The Elias Anomaly

Three

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Dulcie had not intended to spend the night on the lake island. When she realised that it had got to be two in the morning she was forced to reconsider. It would take her maybe an hour to put the island into safe mode and retire to her homeworld in the Disc. She made a token effort setting the skybox to a pleasant balmy night time and slept in the homestead on the edge of the ocean.

The problem with something like that was that it could become too seductive, too easy. This kind of thing could not continue. If she found herself transferred into writing stuff for the new Dark Continent expansion project on Odas. If that happened she would be asked to clear her folly and rebuild as something else. The Supervisors didn't like any trainee to overidentify with a single plex.

Even so, as she contemplated taking a walk along the beach at dawn Dulcie had to admit that her little island was a sweet place. Even bearing in mind that its subroutines weren't one to one yet, exactly. This was one of the problems with having access to the God Kit. You got used to every sub-quadrant being completely under your control. It was important to let a quad just run every so often.

For example, it did seem that the light from the sun in the skybox over the island was increasing its refraction over a period of hours. That would never do. The day-night cycle was being thrown off. Probably it was by something she'd written, maybe the routines for the continual fine weather on the island. Maybe if she tweaked it to include the odd tropical squall it might regulate fluctuations in the orrery subroutine.

Of course, she could also just fix the damn refraction so that the sun stayed in one piece with no dumbass lens flare. Some trainees loved lens flare but Dulcie found it distracting.

She checked her wrist tab, she still had about forty minutes before she would have to leave for work. As she was here, and in a contemplative mood, it would be a good idea to take a wander and think about what to do next with her island.

She put on a pair of sandals and left her habidome via the hatch that lead out to the cliff path. The habidome was a wonderful artifact. The friendliest a gigantic, flat plastic ovoid with an entire living space arranged on one floor could be. It was one of those little things that architects and trainees knew about not available to the average player or socialite.

The habidome opened onto a large lounge area. A gigantic three-quarter circle sofa faced away from the entrance took up most of the floor. The sofa's seat was sunken into a deep carpeted floor.

A giant view screen plugged into the ceiling, angled for the optimum viewing experience. Dulcie got good use from the one in her homeworld habidome but she didn't switch the one on the island on at all. She was aware that this folly was a special place, an expensive part of her ongoing apprenticeship in Plex Engineering. The island was beautiful, placid and calming, but it was a work place, just as much as the broken sub-quadrants she fixed on a day to day basis.

Behind the lounge to the left was a kitchen area that Dulcie used for the preparation of sandwiches. To the right of the lounge was a sleeping area with an en-suite wet-room shower. Living in a habidome was the closest thing one could get to having a nest. That was probably what Dulcie found so restful about it.

Taking the long slope down to the white sands of the beach Dulcie looked back. She took a moment to admire the prominent shape of the habidome perched on the cliff above the bay. All things considered it was not appropriate for Odas, not at all, but this folly was currently environment only. She hadn't put a single domicile on the island, no wildlife and certainly no bots.