though had the traditional weather from Northern Europe. Green and blooming in the spring, with rain some of the time. Hot (but nothing ridiculous like 100 Fahrenheit or 40 Celsius, of course) and slightly humid during the summer. Trees with leaves that turned a brilliant gold and then fell off the trees in the autumn. And then modest amounts of snow and ice, but not a Siberian wasteland like Yakutsk or Norilsk in the winter.
Also there were none of the giant, giant piles of snow that Norway has.
On my way home to the States after my explosion, I’d had a connecting flight through the Oslo airport, which was one of the weirdest places I’ve ever been in the world — the Starbucks wouldn’t accept my credit card because it wasn’t Norwegian, but would accept my debit card, even though it was equally not Norwegian.
Which is just wrong at an international airport with lots of people having layovers — I saw a pile of snow right outside of the terminal window that had been collected by a giant dump truck to keep the airfields clear that was as big as a modest apartment building.
I always meant after that to someday spend a winter in a warm apartment in Norway watching the snow flutter down while I drank mulled wine and hot cocoa. Something else “I” would never be able to do, though I very much hoped the “me” still living in the real world back in California did so.
However, it would not be pleasant to live in a country like that. Both Sweden and Norway have particularly low population densities because it was hard to make a living out of the short growing season and often frozen ground in a country that got that cold and snowy, and I liked the idea of being able to pack a lot of elves into my current space. So fortunately it had a much milder climate, with enough snow that there was a 50% chance of a white Christmas, and an almost 0% chance of a white Easter.
My first year, as the leaves had turned their rich golden and reddish autumn colors, and as the land was covered inches deep in leaves, we were attacked by a large band of barbarians, with my hated friend, the prisoner who I showed mercy to, and who then escaped after trying to kill the guards watching him, giving the large robust barbarian chief directions.
Arnhelm, the young scout who had nearly been killed by the wolf, was the one who spotted them.
He was very good with his spear, one of the best, and though he was young, Marcus had made him the new leader of the scout group that Hamali had lead at first.
Once we stopped the bigger scouting expeditions, he had been stationed by Marcus in a little platform we built in a tall tree near the plains to the south on the edge of the area that my influence could stretch. He spent his time in between watching for movement meditating upon killing enemies safely — and he had asked for solitude so that he could meditate efficiently on murder and mayhem, and on my goodness, which was a ridiculous thing to do.
I did get more spiritual energy from him than I did from any of the other scouts sent out to keep an eye on the edges of our territory. I liked Arnhelm.
He was alert, clever, and useful.
And he had been the only elf who was willing to listen to my idiotic command to fight a group of barbarians without any weapons when we were first attacked.
Arnhelm’s alertness gave us a three day warning of the inrushing band, and there were a hundred fifty of them.
That should have been good news: We outnumbered them almost six to one.
So what?
The barbarians were armed with long spears with excellent flint tips, axes hung from every bit of exposed leather, they averaged five and a half feet tall and had huge bulging muscles. And they were a people used to killing and marauding.
We would probably win a straight fight with them. Probably.
At least maybe.
The casualties would be ghastly. And there was a very real chance the elves would break and crack during that big battle, and then most would be killed or captured.
Every elf was irreplaceable. I only had a tiny number of people in a big huge world. They had long lives, and the skills they developed would be part of the strength of my community for centuries. And the population would take a very long time to recover if there was a massive die off.
Based on what I had so far seen, even at an optimal level, I would only expect to see one of child from each elvish woman every five or six years. According to the data sheets on the elf’s race, the event of birth suppressed the hormones necessary for fertility for a period of approximately five years, and even when they were fertile their birthrate was much lower than that of normal humans, for the rather pleasant reason that the elvish women only had a period every three to five months.
However, despite the low fertility and unsettled conditions, there were still almost twenty women far enough along in their pregnancies for it to be visible, including Trilia who had been Hamali’s wife, and who had been pregnant when they were transferred to this world. Two other women had also been pregnant at the time of transition, and all three of them were close enough to their time of birth that it could come any day.
I really liked that more people would soon join our tribe, but I was especially eager to see Trilia give birth, because of the connection that had rather inexplicably formed between me and her child.
Unlike with any of the other unborn children, I could already access this girl’s status screen, and on the minimap there was always a special marker for where she was, and I sometimes would follow Trilia around watching the pregnant woman as she went about her daily activities — she still mourned Hamali greatly and she visited his grave, and sat close to the stone with a carving on it depicting the fight, and next to the sapling that was growing from the acorn planted there.
She would sit a
nd weep.
I had a sense that the unborn child could tell that I was watching them.
During the battle we planned to put the pregnant women far out of danger, though those who were early enough that they could still easily and safely move and use their weapons were going to be part of an extra reserve.
There always was someone in the community who had any particular weird skill that was needed. For example we had a skilled midwife.
I took this as part of Amzlat’s foresight. He clearly had expected this particular group to be translated, and he had shifted the assignments to those great sky temples of Artoran so that there would be a group who would have more survivability than a random collection of elves.
This showed up in little things.
Once Numericus finished his collection of data I had a very good demographics stat page which would respond to every query I gave to it, actually showing me what I wanted to see, instead of what I told it to show me.
It was much, much better than my efforts to use pivot tables in Excel which only were intelligible with a bit of luck and elbow grease. And it was more flexible than the pretty well designed demographics screens I was familiar with from video games which only could answer the few questions that the game designers had bothered to set up for the game to tell you.
All of the women in the community were still in their reproductive ages, and almost everyone was in a relationship with someone else in the community when they arrived.
Perhaps this was normal for the elves, but it struck me as decidedly suspicious, and suggestive that we were being given a group whose population could grow relatively quickly. It also was weird to think how similar the demographic screen was to the early years in the city builder Cleopatra, when all of the immigrants to your city would be young, and then you’d start having children and people too old to work slowly show up in the population, meaning that at the start you had more workers for your population size than you did once the city had matured for twenty or thirty years.
Civilization- Barbarians Page 12