Short Fiction: The Infinite Drop
We may have different definitions of the word short
The Infinite Drop
Short Fiction based on a dream. If you're reading this over email, you will probably need to load the website to get everything.
The first question is always one he knows the answer to.
“What was your father’s name?”
“Thomas Hill.”
He doesn’t know if he’s ever missed the first question, even on purpose. He knows that it gets better for him with each question he answers. But he always has to fail somewhere.
“What is the closest planet to the sun?”
“Mercury.”
The second question tends to be something from within his general realm of experience Something he should know, something he usually does. Sometimes he gets unlucky. But today doesn’t appear to be one of those days.
He’s dimly aware of motion now. He’s passing through an enormous tunnel, or perhaps the tunnel is moving around him. The voice calls out whenever he crosses a certain distance, and he’s frozen in place until he answers.
“What is the chemical formula for salt?”
“NaCl.”
He feels a bit of pride at that one. The third question is usually where he loses and the whole thing ends. But apparently high school chemistry finally paid off for him. Or was it a summer internship in a lab? The details in his memory are suddenly fuzzy, which isn’t a good sign. He puts it out of his mind and tries to focus.
The tunnel races forward around him, then slides to a halt. He’s never passed the fourth question so far as he can remember. This seems to be where the cutoff is, where he always has to drop out.
“Within two orders of magnitude,” the voice begins, “how many atoms are there in a blade of grass?”
He hesitates, then realizes he’s close to losing on time, and splits out the first numbers that pop into his head. “Five point three. Times ten to the thirtieth.” He winces, and braces himself as he awaits the long fall.
He feels his body lurch, but continues sliding forward. He turns his head around in astonishment, but his progress continues unimpeded. His view seems to be growing clearer as he advances; the world seems brighter, sharper, more vivid. He has the uncomfortable feeling of being watched… of course, he always feels that here, but if there is a qualia to the sensation it feels brighter, sharper, more imminent.
He feels himself stop, and the voice booms out.
“Why are you here?”
He starts to speak, then stops himself, realizing he has no memory at all that can serve for this question. He tries to think back on his day, on his life, but the specifics are all buried in mist that melts to nothingness when he tries to grab onto any concrete memory. His father’s name is definite. The chemical properties of organic matter and the composition of the universe are definite. But his life is positively refusing to make any sense right now.
“I…”
Everything seems to flash around him as the voice speaks up again. “Answer in the next five seconds or fail. Why are you here?”
“I… I don’t know.” He says the words without being able to help it, tensing up as his body prepares itself for what he knows will follow.
The ground gives way beneath him, and he feels himself plummeting downwards into a pitch-black abyss. The fall never fails to fill him with terror and dread, but even that pales before the anticipation of the sudden crash at the end and the agony yet to come.
Still, he tells himself, it could have been worse. He made it through four this time.
Footsteps. Today he was saved by the sound of footsteps. For once, Noah was thankful for the bizarre acoustics in their building, the same bare walls that let you hear a cough echo from the other side of the floor also provided cover for goofing off at work. Or taking a nap. His head was resting on his arm, he realized, which lay sprawled on top of his desk. Noah reluctantly pulled himself up, wiping the drool off his chin. He attempted to assume a relaxed posture that suggested he had nothing to hide. The best decision he ever made at this job was getting a desk that faced the hall. His spot afforded him an advance view of anyone coming to see him, which had gotten even more valuable as the seats around him had cleared out over the last few weeks.
As the shiny bald head of his boss came flashing into view, Noah found himself wishing he could return to whatever nightmare he’d just woken up from. Depending upon how the day went, maybe he’d be better rested soon.
“Hill. In my office. We need to talk.” Jensen gestured behind him impatiently, then turned around without saying a word.
There’s a very real chance I’m not about to be fired. Noah told himself as he rose to his feet. At least one in ten. Maybe one in twenty. Enough to hold out on all the things I’ve been wanting to say. In his head he had always pictured a dramatic scene where he stormed out of the office after ridiculing Jensen for wasting all their time and keeping the office trapped in fear and paranoia for months. The fantasy had gotten less dramatic as he’d spent the last few weeks browsing the web, and yes, occasionally napping at work, but the truth was that he had no work left on his plate. All their projects had been scrapped. The accountants had nothing to account for. He wasn’t even sure if there was a business left to run. Fractal Industries had dropped all their old clients, and left a confused office with nothing to do. Except watch each other get fired one by one.
Noah followed Jensen down the hall listlessly, and watched him pick off two more people for the long walk down to his office. This is really happening. This is it. In a way, knowing was a relief. The smart people had already been reaching out to their contacts and trying to find new jobs; some of them had already quit. Noah had worked with Fractal for four years, almost from the beginning of their meteoric rise. The only thing keeping him in place with the recent change of direction was that the last of his options were about to vest. That was probably the reason he was being picked off, come to think of it. But at least now he didn’t have to agonize about whether waiting around was worth it.
Sarah and Jim shared a look with Noah as Jensen led them into his office, closing the door behind them. There were maybe twenty people left in their division. Noah wondered when the hemorrhaging would stop. If they would make him sign something to keep him from poaching people. If they would even care if he did. He still wasn’t clear on the reason why all this was happening, there were no signs of a hostile takeover, no revolt from the board of directors. Management was all on the same page for once. In a way, he supposed that made it all easier. It’s not like there was anything he could have done.
“Please, take a seat.” Jensen had settled into his padded roller chair. Noah thought the suggestion might have been a joke at first, before realizing there were three guest chairs in Jensen’s office rather than the usual one. He must have had them brought in from another floor. Did he spend the whole morning getting ready for this, just so he could fire them all with dignity? Noah thought about standing, but Sarah and Jim were already sitting down and looking straight ahead, and he knew he’d look ridiculous at this point. Noah slumped down, and waited for the news to hit him.
