Child's Play [Text] [Reboot]

>Look around a little bit. Just to see what’s changed and make note of it. Then continue your work. If you keep at it you might be able to make something really great!

>Forget your brother and explore the other part of the island. Worrying about him only makes you anxious.

>Shelter the other pond, and spread the molecules to it.
>Look for your brother, and pick up mineral sources along the way
>When you return to the pond grind the mineral sources finely to line each pond.

Callback:
>Make something in the water, that's surrounded in a thin film that protects the inside from the outside and keeps substances it need inside and substances it doesn't need outside. It gathers energy from substances floating in the water. It has a small threadlike structure that allows them to move. And blueprints that tell how it should act and build more of itself.

I drift around and take a quick survey of some of my other favorite landmarks on the island. I find the scars of some of my old building sites, torn down by sibling or time. I go all the way up to the base of the mountains, which look much the same as they were before. The volcano isn’t smoking anymore, its top cold and crusted over. If I look closely, the entire mountain range seems a bit off, like each of the peaks might be a tiny bit shorter. Some masochistic part of me wants to see what Brother is up to, but I tamp it down immediately. Better to see how far I can get before he comes knocking. At the base of the mountains, there are small caves with deposits of some interesting minerals I haven’t seen before. As much as I hate to disturb the crystals in their natural habitat, I snap off a sample from each one of them.

Then I fly over to the edge of the island, looking out over the shore of the infinite sea. Well, not so infinite. The edge of the neighboring island used to be beyond my range of vision unless I actually went out over the water, but now I can catch the faintest glimpse of it from shore. They must have had another eruption over there, spewing out magma to expand its borders. That island used to be tiny and boring, but maybe one of these days it’ll be worth a visit.

My cove is still mostly intact, though parts of the cliff edge have crumbled down into the water. The sandy beach is just as it was, but the water is a degree or two cooler than I remember. Even though it’s exposed to the sun, the moderating amount of such a large amount of water prevents it from retaining much heat. It’s almost as cool as my little pond now, which makes me wonder if I can ever extend my little experiment into a bigger body of water.

That reminds me - how are my molecules doing? Even though I’m moving through time normally now, I still feel a stab of anxiety at the thought of leaving them alone in the world for much longer. I take a sample of seawater, for comparison, and then head back up to the pond to see if anything interesting has happened in my absence.

Everything’s still the same as it was before, but I’m glad to see the pond is maintaining its higher temperature. The molecules are moving a bit faster now, snapping into place and breaking down again. Sometimes they associate as a single strand, in which case the configuration is transient and short-lived. But when two strands stick together and fold into random shapes, that’s when they have the best luck with eventually splitting apart and attracting new building blocks to rebuild the double-stranded shape they had before. It’s still painfully slow to watch, though. Remembering the crystals, I decide to grind them into a fine powder and use them to line the edges of the pond to see if the extra minerals will make any difference. I also scoop out a shallow depression next to the pond and dump my seawater into the mini pond, deciding to compare the two to see if my molecules could ever be transplanted.

The compositions of the two waters are surprisingly similar, but there are some differences. The seawater has more salt, for one, and more other types of minerals, even some little oily bits that cluster together as if afraid of associating with the others. The freshwater lacks these things, but makes up for it with other types of complexity. I transfer a bit of pond water to the salt water, and the molecules seem perfectly happy there as well as long as they’re under cover of the roof. In fact, some of the molecules get caught between the bits of the oily matter, which re-forms around them to trap them inside.

This gives me an idea. I wrench myself away while it’s still easy and rush down to the beach, grabbing as much seawater as I can carry. I have the brief and silly thought that, to an outside observer who isn’t Mother or Brother, I’d look like a floating orb of water right now. It’s a struggle to juggle the water while digging out a deeper bed for my pond, and I’ll admit I lose some into the planet’s thirsty crust. By the time I’m done, the pond is a bit wider and twice as deep, and has a salinity approaching that of the ocean.

I get to work, actively recruiting the little oily bits and convincing them to surround collections of molecules, coaxing them into position until they form spheres. It’s easiest to do with a kind of hybrid molecule I find in the water, with one a long skinny end that wants to hide away and a smaller bit that’s just fine in the water. If you get enough of those together, they suddenly decide that being all laid out in a sheet is too stressful and they’d really just prefer to close up and make a circle around whatever happens to be near them. If “whatever happens to be near them” includes a bunch of my replicating molecules, then all the better for it.

Enclosing the molecules puts more of them closer together, initially enhancing the rate of their reactions. As a bonus, I notice that they even start floating over to the sunny area of the pond and don’t break down immediately, the fatty covering protecting them from the damaging effects of the sunlight. After a while, though, they use up all the building blocks inside their little bubbles, and the rate of the reactions stalls. I try making more of them, atom-by-atom, which is such a boring task that I quickly abandon the whole enterprise. I thought this game was supposed to be fun…

I tweak the structure of the fatty envelopes a little, making them a bit more loosely organized, until any molecule from the outside that gets close enough to indent the membrane is suddenly sucked inside it. Problem solved, for now. My molecules have their building blocks, and the reactions restart, making each bubble a collection for an ever-growing amount of replicating molecules. I watch with barely-contained glee as they swell larger, larger, until - pop! The biggest ones start to split apart, instantly reforming into two smaller spheres. My concentration is broken for a moment by a faint rumbling noise in the distance. I look up, and notice with some annoyance that the sun is flickering again. It’s hard to tell due to the sped up time messing with the pitch of everything, but it doesn’t really sound like the volcano erupting. Should I check it out, or keep doing what I’m doing? Everything’s at a bit of a delicate stage here.

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