Ctrl+Alt-Reality: Universal Supplicants and the Slimes That Love Them

  Chapter 3

  Thank Goodness for Amoebas

  In the office, where the trio had finally reconvened after a couple days of R&R—following their… ordeal—they now sat clustered in Glen’s oversized cubicle, quietly discussing what absolutely did not happen.

  That’s when Melvin slithered his head around the door hole.

  “Hey Glen,” Melvin said, voice oozing fake casual.

  “We seem to have a problem. Well. Maybe. I think. I got this telegram from the GGG about some… nonsense time-space distortion event or something.”

  He held up a still-smoking index card.

  “Tell me it’s not real and to go away, please.”

  Glen looked at the red card that stuck to the inside palm of Melvin’s hand, then back to his manager’s face.

  “Aw slime! You touched it! Why’d you touch it for?!” Glen said, genuinely perplexed.

  “Now we’re gonna be stuck with this!” He waved his first set of hands at the computer behind him.

  “Look,” Melvin said, suddenly serious. “If this is some xenophobic rant about my physiology, I won’t take this harassment.”

  “Yeah! Harassment! I saw it all and I’m your witness,” the camera chimed in from behind the group.

  “I’ve got a photogenic memory, boss. Don’t you worry.”

  “No! Nothing like that!” Glen shouted. “I’m talking about the Gotcha-Card you’re holding! The moment you read it, it confirms back to them that you received it!”

  He jabbed a finger at the glowing red card.

  “Didn’t you read the email? Or the memo? Or the sticky note Legal put in the pantry?”

  He stared at Melvin, baffled. “We had a whole training and certification on this last year!”

  “Training? No. I asked some poor peon to take it for me,” Melvin said without hesitation.

  “Camera, rewind that please.”

  “Sure thing, boss. Thaaannnkkks!” it whispered, almost lovingly.

  “By the way, thanks for that, Terry.” Melvin smiled over at the currently enraptured project manager.

  “My honor, your honor!” she replied, her owl eyes huge and delighted.

  “How?” Glen asked. “It’s a biometrically-tied video test.”

  “Oh, I have a DNA-matching slime suit,” Terry said, beaming. “It’s quite comfortable once you get used to the acid burns§.”

  “I… I don’t even want to think about that,” Glen said, pressing all four hands to his face and massaging whatever parts still had hope.

  “Okay. So. Umm… Boss?”

  He paused, the title catching awkwardly in his throat.

  “Terry said she talked to you about the issue. The… big one.”

  He glanced toward Terry, who nodded vigorously.

  “Yes! He and I had a very good and productive talk,” she said, beaming.

  “It was direct. And to the point. Such a point. But yes, we talked.”

  Something about the way she said it made Glen start to wonder if her eccentricities were… medical.

  “Good. I guess. So you remember that, um… boss?” Glen asked, trying to sound deferential, but mostly just desperate.

  “Oh yeah!” Melvin said brightly. “That was a delightful conversation. And when I got home, I tried that recipe—delicious, Terry! Good job!”

  “Thank you!” Terry said, giggling like a little girl who’d just earned a gold star in interdepartmental delusion.

  “I remember that conversation too, boss. It was macho-wammo beautiful, if I do say so myself.”

  The camera chimed in again.

  “I sit up at night rewatching it. Just to take notes.”

  “Oh! Wonderful, SpyMe!” Melvin beamed.

  “Can you take those notes and distribute them to everyone? Maybe they’d enjoy it!”

  “Most definitely, Head Honcho-o’-Mine. Thaaannnkkks!”

  The Spy Cam’s voice practically glittered.

  “Oh. My. God.” Glen said to himself.

  “Okay. Let’s try this again.”

  He pointed at the glowing red card still stuck to Melvin’s palm.

  “That Gotcha-Card? It’s about the problem we have there.”

  He jabbed a thumb toward the sim box, which had just finished syncing with his main screen.

  At that exact moment, an alert popped up:

  MYSTERY UPGRADE IMMINENT§§

  Estimated time of arrival: 30 minutes…

  35 minutes…

  33 minutes…

  37 minutes…

  “Okay. Ignore that.” Glen gestured vaguely at the upgrade timer.

