Well World
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The Well World is a fictional planet in Jack L. Chalker's "Well of Souls" series of novels:
[edit] The Well of Souls series
- Midnight at the Well of Souls, Del Rey, 1977 (ISBN 0-7434-3522-2)
- Exiles at the Well of Souls, Del Rey, 1978 (ISBN 0-7434-3603-2)
- Quest for the Well of Souls, Del Rey, 1978
- The Return of Nathan Brazil, Del Rey, 1980 (ISBN 0-345-28367-8)
- Twilight at the Well of Souls, Del Rey, 1980 (ISBN 0-345-28368-6)
- Echoes of the Well of Souls, Del Rey, 1993
- Shadow of the Well of Souls, Del Rey, 1994
- Gods of the Well of Souls, Del Rey, 1995
- The Sea is Full of Stars, December, 1999
- Ghost of the Well of Souls, 2000
It was constructed by an ancient alien species known as the Markovians who predated the existence of the current Universe. They were the first and only intelligent species to arise in the original universe and developed immense levels of technology that allowed them to manipulate reality on a basic level. They constructed layers of machinery miles beneath the surfaces of their colony worlds that responded to telepathic commands in a manner very similar to the Krell Machine in Forbidden Planet. Their localized omnipotence went better for them than it did the Krell, but eventually the Markovians developed a sense of ennui and incompleteness that they were unable to fully understand, let alone develop a solution for. The Well World was eventually constructed as a means of trying to overcome whatever flaw in themselves was stopping them.
The Well World is a computer roughly the size of Earth with a crust of normal rock, water and air over the surface making it resemble a normal planet. The computer is responsible for "simulating" an entire new universe superimposed over the old Markovian one. The surface is divided up into large hexagonal regions each with an independent and often dramatically different climate, native to a new species of intelligent life that the Markovians designed. The southern hemisphere was devoted to relatively Terrestrial environments with oxygen-containing atmospheres and the northern hemisphere was devoted to more exotic and variable environments (often with non-carbon biology), with an enormous wall at the equator keeping them separate.
The Markovians travelled en masse to the Well World, used the computer (called the Well of Souls) to translate themselves into members of the various species living on it, and then after residing in that species' "hex" until the species' viability had been confirmed they would be teleported out to colonize an appropriate planet in the new universe. In this manner the Markovians started their technological and social development over from scratch, this time using thousands of different approaches in the hopes that once they achieved their old level of technology again one of their child species would know what to do with it. Humanity was one such created species.
The Markovians have all passed through the Well in this manner (with one or two possible exceptions) but the ancient Markovian colony worlds scattered throughout the new universe still sometimes had functional teleportation machinery that would inadvertently snare individuals and send them to the Well World. These individuals would be automatically transformed into randomly selected species on the well just like the Markovians were, but without Markovians running the operation new species were no longer being created or sent out to other planets.
In later books a human scientist named Zinder developed a technology that allowed a human-built AI named Obie to remotely interface with the Well of Souls and change local regions of reality without initially realizing that this is how the reality-manipulations were being done. Zinder and Obie were ultimately lost but human governments later reconstructed part of his research and developed the Zinder Nullifier, a weapon that simply "blanked" the region of space it was targeted at. The Nullifiers were a vital weapon in winning a war of species survival against extragalactic invaders, but when a Nullifier was accidentally used to erase itself from existence it caused an unrecoverable error in the Well of Soul's programming. An expanding region of the universe began going blank and the Well of Souls ultimately had to be rebooted to prevent it from being irreversibly damaged, causing the Universe to end and be recreated.