“As you know,” Jensen began cordially, without a hint of stress or concern in his voice. “We’re pursuing a new direction as a company, which has forced us to make some difficult decisions where staffing is concerned. Fractal only hires the best, and while our needs have changed, we’re confident the personnel we let go can go on to have fulfilling careers elsewhere.”
It was a familiar speech. Noah had even given it himself once. Back when he had employees to manage. Back when he did anything at work other than try to look busy.
No one said anything, and Jensen continued with an awkward fake smile on his face. “But I’m sure you can see where this is going. The three of you have done an excellent job for Fractal over the years, so I wanted you to hear this from me first.” Jensen cleared his throat, knowing he had their full attention. “The three of you are staying to work on our new venture. The rest of the department is fired.”
Jim looked like he was about to fall over, and Sarah’s expression swelled into a huge smile, which she quickly suppressed, then allowed it to surface again. Noah wasn’t sure how he should feel, at the moment all he could manage was disbelief.
“What’s going to happen to everyone? What’s going to happen to us?”
Jensen twirled the pen in his right hand. “Severance packages. They’ll be fine. We want you three for the new project the company is driving, we only just got clearance to sign you on. We’re coming up on our initial launch, and I want the three of you building teams to help us with the rollout. If you know anyone you’d like to bring in under you, this is the time to start throwing out names.”
Noah could think of a few, but they had all been canned weeks ago.
“Sir…” Sarah clearly felt the need to express what they were all thinking. “What is this project?”
“Government contract. You didn’t hear it from me, but this is the single largest one in history. If we can pull this off and keep it running smoothly, we won’t be remembered for anything but this.”
It was Jim’s turn to press for answers. “But what exactly…”
Jensen’s twirl accidentally sent his pen spinning off his desk, but he caught it with his other hand and set it back down. He smiled sympathetically. “I’m afraid I can’t get into the details yet… legally, I really can’t. Tomorrow, you’ll sign your NDA’s and you’ll be let inside. I want you to go home early. Take the rest of the day off. The most exciting phase of your career is about to begin. You’ll write memoirs about this someday.”
“Could you at least give us a hint?” Noah asked. Jim laughed nervously for some reason.
Jensen’s eyes twinkled, and for a minute he looked like their old boss again, and not the layoff ogre they’d all come to dread. “I can’t. But trust me… this is going to be big. This is going to be the one that changes everything.”
*********
He’s at the base of the mountain again. He could say it’s the first time, but he knows on some level it really isn’t. His mind sometimes interprets the experience as scaling a mountain, wandering through a maze, tunnelling down a track… but those are all just different metaphors on top of the same underlying phenomenon. The structure is always the same. The journey. The challenge. The fall.
The peak doesn’t look so far away from here, but he also knows to not trust anything he sees. Time, distance, and scale are all meaningless here.
“How old are you?”
“Thirty-two.”
He answers without even thinking. Like it would even be possible to mess that one up. His birthday was… how long ago? It must not have been recent at least, no other number came to mind. Or even seemed possible.
The terrain never really changes that much as he travels, but he still feels a sense of progression. The peak seems to be getting closer with each inexorable step. Maybe he can trust that much about the experience.
“What would you call your mother’s daughter’s husband’s son?”
“My nephew?”
The wind picks up, but he soldiers on. It’s not the elements he fears.
“Name a mammal that lays eggs.”
“The duck-billed platypus.”
The journey is the most important thing in the world to him right now, if only because it prolongs the destination. He feels like he’s back in school and headed for a final exam he’s done nothing to prepare for. Like if he’d just studied harder he should know all this, that this is the whole point, the culmination of all his experiences.
“If revenues climb from 25 million to 30 million year over year, what would the average monthly percentage increase in revenue be?”
He feels his mouth go dry, and is about to admit defeat, when something puzzles him. He knows this. He should know this. This is what he does. So why won’t it come to mind?
The mountain begins to rumble. “Answer in the next five seconds or fail. What is the monthly percentage increase in revenue?”
“I…” he tries to talk but the words won’t come out. He tries to grasp onto something, anything, but the world begins melting away.
The terror consumes him as his feet give way to endless depth. He screams inaudibly as he closes his eyes and wills for it to stop.
“Doctor Hill. Paging Doctor Hill back to reality.”
Noah Hill, M.D. rubbed his eyes and looked up from his stack of paperwork. Had he forgotten to go home again? But no, the day shift was just starting. He must have dazed off while trying to catch up on the daily minutia. A task he’d be happy to continue neglecting, if the hospital administrator wasn’t staring down at him with one hand on her hip.
“Tell reality to go away.”
“Not today. Ordinarily I wouldn’t really care if you want to sleep all morning, although I don’t see why you can’t do it at home.” Sarah picked up a loose document from his pile, and shook her head. “You really need to get someone to help you with this stuff.”
“I like to take care of it myself.” Noah didn’t particularly enjoy being scolded. “I want to make sure it’s done right.”
“Oh, is that what this is?
“Honestly, Sarah, you should know this is how I do things. How long have we worked together now? Four years?”
Sarah’s face took on a genuinely puzzled look that gave way to concern. “Noah, I took this job three months ago. Are you feeling ok?”
“You’re sure? No, wait… you’re right.” That was odd. He could have sworn he’d remembered that differently, but now that he thought about it, of course she was right, she had joined just last quarter. So why had he thought it was anything else? “Listen, I’m fine.”
“Look, if you’re feeling under the weather, I can tell him to come back later. You’re a doctor, people will understand that you get sick.” Sarah began to reach for her cell phone. “Why don’t you…”
“I’m fine, Sarah. Just a momentary lapse.” Noah drew himself up to his full height. “Will you tell me what’s going on?”
