The Elias Anomaly

Twelve

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"Oh this is beautiful, really, very nice work," Dulcie said. She was examining a market stall that groaned under the weight of various fruits and vegetables.

"It should smell more," Joseph said. "Can we get on with this?"

"You think that this fruit isn't scented accurately?" Dulcie asked, puzzled, she bent over a basket of apples and inhaled the faint apple aroma of their skins. The balance seemed perfect to her. In fact, these were probably pre-made apple assets. Grant hadn't changed them at all.

"No," Joseph said. "Not the fruit, this city, to be authentic it should stink of open drains."

"You're being facetious, of course," Dulcie said as they resumed progress down the street. "You're mixing up verisimilitude with authenticity. Besides, this isn't the real London of the 17th or 18th Century. Its a supernatural clockpunk fantasy setting based on London at some point in one of those eras. It's filled with contradictions and anachronisms for the historian. Not least of which being the presence of demonic spirits animating clockwork automata."

"So this is where I went when I left Dewsmonk behind the department store?" Joseph asked.

"No," Dulcie replied. "This is a folly based upon the plex you accessed from the service tunnel behind the department store."

"One question," Joseph said. "Why this complicated network of tunnels between places? As the user of a simulation surely you should be able to go anywhere and appear at any point in any plex."

"I can," Dulcie said. "My viewscreen can generate point to point tunnels if that's what I want to do. Sometimes you need to trace something, so you fly or whatnot. Sometimes the access tunnels are faster."

"How could they be any faster?" Joseph scoffed.

"The point to point tunnel generator has to open an access window. The window stretches from a coordinate within one plex to another coordinate within a separate plex. Those two points are arbitrary," Dulcie explained. "To calculate all the changes needed to the user session the central processing farm has to do some calculations. It takes about five minutes to get a bespoke tunnel ready. The access tunnels, on the other hand, are predefined constant routes from a point in one plex to a spawn point in another. Even dropping into a folly only takes a couple of seconds to calculate the endpoint because it's predefined."

"Oh," Joseph said. "So what you're saying is that all this tunnel business is a mask for the computer loading something?"

"Just about," Dulcie agreed. "Don't be alarmed I'm locking down this folly."

There was a sudden silence as London town, caught at some point between the Age of Elizabeth and the Restoration, froze in place. Dulcie made a couple of flicks on her viewscreen and the folly terminal rose up out of the slabs paving the market square before them.

"I'm a little disappointed. I thought it would all run faster, or smoother, or something," Joseph said.

"You and everyone else who's interacted with a vastly complicated computer system," Dulcie said. She wasn't paying much attention to Joseph's burbling.

"So what are you doing?" Joseph asked moving round to get a better view of the terminal screen.

"Every sub-quadrant of every plex has a terminal built into it somewhere," Dulcie explained. "It's the point zero for that particular sub-q. At a terminal I can get fast access to all the extended properties of the sub-q. I can access stuff about the quadrant it's placed into and most relevant information about the plex it's contained in.