  “But the sim—Melvin, this is a problem with the sim. It’s gone sapient.”

  He took a breath. Regretted it. Continued.

  “And that caused its pocket universe status to evolve into its own… band in the multiverse.”

  “What’s music got to do with any of this GGG stuff, Melvin? C’mon, get back on point here, buddy.”

  Melvin gave Terry a look like Glen was the idiot.

  Glen sighed.

  He was already a master at sighing—having earned three degrees in it from accredited universities in two separate alt-universes, each flavored with its own distinct emphasis.

  Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

  Yes. Glen knew the when and the how of sighing.

  And now, he sighed an Oscar’s worth of sighing. Possibly even a Maria’s worth of sighing§§§, too.

  “Right. So the sim is now a universe, Melvin. A real universe.”

  Glen gestured toward the screen, already dreading what came next.

  “And we’re its stewards. Congratulations—it’s a blue marble. Again.”

  He paused.

  “It’s always a blue marble Melvin.”

  “I’m… I’m not ready to be a Steward!” Melvin gasped, starting to hyperventilate.

  “I’m too young! My freedom. I need—my—freeeeedom!”

  Melvin raised one gelatinous arm, which rapidly shifted into a full battle axe.

  He started toward the SimBox with surprising speed.

  “No! No! Yield! No! Bad slime! Bad!”

  Glen threw himself in front of the axe-wielding manager, flailing all four hands.

  “Glen, you’re being insubordinate now,” the camera chirped.

  “I’m going to have to report that. Sowwwy!”

  Glen grunted, still holding back the writhing mound of weaponized executive.

  “Physical acts against other employees too. Tsk tsk,” the camera added, its voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper just loud enough to echo.

  “That’s getting you a pip for sure.”

  “I’m a GOD,” Glen snapped, still wrestling his manager’s gelatinous axe-limb.

  “A member of the Galactic Governance of GODs. I’ll tell them.”

  “You wouldn’t… you wouldn’t become a… a whistleblower!”

  Melvin’s face twisted in horror.

  “Ohhh, I’m going to have to report someone said the W-word!”

  The camera chimed in, now glowing with delight.

  “Sowwwy, Mel!” it squealed, practically salivating at the chance to incriminate an executive.

  Melvin finally calmed down, huffing and puffing, then collapsed into Glen’s seat with a wet splat—the kind Glen knew he’d feel later.

  “Sorry. I kinda lost control there,” Melvin said, eyes downcast, wearing what might have been embarrassment if it weren’t so slime-based.

  Then his posture straightened. His expression cleared.

  Because he remembered something profoundly important.

  This wasn’t his mess.

  It was his worker’s mess.

  He adjusted himself into a mock-executive pose and turned toward Glen.

  “So,” he said to Glen, voice steady and full of smug delegation,

  “this is a fine mess you’ve made. How are you going to get out of it?”

  Glen took a breath.

  “Okay. So I need to run the sim now. No turning it off. Actually—it just won’t. That’s why it’s illegal to reboot it now.”

  He pointed vaguely at the console.

  “Forcing a reboot would cause a reverse Big Bang in that band, and… who knows what that could trigger.”

  “You do, Glen,” Terry said, finally entering the conversation.

  “Umm, yeah§§§§. That was a figure of speech. We don’t want to turn it off, okay? Just—trust me on this.”

  She nodded, then turned to Melvin with a thoughtful smile.

  “Hey Melvin, can you turn your hands into any shape?”

  “Pretty much,” Melvin said, wearing a silly smirk like a five-year-old who’d just discovered pudding.

  “Hey—back to this, please.” Glen waved his arms.

  “So. We can’t reboot it, reset it, destroy it. But we can still configure it, right? I can inject impossible scenarios. Stuff designed to bleed out the rat people I saw.”

  He cracked his knuckles.

  “Then—once there’s no sentient life—we can reboot. Clean sim. Reset. No thanks to Alex, of course.”

  “Duuude!” Alex peeped, mid-munch, crumbs spraying from his snack pack.