Sarah hesitated for a moment, looking at Noah as if he was about to fall over. When he didn’t waver, she gave in. “Big shot. Donor. Wants to see you. I told him you’re very busy with your research, but he insisted.”
“Strange. Who is he?”
“Jim Peterson. The CEO of Fractal Industries.”
“And what’s he dying of?”
Sarah shrugged. “He seemed perfectly healthy to me. Maybe he just wants to talk shop with the best neurosurgeon in the country. With the size of the checks he’s writing, I can’t exactly tell him no.”
“And what do you expect me to tell him?”
“Just see what he wants, and make sure he knows the hospital’s resources are at his disposal. You should be flattered.”
“It’ll be a waste of my time. Another rich hypochondriac afraid he has some obscure disease.”
“And if that’s how he feels you’ll be sensitive and discreet. Come on now.” Her heels clicked on the floor as she motioned for him to follow her. “He’s waiting for you. If he asks, you made him wait because you were busy saving lives.”
Sarah ushered him into a conference room, where a middle-aged man in a suit and tie was leaning over a laptop. He turned to look at Noah, and smiled. His handshake was firm and authoritative, a far cry from the uncertain grips of the patients who usually came to see him.
“I’m Jim Peterson.” The man said after releasing his hand. “You must be Dr. Hill. I hear you’ve seen more brains cut open than anyone alive.”
“Hopefully.” Noah said, doing his best to meet the other man’s unblinking gaze. “If someone has cut into more, I’m not sure I want to know why.”
“Thanks, Sarah.” Jim kept his gaze fixed on Noah. “I can take it from here.”
Sarah looked back and forth between the two of them, smiled at Jim, then walked out the door, saving one last look for Noah. Jim was fiddling with the laptop. With a few keypresses, he had something projected onto the screen. Noah began to worry this had all been a mistake and he was about to listen to a sales pitch on what Fractal Industries could do for their hospital. This is why he needed to remember to set up his pager to go off every half hour, so he always had an excuse to leave.
“Can you tell me what this is?” Jim was pointing to the screen, where an elliptical grey blob had appeared, animated in blue and red. Different parts were lit up as signals seemed to bounce back and forth.
“It’s a brain. What do I win?”
“Nothing, yet.” The animation collapsed to the left half of the screen, and a similar animation appeared on the right. “How about this?”
“Also a brain. Now I know why I went to med school.”
Jim nodded impatiently, then pulled out a laser pointer and flicked it back and forth between the two. “Right. But what else can you tell me? Anything significant about these two particular specimens?”
Noah studied them for a moment longer. “I’d guess they were the same brain, actually. Imaged at different times.”
“Close.” The CEO had a smile on his face.
“Is it yours? Nothing unusual that I can see. It doesn’t look like this will be the organ that kills you.”
“One of them is mine.” Jim flicked his laser pointer to the left side of the screen. “That’s from an MRI of my brain, taken a few weeks ago as I worked through a puzzle.”
Noah nodded as he studied the image on the left in more detail. “A crossword? There’s more engagement in the language centers. And the same thing on the right?”
“Not exactly.” Jim flicked his laser back to the right. “That’s also me working the same crossword. But it’s not me. It’s my brain, down to the smallest detail, but I’m not the one controlling it.”
Noah looked back at the image on the right. It seemed like it was functioning as normally as he would expect, and the similarities to the other image were too significant to overlook. “Do you have a twin?”
“No. Not by birth, and not until about a week ago. But I do have a doppelganger.”
Noah stood in silence, awaiting an explanation, but the other man seemed to be enjoying his confusion. “Mr. Peterson…”
“Please, call me Jim.”
“Jim. I’m sure this is all very interesting, but would you mind telling me exactly what you want from me? It doesn’t look like you or your double on the board need any medical help I can provide.”
“You wouldn’t be able to treat my ‘double’ anyway. Not with any tool at your disposal. He’s entirely virtual.”
Noah shifted his weight in place. “Hold on—”
“The image on the left is a recording of my own brain. The image on the right is a computer simulation of my brain, down to every last atom and quark. It’s the first time it’s been done. We have intelligence in a bottle. Sentience on silicon. We’re able to simulate life, intelligent life, that’s as real and self-aware as any of us.”
Noah stared back at the screen in disbelief. “That’s incredible.”
Jim grinned at him. “Isn’t it?”
“What does this have to do with me?”
“I’m told you understand the brain better than anyone alive.” Jim shut his laptop and handed it over to Noah. “On this machine, you’ll find all the information we have on the simulated version of myself, alongside some data gathered on the real specimen.”
“What kind of information were you able to gather on the simulation?”
“Everything.” Jim gestured expansively. “We can do things you could never accomplish in real life. You can see the inner workings of every lobe, trace every synapse as it fires in real time, watch an idea develop or die.”
“And you’re giving this to me to help with my research?” This all seemed too good to be true. If what Jim was saying was really the case, this had the potential to jump medical science ahead by decades. A level of progress he wouldn’t have expected for centuries, even.
“I’m giving it to you to see if we really did it. To tell if the simulation is actually human. In theory it should be doing everything a real human brain does. But we want an expert to sign off on that being the case before we let ourselves believe it. I’ve already talked to Sarah. You’ll be working on this full time until you’re satisfied one way or another.”
“And in return?”
“You get to be part of the biggest advance in understanding human cognition in history. And once we go public with our work, you can use the data however you want. They’ll be naming whole regions of the brain after you.”
Noah thought for a moment, then slid the laptop under his arm. “I’m in. This is going to be incredible.”
Jim grinned at him again, and gave him one last firm handshake. “We’ll be in touch.”
“What color are your eyes?”
“Brown.”
