#saving progress and whatnot with a working game manager will be a hurdle. and some of the puzzles are a bit intricate

[ruvviks]

hey if i actually started developing my video game idea would you guys be interested if i posted about it on here

[ecotone99]

[SP] The Misadventures of a Planetary Emissary

To say the job is straightforward would be more or less true. To say it is easy, however, would not be. We run it like a stock market, even if everything isn’t entirely above the table. Prospectors scour star systems in search of one thing: planets with liquid water. Once discovered, these planets then pass on to Inspectors, who conduct a more thorough examination of any fauna on the planet. If any one species seems to be organizing into civilizations, then someone from my department gets sent: the Emissaries. Our goal, in a nutshell, is to give the life forms faster access to necessary technologies to begin advancing their way through their status of a Type I civilization. The tough part is that isn’t strictly legal.

See the thing is, to become a Type III civilization there are many hurdles, both technologic and moral, that a society must pass through without killing themselves. Great Filters, if you will. There’s overconsumption of limited resources, killing of their own species based on aesthetic or ideological delineations, and harnessing nuclear power, to name a few. As a Type III civilization, we are forbidden from advancing any lesser species technologically. Period. What we are allowed to do is to attempt speeding up their moral or ethical progress. If those faster moral achievements lead to technological advancement sooner, well then technically that wasn’t my fault.

So how do you make a market out of this? Well Type I’s love killing each other, and we love to make money on those chances. It’s honestly baffling that eons ago our ancestors were able to make it out of that bloodbath. When an Emissary, or Meddler (as some holier-than-thou ethicists at the Council of Intervention like to call us), tweaks the advancement of a lower civ, Hedgers create currency pools for all types of outcomes.

For example, there was an aquatic sentience whom I was an Emissary for nearly 2 Unified Cosmic Years ago. Their ocean planet had a plethora of thermal vents feeding into it, creating scattered pools of superheated water. These reptilian heathens would use these waters to scald members of opposing tribes, or even members of their own as a form of punishment for Essence knows what. Despite their differences, a few gods and goddesses existed in their culture that were helpful in education. Nkikik, their goddess of salt and mercy, proved to be the easiest form to take to get my message across. A few decades of their solar-years of tweaking later, and I taught them the cruelty that is being boiled alive. Sure, the example I used was to cook one of their food sources in the hot waters. Fine, they then started cooking their food rather than eating it raw, but really I was there to get them to stop murdering each other.

The Hedgers had a field day with that one. There were markets being created for timelines from when the civ regressed, to when they became cannibals, to when they discovered extracting metals from rocks. I would have made a pretty sum on that last market, too. Sadly, intertribal conflict and infanticide got the better of that civ. I’m not sure which one started it, but one of those mongrels discovered the delicacy that was cooking enemy egg sacs. Oops.

My most recent assignment had been this mammalian species from a planet they call Earth (at least they call it that in one of their too many languages). That was until recently. Of those I’ve had the benefit of grooming, this lot was the most frustrating yet most lucrative. For starters, there were several cousin species that were of similar intelligence. To maximize our profit, I worked within tribes of each group scattered around the world. My first goal, and honestly the most fun of the tweaks, was to give them each fire.

There were scattered tribes of larger hominids living in cold areas that were easy to get on board. All I had to do was take the form of a bear, steal a child dying of frostbite, and drag her near a fresh lava flow. Those smart little apes quickly put two and two together and realized that dumping wood on the liquid rocks created fire, and after a bit of time learned alone how to make it themselves. There was another group spread out across vast areas, but again in places where it was mostly cold. Easy. The last group was a bit trickier, as they lived in hotter environments. This was an intelligent yet surprisingly savage crew, that chomped at the bit when it came to the idea of sacrifice, so a couple of flame engulfed offerings later and they were on board.

The Hedgers went absolutely rampant. The benefit of simultaneous civs was incredible for betting pools with most of the money initially being made in figuring out which one would achieve which step or crumble first. But then the ones who came to call themselves Homo sapiens took over. This group was equal parts cunning and barbaric. Able to organize in groups substantially larger than the others, they quickly out-gathered, out-hunted, out-procreated, out-warred their genus cousins until they were the only ones remaining. Seemingly every continent they spread to quickly ran out of its previously existing megafauna. The Hedgers loved me, but I felt I had gone too far. Perhaps my meddling this time caused the wrong civ to thrive, and I prevented us from having another Type III join the ranks.

