Daniel Dean on a mechanically simple but interesting object found in the buried space drill ruins

Ian Reilly has a genie's worth of wishes:

any or all would be much appreciated:

-a mechanically simple but interesting object found in the buried space drill ruins

DOWNBALL

This is the simplest thing I can think of: a ball that determines what down is. It has three grooves, like it was cut in half three times along different axes and reassembled.

Turning one segment determines which direction is down, affecting the immediate gravity for 100' in a sphere centered on the ball. Turning the ball to face in a particular way before rotating its parts gives you the ability to point down in any direction. If you fall and hold the ball then the gravity shift moves, centered on the ball, but if you fall without the ball your gravity corrects when you leave its sphere of influence.

Turning another segment affects how light or heavy things in this radius are, not changing the direction of gravity but its pull.

Turning the last segment attracts or repels things toward the ball, with the ball being its own gravity. It also roots your footing immovable (so long as you're on a surface where down is going) like the Blob from the X-Men.

All of this is written in simple to understand visual language, for eyes of a long dead kind of being, in a language no one should be able to read without crazy magic or thorough study. It's all easy enough to determine through experimentation, though.

After an individual uses the ball 1003 times they will have accidentally solved the puzzle ball and it will cease to work. I does however open. At its center is a miniature floating world, who will orbit you and revere you as a god. There are powerful scientists and sorcerers on that world who will do your every whim, and leverage their science and magic against your enemies for as long as this world survives. If it dies in your care, its inhabitants go to heaven, a.k.a. you, and you are haunted by one billion ghosts and lose your fucking mind.