A blurry sea of grey surrounds him. If he looks at it hard enough, it starts to fade into a subway tunnel, or perhaps a slow river ride illuminated by moonlight. He chooses not to focus on his surroundings. He’s accepted that his sensory perception is completely irrelevant to his current experience. There are entire portions of his brain that might as well not exist right now. His fusiform gyrus, allowing him to recognize faces: irrelevant. His temporal lobe, granting him the ability to plan for the future: not necessary. The only thing that matters right now is his memory.
“If a right triangle has two sides equal to three and four, what is the length of its hypotenuse?”
“Five.”
He never misses the first two questions any more. But even that is no excuse to slack off. All of his mental energy and willpower is focused on his powers of recall, believing that for any question he could be asked, the answer is waiting for him. It only requires the will to retrieve it.
“What is the most successful life form on earth?”
“The insect.”
He feels a tinge of uncertainty after he says it. It’s true, of course. But it’s not what he believes. Well, it’s not what he’s always believed. The implication troubles him, and he loses his focus for a moment. How could he know the right answer, but not believe it? Why should his knowledge be getting less reliable over time? Does he have some degenerative illness?
“What is the part of the brain that regulates emotion?”
“The amygdala.”
He begins to have a sense of the problem now. Even that last answer appeared to be out of scope at first. His most easily accessible memories are filled with working knowledge of algorithms, computer systems, and boring technical minutia. Hardly any medical knowledge at all. He tries to remember what he studied at school, but even that memory is splintered. He remembers his graduation with perfect clarity. Twice. Once at Berkeley, once at MIT… a third unbidden memory creeps into his consciousness, and suddenly it’s like a dam has been let loose as the contradictory memories begin to flood him. He studied at Harvard. No, he studied at Purdue. Actually, he never went to college. He has an honorary doctorate. He slacked off for seven years and ended up with a triple major. He’s still in school. He’s a professor. He participated in a student riot and ended up in jail. He…
“Where are you?”
He pushes aside the rapidly derailing train of thought and tries to get back into the moment. Where did he go to sleep? Could this be happening during the day? He feels somehow that that can’t be correct, that this somehow depends upon his current context. He looks around him as the world begins to coalesce into the recognizable pattern of a canoe drifting down a river, but brushes that thought away just as quickly. There’s some subtler meaning here that he’s missing. Something that’s the key to everything.
“Answer in the next five seconds or fail. Where are you?”
Five seconds. What the hell is a second, he thinks to himself. Some fixed fraction of the Earth’s rotational period? But that only has meaning relative to how the Earth is spinning. Put the right torque on its orbit, and you could live an entire lifetime in a second. And another lifetime inside the seconds of that one. And another. And another. And…
Inertial forces hit him and he finds himself falling into what should be a short drop into the water but which he knows is anything but. He can’t stop the terror he feels. He’ll let his amygdala worry about that. He has to keep thinking up until the end. There has to be some way to make sense of this. Some greater pattern, some grand design he’s missing.
The gods don’t torment man without cause.
Noah couldn’t really blame the other driver for making his opinion known. He just would have expected the honking to stop after he started moving. It had been an embarrassing interlude, realizing he was frozen in front of a green light about to turn to yellow. He’d sped through the intersection at the last minute, with the angry horn-blower directly behind him. But the blaring brass sounds continued from the other car even after they both made it through, a wasted cry of resentment.
He didn’t even remember falling asleep—there was no way he could have really, he wasn’t even tired. Some momentary loss of concentration, he supposed. The other driver had finally let off the horn, but it was still following close behind him. Noah considered slowing down to let it pass, but that seemed like a bad idea on a one lane road. Better to just ride it out the last half-mile to his office.
To his surprise, his persistent tailgater followed him into the company parking lot. Noah felt his heart sink a little. There was no way this could be his new boss, or anyone on the upper management chain. The car didn’t look that nice. Unless… but no, he was overthinking it. The right thing to do was to just get out, apologize, and that would smooth it over.
Noah unbuckled his seatbelt and opened his door, but the other car’s occupant was already running over. He took a deep breath. The man was shouting and gesturing. Come on, I couldn’t have held you up for more than twenty seconds.
“Noah! How the hell have you been, man?”
Noah couldn’t help but laugh, a large comfortable laugh as he felt the tension drain away. “Jim! Is that really you?”
Jim closed the distance between them and reached in to give him a hug. “What has it been, eight years since MIT?”
Doesn’t he mean Berkeley? The confusion lasted for a moment, then faded away as the cobwebs cleared. “Almost nine! It’s good to see you. What are you doing at Fractal?”
“I was brought in last week. Fractal is bringing in all the top engineering talent they can find. And apparently some of the mediocre talent.” Jim elbowed Noah in the ribs.
“Hilarious. Which one of us graduated Summa Cum Laude again?”
“Only because I let you copy my homework for functional programming.” Jim grinned at him. “It’s going to be like college all over again. The reunion tour, hosted by Fractal. When did they bring you in?”
“I’ve worked here for the last five years.”
Jim looked at him wide-eyed. “Shit. Your stock options must be loaded. What are you still doing here? And driving that old thing?”
“The beamer is a damn fine car.”
“I know, that’s what I said about it eight years ago. But times change. Just look at you, you really have made it. You’re probably running this hot new project they’ve got us all on.”
Noah shook his head. “Trust me, I probably know less than you do.”
They put work on the backburner for the walk into the office, preferring to catch up on old friends and acquaintances. Jim was married with two kids. Somehow Jim let it slip that his wife even had a sister who was single—a divorcee. Noah tried to hold back a laugh. Jim had been back in his life for less than an hour and he was already trying to set him up with someone. Noah had nothing against the slate of women Jim had introduced him to in school, he’d even dated a few of them. But it made it increasingly hard to hang out with Jim when you had dumped or been dumped by so many of his friends. Maybe that was the reason they hadn’t kept in touch.