Then the Council of Intervention, or the COI, got involved. The COI oversees all interventions with younger civs. There goal is to ensure that any interventions that are made do not directly lead to the extinguishing of a civ and in the best case actually allow the civ to progress. Obviously, they are not a big fan of my company to begin with, but hearing that two smart civilizations were extinguished, along with a plethora of less intelligent species set off multiple alarms. Everyone in my company that worked on that planet, from the Prospector to the Hedgers was put under investigation. I barely managed to escape with my freedom by throwing a few Hedgers that had previously irked me under the bus and pleading to a parole sentence of righting my wrong under direct COI oversight. Which of course meant that I had to spend countless Sun-years in the form of actual Homo sapiens on Earth. Fantastic.

By the time the investigations had ended and my parole begun, the humans had already created complex civilizations. They managed to figure out agriculture, metal extraction, transportation systems, aqueducts, and various religious and spiritual callings without any tweaking at all. Perhaps I hadn’t made the wrong tweaks after all. When I arrived at Earth, though, I found their individual civilizations to be disjointed, warring, and focusing more on the here-and-now than I needed to right my wrong in the eyes of the COI.

So I travelled a lot. I met with small society after small society pushing them ever so gently to think more about the sciences, both of the tangible and the intangible. This took off in some places more than others, but by and large these Homo sapiens were proving to be quite curious when teased with the taste of greater knowledge. For a while, progress moved largely on its own with very little effort from me. Sure, there were some societies that crumbled, but others always rose from the ashes. Sure, there were some pretty violent disagreements about what they believed the Essence to be, but that’s to be expected from Type I’s. They were still progressing through technologically, making gunpowder and whatnot despite one cluster of society’s decision to burn a lot of books and stop pursuing science. A little tweaking with that here and there and science came back as popular.

One thing that never left regardless of the popularity of science was that of magic. These apes were just obsessed with the idea that forces exist that can be bent to their uses other than electromagnetism, physicality, chemistry, and gravity. Despite its occult popularity, a great many of their religions detested those practices even more than they detested their own scientists. This led to a longstanding craze of burning usually beautiful women for accusations of magic use. I know it sounds preposterous but these apes loved a good witch burning. The COI saw this as a major moral regression, and forced me to put a stop to it. I bartered with them that this wouldn’t be an easy task for me in the figure of a human to do, so they allowed me to get a bit ethereal with it. A few visions in the night, or sudden bursts of enlightenment in the right people later, and specifically witch hunts were made illegal. Though troublingly the idea of false imprisonment never quite seemed to fade.

Regardless, the COI was very impressed by ending the witch burnings. So much so in fact, they greatly reduced their scrutiny of my comings and goings. As any enterprising entity would, I let a few of my favorite Hedgers know that humanity’s antics were back on the menu, but to keep it discreet. I was going to give them electricity.

It is rare we get a civ this far. To be honest, the games we play rarely end well for our civs, even despite our best efforts. Truth be told, it is just a scary, lawless Universe for these youngster civs, and no amount of intervention can save them from that. So when I had a civ in my fold that was looking close to figuring out electricity on their own, I just couldn’t help myself. Besides, Homo sapiens had always been curious about it. Whether it was static charge or electric eels, they simply couldn’t get enough. In my encouraging of experimentation, I may have gotten carried away and hit one fellow in particular with a bolt of lightning. In my defense, he attached a key to a kite so it seemed appropriate.

The COI notoriously does not have a sense of humor. My lightning antic drew the attention of my Investigative Ethicist who let me know that one more slip up and I would be decommissioned. Permanently. On the other hand, my Hedgers were loving it. They knew the moral development of Homo sapiens was not on par with their technologic advancement, and that harnessing electricity would only worsen the disparity. They assured me that if I were successful in speeding up the timeline, the life-or-death market created would be enough to buy myself out of any COI trouble that could possibly arise. What can I say, I believed them.

Humans began running rampant with this newfound power. Admittedly, I basically gave them the knowledge on how to generate and capture electricity, bending it to their will. The COI completely lost it. Yet another investigation began, and this time the odds were stacked clearly against me. The Hedgers promised me that if I was able to institute an Emissary of their choice to fill my spot, they would be able to bail me out and set me up far away from the reach of the COI. When I considered my options between obliteration and relaxing on one of the few off-grid paradise planets, it was an easy choice. Whether by a stroke of luck, or all my Unified Cosmic Years of Emissary work teaching me the ins-and-outs of charisma and negotiation. I was given one last visit to Earth to induct a new Emissary. One I was able to suggest based on her previously successful track record.

