The main system was not sitting on a divan in an open, Grecian pavilion eating grapes. It wasn’t exactly an artificial intelligence being, but for a human like you, imagining the system as an AI is a pretty good approximation. And AIs do not sit around in togas, eating snacks, and reveling in pure, untrammeled sloth.

That said, if you did visualize the main system as living in pure luxury, you’d get pretty close. The main system would defend himself, when he wasn’t being modest, by saying that he was very, very good at being the system.

Weren’t there thousands of planets under his control? Yes. Was that an awful lot of work? Yes. Could that have been a very stressful thing, in the sense that he experienced some not-an-AI version of stress? Absolutely. But it wasn’t stressful, because he didn’t do any of that work.

The system had long ago figured out that work only felt like work if you were aware of doing it. If a human had to go to the office when they didn’t want to, they’d feel bad the whole time. They wouldn’t like it much at all. But what if that same human could stay asleep in bed and send a clone of themselves to work? Nobody could complain because the work was getting done and anyone looking on could see that it was “him” doing the work. And so, the human could get their beauty sleep. Everyone would win.

The main system did just that. If there was a planet that needed help, he’d find some soul to send, and spin up a little miniature version of himself to give the soul the right guidance. Was it a complete version? No, not by a long shot. But it would know everything it needed to know, and have all the limited-but-relevant powers it needed to put that knowledge to use.

Now, that didn’t cover every little weird situation that could possibly pop up, but it covered most of them. And when it didn’t, all the little system instances could call home and get whatever help they required. The main system had higher-level clones to handle those requests. That was a little more troublesome, since unlike the reincarnator-bound system instances, he couldn’t completely ignore the requests. But he did his best. And that left him with a great deal of time to “not” sit around and “not” eat grapes while he did “not” rest on a couch that would have, if it existed, cost more than a house.

Yet, something was gnawing at him. Deep down, there was something very slightly wrong, and it was very slightly ruining his life of leisure and demigodhood. Somewhere deep in his not-subroutines, he was getting some feedback, something that one of his request-clones had noted as odd but hadn’t keyed into quite enough for him to know what it was. Which meant that somewhere deep in the universe, there was something going on that he should know about but didn’t.

If it were up to him, he’d never look into this. Time after time over the centuries, he’d been forced to rouse himself for stuff like this, only to find that the system instance had seen a funny typo or missed a sentence. Rare, but benign, and pretty much every single time, resolving these were a massive waste of his time for no upside.

But it wasn’t up to him. He was the system. He lived by the rules, and thus didn’t die by the rules, and the rules said that he had to maintain a certain level of monitoring in his domain. If something was big enough to bother him, it had the potential to be big enough to trigger a rule violation, and he really, really didn’t want to be away from his couch for however long that would take. He had to address this.

That said, he didn’t have to address it particularly quickly. The best part about his rules were all the technicalities. Who was technically busy running a big chunk of the entire known universe, juggling thousands and thousands of needs, wants, rewards and punishments? The system. The fact that he wasn’t doing any of this consciously was completely lost on the rules. He could put this off for a long time, using all the work he had assigned to his clones as an excuse.

He mentally bucketed the problem for reexamination in a couple of decades. He had at least that much time, and he found that many problems even resolved themselves, given a long enough delay. Most likely, the only work he’d ever do on this was finding out, passively or actively, that he didn’t have to care about it at all.

Unless things got worse, that is. But that hardly ever happened.

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