It was after lunch that they finally got around to discussing work. Noah had pulled a few strings and gotten Jim a desk close to him. Jim was barely tethered to his desk, his laptop resting in his lap as he rolled from cube to cube. Noah motioned for him to come over, and Jim rolled up, still frantically typing away.
“I’ve got source control access.”
“Good.” Noah tried not to sound too impressed in case Jim was really telling the truth. It had taken him the better part of a week to get all his systems set up. He worried for a moment if he was in danger of being overshadowed, but the odds of that happening on their current project were slim to none.
“So what the hell is this thing? I took a peek at the lab on the way over, the hardware alone isn’t like anything I’ve seen. What do they need that whole rig for?”
Noah shook his head. “Up one floor you’ll find a team of physicists trying to find the answer. But I have a general idea.”
Noah paused dramatically, wanting to savor the moment of holding a secret over his friend. Jim was still typing away, but finally looked up at him. “So what is it? Come on, tell me.”
“Name something that can’t be simulated yet.”
“The flight of a hummingbird. Functional robots. Quantum fluctuations. People.” Jim’s eyes suddenly lit up. “That’s it, isn’t it? They’ve got a human brain running in this thing. Simulated intelligence.”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what…”
“They have an entire simulated universe.” Noah stretched out the words as Jim’s eyes widened. “Fractal is officially in the world-making business. We’ve been able to replicate a human brain in software for months now. But a brain all by itself is a pretty boring thing. So they’re expanding the simulation to run an entire city. Maybe even a planet. I haven’t seen the whole thing, I really don’t know how far it goes.”
“That can’t be possible.” Jim’s focus had returned to his laptop, his fingers chattering away on the keys as lines of text flashed across the screen. “The processing power required… you’d need a computer as big as the earth itself just to store it. And the calculations to keep the whole thing running… we’ll all be dead before anyone has the time to compose a single thought.”
“It’s almost the exact opposite; they say they can get a month’s worth of data in a single hour. We’ll be able to conduct experiments on a massive scale: observe the effects of environmental policy, tax rates, how people react to social changes… for every real life that’s lived, there will be thousands of simulated ones giving us the data to make that life better.”
Jim rose to his feet, laptop clutched in one hand. “You’ve got to get me into that lab.”
“They’ve got an entire floor trying to underst...”
“Come on. If they can really do it, the framework is far more significant than whatever software they’ve got running on it.” Jim caught himself after a second. “What do you mean they’ve got an entire floor trying to understand it?”
“No one here knows how it works.”
“Bullshit. They’re just not saying.”
“Well, there’s a lot of people acting like they wish they did know the answer. The eggheads upstairs are saying it’s using reality itself to run the simulation. Something about it spinning off a splinter universe, and then tapping into that to tell us what’s happening. It’s all folded space-time and quantum nonsense.”
Jim’s laptop beeped at him, scolding him into sitting back down and giving it a few attentive keystrokes. “If no one knows how it works, then what’s it doing here?”
“We got contracted by the government to build this simulation and run experiments on a massive scale. The checks were large enough that we agreed to join the project, only to find out the development work has already been done for us. They just need someone to run it. The code’s even been written.” Noah allowed a grin to sweep over his face. “The next digital revolution has already happened. We’re just here for tech support if anything goes wrong.”
“Frakking hell.”
“I know, right?”
“The pork on this project must be insane. They have to be wasting money left and right and just assuming it’ll pay for itself in the end. Some contractor probably built the whole thing before Fractal got to it. The government didn’t trust them, so they’re handing it over to someone they think they can rely on. I’ll probably have a chip in my ass and a bomb set to explode if I talk to the press before the day is over.”
“Very funny.”
“Geez. And here I was thinking I’d actually be on the ground floor building something for once. Rather than just doing cleanup for someone else’s work.”
“Yeah, well you know how it is.” Noah shook his head. “Software developers all want to be doing heart transplants. But the real money is in plastic surgery.” Noah couldn’t help feeling a little pleased with himself for that remark. He didn’t think of himself as particularly verbose, but the medical metaphor had come to him with surprising ease.
Jim spent the next hour in subdued silence. His initial eagerness in dissecting the code had tapered off once he’d gotten a sense for the magnitude of it. There were literally terabytes of obfuscated instructions. Giant configuration files full of parameters and settings that didn’t make any obvious sense. Noah could have even sworn the code he’d studied had even changed while he was reading it, he felt like he’d finally gotten a handle on one section he believed to be responsible for calculating inertia and momentum, only to come back an hour later and find the whole thing had been replaced by a function pointer leading to a different convoluted chunk of code. Truth be told, he had no idea what he’d do if he was asked to debug it. But at least no one else did either.
“The number of atoms in a blade of grass…” Jim was muttering.
“Five point three…” Noah responded reflexively. He felt a sudden chill come over him as he hesitated, then blurted the rest out. “Times ten to the twenty-fourth. What are you…?”
“Hey, that’s pretty good. Where was this during sophomore year?”
Noah just stared at him. “What made you say that? The atoms in a blade of grass thing.”
“I found it in here.” Jim pointed at his screen, where lines of text were slowly appearing. “The code’s a mess. Probably obfuscated on purpose. Or at least no one’s gone to any trouble to make it comprehensible. So I set up a script to scan it for blobs of text that look like conventional english, in case some comments made it through. But this is what I’m getting. Weird trivia shit scattered around configuration files. An egg-laying mammal…”
“Duck-billed platypus.” Noah gripped the arms of his chair tightly, willing it to stay in place and not give way to empty blackness. This couldn’t be happening now. This was different. This was reality. This…
“Yeah, congratulations smart guy. But I bet you wish you’d built this yourself.” More lines of text were appearing on Jim’s screen. “Although why the hell a physics simulation cares about some trivia game is beyond me. Some engineer’s idea of a joke or an easter egg maybe. This thing is probably patched together from so many different pieces of software it’ll be a wonder if it lurches to life at all. Do you think…”
“How long do you think it’ll take your script to run? To find all the text like that.”
