Chapter 5: Vulnerability

“It’s not fair!”

Delta shouted alone across her natural landscape of a realm. Away from the crowd, she no longer felt anxious. That just left more room for her anger to boil

Since she reset the realm yesterday night, the place was clean of buildings. She changed that at a thought. Her usual city manifested within the seemingly endless world of hers. Then, right next to it, another city spawned, then another.

Delta was pissed, and needed more than just one city as a stress-reliever.

As the tall edifices rose all around her, she quickly began to dwarf them. Still in her shorts and shirt--green and yellow like the colors of her hair--Delta grew up and out. Her body rose high above the towers, but she had no patience. All while her form expanded she was elbowing buildings over and crushing their remains under tread.

‘A two to one ratio. That’s it! Not enough!’, she thought.

Delta hit a mile in height fast. Her ruminations stoked the anger which had her increase her growth rate in turn.

‘Why must my fantasies be stifled like this? There’s no way that’s all they could do. They should've been able to do 16-1 at least!”

She took a booming step over a few blocks. The crumbling textures under her soft sole served only to fuel her anger, not quell it. She burst up to 5 miles in height instantly. As her form settled again, the ground of her realm quaked and countless blocks disappeared underneath kilometer long feet.

‘Look at me. Stepping on these empty shells. I might as well be walking on a beach. And if I want to populate my city?’

Delta lifted her foot and stomped down on a pristine swath of the current virtual and empty city. Her foot swished left to right to smash a crater clearing about as wide as a welcome mat. She lifted her foot and settled it to the area’s side as it filled with those shape-made NPCs with sphere heads and cylinder limbs. They walked around, uncaring of the giant tan woman shadowing them.

She spoke aloud now, her thoughts slipping past her lips.

“What do I get? The denizens of my realm to destroy? You worthless fucks.” said Delta, speaking aloud now.

Her foot settled to the side of the area.

“My sole just whisked right over your heads, and you didn’t even run. You can’t fear it. You can’t fear me. You don’t even react! Look at you, stumbling around. While a giant, a fucking ‘god’ looms above you. How am I supposed to be immersed like this?”

She raised her foot and stomped them out in a few quick motions. Seconds before her sole would’ve crushed them, they poofed out.

“I. Hate. This.”

That area was cleared, and she doubled in size again. By now, her 10 mile self crept into an adjacent city. Her toes steamrolled skyscrapers in their brief rest. It only took a moment before she raised her foot again. The cities near her began to populate with NPCs. The buildings, too, became rife with them.

“It’s not even me that’s the issue! I could write some behavior code to make NPCs cower, to flee, to scream. To act intelligently and naturally to the force of nature I am! But no, a human can fuck 30 people a day here in Paradise, but if *one* person wants to crush some realistic people, that’s too much! Too violent. Too obscene! I can have sex dolls, but not punching bags. How fucking wonderful!”

She brought her foot down over more than a mile of city and clenched her toes into the earth of her realm. Her ground simulations were realistic in their own way, and splits in the land crept out from her foot’s impact like spider webs.

Another thought had the streets get populated by vehicles. Buses, models of the autonomous kind in Newer York City, ran through the streets filled with those NPCs of hers.

“I can’t even make you get off at stops, or try and flee the windows.” she said. Delta brought a toe down on a convoy of the things as well as the surrounding block.

She was a city destroyer, but didn’t feel like it. Anger still thrummed at her head. She appeared in front of a yet-untouched city of hers at 100 miles in height. She raised her foot and covered the entire thing in her shadow. A ping entered her head, and she opened her headclip interface to see a message.

‘Warning: approaching current realm complexity limit. To be considerate of other Paradise players, please reduce the amount or detail of objects and entities in your realm.’

“Fuck off.” she mouthed.

A thought dashed the private-holodisplay away and she brought her foot down on the city. Her sole fell upon the metropolis. The tops of buildings began to crumble. She almost felt a bit of satisfaction as the realistic physics of building destruction just tickled her sole. She closed her eyes to savor this moment, then stepped down onto grass as a loud buzz interrupted her pleasure.

She opened her eyes and saw that she was back to her old size. Her feet rested on an empty landscape now. Paradise had a dynamic soft-cap on realm complexity. The computer farms were a shared resource, and they served more than just Paradise. When Paradise usage was high, realms had to be more constrained in their demands, else they got reset.

Delta was angry beyond words. She designed her cities and buildings herself. She couldn’t have the real ones. She could easily recreate the Nexus for that fantasy of hers, but the buildings there, as well as any real world ones were forbidden to be remade in private. No Leaning Tower of Pisa for her to smash: even getting too similar with the model prompted an error that precluded rendering.

Now, because everyone had flocked to Paradise to enjoy the first day with time-dilation added in, Delta couldn’t even appreciate stepping on a city of her own. The physics of it was too complex at this moment with everyone lounging in virtual manors or playing group games in other realms.

The woman with circuit-patterned hair grew up to a paltry 50ft in height. She summoned up a simple city on the fly into her realm, picked semi-random from her list. Her feet crushed against the street lined with NPCs and buses, but she paid them little mind. Instead she walked up to a building so smooth and shiny she could see herself in it.

Delta stared at her yellow-eyed face. Seeing herself quelled her anger and her expression grew glum.

‘It’s just not fair. I could create entire continents if only given the resources.’

To prove the fact, Delta held up her palms and looked down. She made a chunk of shrunken landmass in her clutches. It looked as though she dug her mitts into a green planet, perhaps an older Earth, and tore up a chunk of the terrain. It rested gently in her light-brown hands.

Delta put her gifted imagination and design skills to work. The landscape came to life with minutely raised expanses of forest. She could almost see the treetops flutter from the soft exhales of her nose. She smiled at the power of that for a moment, before remembering that having to *breath* was enforced here. They didn’t want people feeling too “inhuman.”

But, what was human about holding a continent in her hand?

She formed a few patches of gray next. Each one tiny gray blemish was a detailed city, though without any NPCs or buses or the like. She also stopped at three, not wanting to hit complexity cap again. She squinted, trying to make out even a single speck of them. No such luck. One couldn’t have super senses here. Another possibility denied by the rules of the system.

Still, this was tantalizing. She imagined how she’d look from down there. Her face would be their sky: they could maybe see one eye at a time, if even. She began to smile. Delta balanced the terrain chunk carefully in one hand. With her other, she hovered a tan finger above one of the cities: a mountain and a small forest were caught in the shadow too. This would definitely trigger the complexity cap. Yet, it was tantalizing all the same...

‘Fuck it’ she thought. Delta brought her finger down on the mini-continent she made. As her digit made landfall, she gasped. Surprisingly, the realm didn’t reset. She didn’t even get a warning. Still, something happened as that swath of landscape mashed into the whorl of her print. She had never seen it before, and it distracted her from the thrill of her own destructive display.

In the reflection of the building at her front, she saw the buses and NPCs moving about stutter.

Her realm had lagged.