  “Alexander Gripsy is a superb employee. I will need to report this character assassination—again—to HR,” the spy cam said from behind him, chipper and accusatory.

  Then, with sing-song glee is said “Thaaannnkkk Yooouuu!”

  “Okay Glen, get to it and report back to me… Actually, have Terry report it back to me. I’ve got a meeting to get to.”

  Melvin waved a hand and slithered toward the hallway.

  “Bye, boss!” the spy cam chirped as he left.

  Then, in a soft, distorted whisper “I love you…”

  ***

  Days passed as Glen worked day and night, crafting scenarios and cross-checks designed to unleash natural disasters and societal chaos. He ensured that nothing—*nothing*—would survive the baffling states this version of Earth would find itself in.

  He couldn’t outright create life. But he could write the rules for how it should form—and exactly what traits it would have once it did.

  And his life—his glorious, doomed lifeforms—would all be:

  ? Aggressive to a fault

  ? Convinced they were smarter than they actually were

  ? Significantly less risk-averse than any sane species should be

  ? And above all:

  desperately willing to do anything for even a whisper of hanky-panky.

  He really cranked that stat through the roof.

  His little rat followers were thriving—slowly building their society into step pyramids and sacrificing wild cats to their chosen triad of gods.

  Alex used them as personal caddies, sending them off to fetch the finest mushrooms from the bathroom tiles.

  Glen really needed to talk to him about *interacting with the natives*, but technically none of it violated protocol. After all, they weren’t in the business of creating inhabited worlds.

  In other companies—which *were*—there were hard and fast rules about that sort of thing.

  But not on Glen’s Earth.

  No, these proto-natives were about to be overrun by the next evolutionary upload: more streamlined faces, bigger brains, and two-legged posture specifically designed to wage war on their own spinal column.

  Glen clicked the fast button—a regulatory must.

  Twenty percent real-time, sixty percent on fast-forward (which flew by centuries in days), and the final twenty on stupendous mode, where evolution happened in minutes. All laid out in his GOD manual, designed to “balance the temporal flow” during SimBox operation.

  His real-time allotment was up.

  The SimBox groaned—just once—then adjusted itself. All else was quiet.

  Alex had surely lost all his caddies by now. Probably dust, buried in ceremonial graves, or both. Time moved too fast now for him to interact with anyone.

  “Dude! Warn a bro before you swap speed next time. I just lost out on a banjo§§§§§ shroom milkshake,” Alex squeaked through his wrist communicator.

  “Set your chronology watch to fast then, Alex. It’ll sync you to the current time for about an hour—then back to fast. Don’t misuse it. I need you to force certain events at specific intervals.”

  “Roger roger, big bro in the sky!” Alex replied, and the comms cut off.

  Now it was just a waiting game.

  Let the chaos unfold. Let evolution sort itself out.

  He’d just sit back and replay the highlight reels the AI handed him—buffered, annotated, and slowed to normal speed.

  Like a cosmic fútbol fan reviewing game film—

  in this case, footage of a species trying to crawl out of its own tailpipe.

  Footnotes

  § – Terry was comfortable due to a lack of nerve endings in the slime suit. Megacorp does not recommend prolonged soaks without PPE.

  §§ – Megacorp does not announce the names of incoming updates due to certain operational environments in which doing so would legally require full hazard protocol and PPE. It is considered safer—and more economically viable—to let everyone guess.

  §§§ – Maria-class sighing is considered lethal above 4.2 sincerity units without proper PPE.

  §§§§ – Like all GODs, Glen does not actually know what happens when you turn off an active universe. The last researcher who tried was lost in transition while attempting to check. No one has gone looking, mostly due to her brassy voice, sour odor, and bad disposition. It was unanimously decided that mystery is better then talking to her in PPE.

  §§§§§ – No one knows where this slang term for “delectable” originated, but everyone agrees they’re tired of it. Earth-2345 (Kyle’s Earth) outlawed it entirely, which inadvertently caused a global war that decimated land and air alike requiring PPE. As a result, geo-political conflicts based solely on slang are now hard-coded out of all simulations. Religion-based wars, however, remain fully supported.