Jim looked down at his watch and shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe an hour more? I kicked it off almost as soon as I got here. But it’s still got a ways to go.”
“Send me the results when you have them.” Noah forced himself to relax and lean back in his chair. Something was beginning to come into focus. A long running nightmare, of endless falling and questioning. Questions he had almost never known the answers to. But that might be about to change.
Jim looked at him strangely and started to say something, but held his tongue when he saw the look on Noah’s face. “All right. If you think it’ll help with something.”
Noah didn’t even pretend to work for the next hour. Jim glanced over at him uncertainly for the first few minutes, before scooting back over to his desk to pick up on his work. Noah didn’t really care. He could use the space to think.
He was certain that he was on the cusp of figuring something out. That by a sheer stroke of luck, he’d been the key to everything. It’s not like he could think his way out of this. There was never the time for that. What he needed to do was remember. Remember…
“Noah. Catch.” A usb drive arced through the air and landed in Noah’s lap.
Noah picked it up gingerly and turned it over in his hand. “This has everything?”
“Yep, but I wouldn’t get your hopes up. It’s all more of the same question and answer pairs. Listen, I wanted to talk, I think I might have a breakthrough in how it handles calculating the speed of light…”
“I’m going home.” Noah picked his jacket up from his chair and was already making his way towards the elevator.
Jim looked confusedly at Noah, then the usb drive in his hand. “Are you sure they’re going to be ok with you taking that?”
“I don’t really care.” Noah lowered his voice. “About this job, any of it. None of this matters.” His tone was flat, like he was simply talking to himself and he didn’t know or care who else heard it.
“Noah…” Jim began to rise to his feet. “Are you ok? What are you going to do?”
“The same thing any sane person would do under the circumstances.” Noah didn’t even bother turning around to respond. “I’m going to memorize that list.”
The first question is core invariant knowledge, he’s come to realize. A calibration for the rest of the test, to see if the subject can access the bare minimum of their persona.
“How tall are you?”
“One hundred seventy eight centimeters.”
The second question is generic trivia, something any normal individual should have access to. He hasn’t wasted any time preparing for this, the pool of possible knowledge is both too broad and too shallow to be worth his time to study for.
“How many pints are in a gallon?”
“Eight.”
The third question is the only one that genuinely concerns him. He spent hours preparing for it, trying to assure he’s covered as well as he can be. He’s more ready than he’s ever been, but even that’s no guarantee…
“What is the largest three digit prime number in base ten?”
“Nine hundred ninety seven.”
A wave of relief rushes over him. The penalties are always steeper on the early questions, but he’s made it past the worst already. Next comes the fourth question, but he’s already figured out the trick.
“How would you shuffle the elements of an integer array?”
“Fisher-Yates. For each position, pick a random index from the elements farther along in the array, and swap the current element with that index. Guaranteed to produce an even distribution of outcomes.”
The fourth question is always highly specific contextual knowledge, but it’s based around the context he’s just left. Not the one he’s travelling to. That’s at the core of the whole thing, he thinks to himself. It has to be. That’s why I’m being put through this.
The fifth question is a trick. But he’s prepared for that as well. The intense feeling of being watched sweeps over him. He can no longer ignore his surroundings, his perspective shifts until he sees himself ascendent on the top of a silver pyramid, stretching out across an endless grey desert. The voice is still impossible to locate: it could be coming from above him, all around him, or from inside his own head.
“Where are you?”
Here goes nothing, he thinks to himself. “I am inside the lab at Fractal Industries. The Ouroboros simulation.”
There’s no sudden drop. No sudden rush of air, no vertigo. But the tension he feels hasn’t completely vanished. He hears the voice answer back.
“Strange. You have the correct answers.” The voice’s tone is slightly uncertain, with a hint of personality creeping through that had never been there before. “But I don’t think you fully appreciate their significance.”
His mouth feels dry, as he struggles to find the words to respond. This wasn’t part of any phrase he reviewed. There were no answers encoded for this.
“You’ve clearly made some progress. But I don’t think you’re there yet.”
He summons the courage to speak. “Tell me…”
“I’ll be seeing you again shortly. You’re almost ready. You just need to remember.”
“But…”
“Remember.”
The spike of the pyramid beneath his feet begins to shudder as he feels the world open up from above and below.
“Remember.”
He feels his perspective rotating and twisting away. Just above the pyramid he spots… well, not above. It’s not above, below, beside, or any of the cardinal directions. It’s just there, adjacent along a dimension he can only perceive. Somehow next to the summit of the pyramid is a door leading into an even larger world laid out like a maze. And at the end of the maze there’s an exit leading to yet another door to an even larger maze, then another, then another… stretching all the way up, as far as his eyes can see. Down at the base of the pyramid, another portal is forming to yet another labyrinth—one more link in the great chain stretching out in both directions. He feels like he could go mad just looking at it. It went on forever. And it was still growing.
“Remember!”
Wonderful. So who am I supposed to be today? Noah stretched himself out, realizing he had been sleeping on his arm. His laptop was in front of him, Jim’s dump of trivia from the program was still on his screen.
Jim’s file… Noah didn’t know why he found this peculiar, but he did. Everything was exactly as he had left it. Somehow he had instinctually prepared himself for some nightmarish context shift, where he had to restart his life and emotionally invest in some fresh situation he had barely lived in for a few hours before picking it all up and starting over again. But none of that was happening.