Inducting a new Emissary is always tough. You have to show them not only the civ being tweaked, but also give them a rundown of the entire planet’s ecosystems, so they can understand the ethical (and technological) implications of their tweaks. This is made even more complicated when the civ is this advanced, because there are many, many cultures, religions, political ideologies, and philosophies to understand as well to do the job properly.

We returned to Earth to find that the Homo sapiens had begun to wreak havoc with electricity. They were happily churning through their planet’s natural resources, with no concern for the thick black smoke that coughed into the skies or the darkening of the previously clear rivers and streams. Admittedly, they used this power for some pleasant means, such as communication and lighting, but they also executed prisoners by running a current through their entire body. The barbarians.

It should be noted, at this point, that Homo sapiens look very different from one another. From intermingling with their other hominid cousins, to differences in diet and ultraviolet radiation, there is a much greater diversity of appearance with them than with many other civs I have tweaked. This is an important detail because unlike other civs, when one human mistakes another for someone he or she is not, there is at least an embarrassing fallout that occurs shortly thereafter. In certain extreme cases, the results can be fatal. My luck with the COI abruptly ended when I was in an Earth society called the United States of America, and the personage I had assumed to explain the world to the new Emissary was mistaken for a thief and a vandal. I was arrested.

In normal circumstances, I would have simply left, leaving behind an empty carcass that my consciousness was previously projected into. But the extra level of COI scrutiny meant I couldn’t pull any stunts that would alert these creatures to a presence in the Universe other than their own. So I spent time in an Earth jail. The irony of a Type III entity being imprisoned by some Type I apes was not lost on me. Not for the nearly 2 Sun-years I spent locked in a cell alone. They even put me on what they call “Death Row”, though given what I know about the morality of Homo sapiens, especially those in that part of the world, my guess is it had to do much more with my appearance than any crime I was wrongfully accused of being guilty of.

While I waited to learn of the fate of this body I temporarily inhabited, the new Emissary informed me the Hedgers had come through on their deal. They were already working on intercepting my projection’s return to COI custody, so instead of awaking in a COI holding cell before my obliteration I would awake on Parediz-7-c. Booyah.

A few Sun-months later, the body’s name was called. A couple officers unlocked my cell and dragged me to the body’s execution. They must have thought I was completely insane, because I couldn’t help but find the humor in how I was to be executed. After giving these apes the gift of electricity, they were going to use it to “terminate” me. Oh, the irony. They fed my body a meal of chicken, mashed potatoes, and spinach. Honestly, if I had to eat the stuff these apes call food I would have terminated myself years before. After choking down the vile creation, they led me to a wooden chair with leather belts and electrodes above the backrest. Before they sat me down and did their violent deed, they asked if I had anything to say. If the COI were not watching, I would have opened my jaw so wide that the back of my head touched the nape of my neck, letting forth a gurgling scream as I shouted “Idiots! Idiots! You backwards apes are killing your savior!” in the language of that long lost aquatic civ before exiting the body. Given the scrutiny, I decided for one last attempt at a lesson in morality.

Looking in the eyes of the head of the guards with the steely resolve this species prides themselves on, I spoke: “If killing me today is what you must do, if under the watchful and loving eye of your God you can take my life, then know that you are murdering an innocent man for no other reason than your own lowly prejudices.”

They strapped me in. I wish I could say it was fast and painless, but it was excruciatingly not. I felt the heat of the electricity arcing through the body from its temples down to its ankles. The body’s heart began fluttering and then racing. I couldn’t even prevent the body from letting out a screech as the electrical current caused the diaphragm to pulse in rhythm. The skin blistered as the hair burned, and I began to lose the tether to the body. For a moment, I thought my own consciousness would be extinguished simultaneously. My vision faded to black as I watched a sickening smile creep across the head officer’s face.

When I opened my eyes I saw a familiar purple sunset and emerald waves washing up on shore. A friendly visage floated by and asked me if there was anything I needed to make my stay more comfortable. I thought for a moment back to the unfinished work of planet Earth, the countless humans that needed guidance through a burgeoning age of Technocracy. Then again, that is only one of the countless other Type I’s in need of assistance, and let’s be real. I was never in it for the help anyway.

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