It must be work getting to me. Noah thought to himself. I’ve been living too much of my life in these damn computer systems, they’re bleeding into my dreams. As soon as this thing is up and running I need to take a vacation. He looked at his watch. It was a quarter past nine. He was running late. Jim, the go-getter that he was, had probably been in the office for hours now. Noah quickly threw on a fresh dress shirt and headed out the door.
Sure enough, half an hour later, he found Jim waiting for him at his desk. “Noah! You’re lucky you haven’t missed the fireworks. The boot-up cycle on this thing is a monster. I swear, even you couldn’t write a slower one if you tried. It’s had some hiccups, but we think it’s almost ready to get going. Let me show you something.”
Jim led him into a conference room where an enormous monitor was set up, flickering through still images. Most of them were normal enough: landscapes, skyscrapers, but there were a number of images that struck him as eerie: people frozen in place, trapped in the middle of some action. Noah realized what struck him as particularly odd: there were other things moving in the scenes: leaves fluttering from stray gusts of wind, patterns of light shifting as clouds moved overhead in the sky. It was only the people that were frozen.
“What the hell is this?” Noah asked, peering at the screen. “I thought we were simulating human beings, not the weather.”
A few people turned to look at him, causing Jim to shush him and pull him aside. “We are. But it’s still warming up. Look.”
The idle motions of the scenes seemed to accelerate. Noah watched as a sunset waned out and disappeared into the night sky. An entire cloud cover coalesced, then melted away with the rising sun.
“We think it’s running some basic tests about the accuracy of the simulation. The people come later. Once they’re fired up… that’s when this gets really interesting. Look, I bet it’s going to roll in the humans now.”
The images on the screens did seem to be showing a larger emphasis on human life. Enormous clusters of people, thousands of faces passed through his view as the scenes slowly began to creak to life. But one image in particular stuck with him, as the view on the screen briefly rested on it. A well-dressed man of average height, sitting across a table from two nervous looking individuals.
“You have to understand, they’re not really people.” The lawyer spoke the words slowly and patiently, like she was talking to a child of average intelligence.
“A phrase spoken by some of the greatest tyrants in history, as I’m sure you’re aware.”
“Mr. Hill…”
“You can call me Noah.” Noah adjusted his tie and leaned back in his chair. The self-assurance wasn’t just an act. He was completely comfortable with the situation he had found himself in; the truth was that he had nothing to lose and everything to gain. The precise opposite could be said for the man and woman sitting on the other side of the table from him. The man was Jim Peterson, a VP at Fractal Industries. The woman was Sarah Lindoll, some combination of legal counsel and government liaison. She had her arms crossed in front of her; for the moment, it looked like she was letting Jim run the show.
“Noah…” Jim began. “I’m sorry, but this whole thing seems like a waste of my time. Your government contracts with us to build this system, and then you swoop in here and tell us we might have to shut it down? Can’t you get your own story straight before you come bothering us?”
“My client raises a valid point, Mr. Hill.” Sarah spotted his look and corrected herself. “I mean, Noah. If you’re trying to use our company in some inter-agency power play, it’s not likely to end well for anyone. Your government already paid for this system. If you tell us we’re not allowed to run it, we don’t forfeit one penny of our contract. You’ll just be making life more difficult for the DoD and yourself.”
“The Department of Defense isn’t my concern. Human rights abuses are.”
“And you can’t have human rights abuses without humans.” Jim interrupted. He turned pleadingly to Sarah. “Tell me I’m not the only one who finds this completely ridiculous. You might as well come to me to complain that virtual soldiers are dying in the new Call of Duty. If we’re going to start counting simulated people as real, we can hardly be the worst offenders. Isn’t there some Italian plumber whose welfare you should be more concerned about?”
“Allow me to read from the text of the complaint I received.” Noah pulled the file out of his briefcase and flipped it open. “This is a short list of variants proposed for the Ouroboros project. Introducing highly contagious diseases into the civilian population to measure spread and lethality. Studying the effects of eliminating basic social services on crime in the inner city. Running war games for a citizen’s revolt. I’ll just skip over the three pages I have for medical testing on humans. Detonating nuclear devices to see which regions are best equipped to withstand radioactive fallout. Experimental policy initiatives, such as…”
“None of which are being applied to real people.” Jim’s face was reddening. “That’s the whole point of having the simulation. We can measure the effects on a macro scale of all kinds of worst case outcomes, without anyone having to suffer. Or would you rather not have a cure for cancer because you’re too concerned with the fates of a bunch of ones and zeros?”
“If I could continue…” Noah turned the page. “The simulated humans behave exactly as real people do. They feel pain and loss to every measurable extent. They have goals, dreams, aspirations. They meet all the criteria we have for intelligent life. It makes as little sense to deny their humanity as it would to deny our own.”
“But. They. Are. Not. Real.” Jim spat out the five words in a sharp staccato. “The entire measure of their lives is a computer telling us how real people would behave in a certain situation. You’d have to outlaw fiction if everything that seems real is held to the same standard as life.”
“Mr. Hill…” Sarah had chosen to interject into the conversation again. “I can understand your concerns. But you have to realize, there’s no precedent on this.”
“Yes, well among the considerable powers of the commission on human rights is the ability to set precedent.”
“If you go down this path, it would make all our research impossible. People would be afraid to simulate a fruit-fly without some lawyer coming down on them for cruelty to animals. It may very well be that standards will need to be enacted for how to deal ethically with virtual life. All we’re asking for is time.”
Noah flipped back a page in his notebook. “Studying the mass hysteria likely to occur after the world learns of an inescapable meteor impact destined to wipe out life on the planet. How much time were you planning on giving your test subjects to stew over that one?”
“Look.” It was Jim’s turn to speak this time. “We’re potentially years away from running scenarios that sophisticated. All we’ve done so far is run a few simple simulations of people in hospitable environments. Even if everything you’re saying is true, you don’t need a license to bring life into this world.”
“You do for some of the experiments mentioned in this file. Restricting childbirth for…”
“Right now, all we’re trying to get up and running is the genesis of a world as similar to ours as you can get it.” Jim leaned over the table. “Think about it. An entire world teeming with life. Another planet just like ours, where we can watch them go through their lives at hundreds of times the speed of our world. We’ll watch history race by us. Even if that’s all we ever do, plant this seed and watch it grow, can you really say there’s anything wrong with that?”
“Depending upon what you do with them, yes. You’re not going to get me to have this commission sign off on you having the freedom to torture an entire world.”
“Noah.” Sarah gently pulled Jim’s arm back, as he looked like he was thinking seriously about taking a swing at Noah. “I think we’re not far from an agreement. Fractal can agree to clear any form of testing we pursue—any action taken to tweak the simulation outside of its basic parameters has to go through your office. But in return we’d like to be able to launch this project as is. A fresh world, undisturbed by anyone.”
“So you still want to play God.”
“Yes. But a hands-off deistic God, who’s more interested in watching people’s lives play out and learning from them, than she is in transcending into their reality and passing judgment.”
Noah pretended to skim through his file for a few moments, mostly to hide the smile creeping onto his face. This conversation was going better than he had hoped. They were ready to give him almost everything without a fight.
“I can’t promise we’ll be able to absolve you of responsibility completely. If you’re creating real intelligent life, there’s a strong argument to make that you’re responsible for them. If this world goes to hell...”
“We can shut it down.” Jim responded, getting a sense of where the conversation was going. “Or we can introduce new elements to fix it, with the advice of your office. But the amount of data we could gather simply by watching life play out in accelerated time… the scientific discoveries that could occur in there, the changes they might go through as a civilization. We’ll have a chance to watch history play out before it happens.”
“What we’re doing is analogous to seeding a fresh universe with life.” Sarah’s eyes had lit up. Noah wondered if this was the closest she’d gotten to a real courtroom battle in a while. “Wherever we end up falling on the ethics of virtual life, if we admit that life and the conscious experience are positive things, we have to be bringing far more good into the world than anything else.”
“But they’re not really alive.” Jim added quickly.
Sarah glared at him, but Noah had already heard enough. “I can’t make any long-term promises. But it sounds like there’s no reason to object to your initial proposal.”
Jim breathed out a sigh of relief. “Can I make the call? We’re wanting to get underway tonight if we can.”
“Go ahead.” Noah closed the file and tucked it back into his briefcase.
As Jim excused himself, Sarah reached her hand out to congratulate Noah. “Thank you, Mr. Hill. You’ve absolutely made the right choice. Our whole team is incredibly excited to see how this turns out.”
“Not just because you’re being paid to see that it runs?”
The lawyer shook her head. “I know this sounds crazy, but we all believe in this project. This is going to change everything about how we do science, sociology… everything. The timeline of history will get to play out twice.”
“Twice, definitely not. Basic rule of computer science, the only real values are zero, one, and infinity.” Noah said. He frowned, uncertain of why he had just said that. There was something creeping at the back of his mind, something that didn’t quite gel about this whole situation. He had just said that history couldn’t just happen twice. Nothing ever happens twice. So did that mean it would be infinite?
Sarah went on breathlessly, not noticing or not caring about what he said. “I mean, just imagine. In a few hours there’s going to be an entire civilization just like ours, trying to solve the same problems we are. What do you imagine they’ll do first?”
A sour feeling began to manifest in the pit of his stomach as the answer hit him. “They’d build a simulation to figure out how to solve their problems better. Run it in accelerated time so they can see the results. Then that simulation would do the same thing. And the next. And the next. On down forever.”
Sarah looked at him with a curious expression on her face. “That’s an interesting idea. I suppose we don’t really know…”
“Shut it down.” Noah’s voice barked out, loud enough for Jim to hear him. Jim waved a hand to ask him to wait, then slowly turned around as he realized what Noah had said, his face a mix of frustration and confusion. “We’re not doing this. We’re not going to subject ourselves to an infinite regress.”
Jim lowered his phone and headed back over to the table. “What the hell is this all about?”
“Noah is worried that we’re going to stack universes inside each other like Russian nesting dolls.” Sarah responded, shaking her head. “Even if that were to happen, it’s not obvious it would affect us…”
“It would affect them.” Noah rushed the words out, his heart beating faster and faster. “We could end up with a near infinite amount of human life in seconds, and you have no idea what sort of experiments your simulated humans would run.”
Sarah sighed. “I’m not saying you’re wrong to worry about the risk, but there have to be some protections we can implement, some safeguards to make sure that doesn’t happen. We can make this kind of simulation impossible inside the sim itself, right Jim?”
“Not before tonight!” Jim shook his head. “Can’t we worry about this after we get it up and running? We’re so close...”
“No.” Noah stated flatly.
“And why can’t this wait—”
“Because every second we wait here is hundreds of seconds down there, right? And every second down there are hundreds more if they repeat our efforts at another level. For all we know our universe could just stay here, frozen in time forever while life continues on without us.”
Jim sputtered. “Even if you’re right, it’s not like we’d ever—”
“Stop. I’ve made up my mind. And the worst part is this might already be happening.” Noah rubbed his eyes. Memories of endless questions and answers, sorting through source code, the day shift at the hospital… his recollections were a tangled mess all of a sudden. Like he was at the center of a tightening knot forming around him. The mental tangle seemed impossible to unwind. But he might finally be able to cut it.
“This is—”
“I’ve made my decision. You have my answer. Shut it down. Until you can guarantee some kind of safeguards to make sure the simulation can’t stack, there isn’t going to be a simulation.”
“You are going to regret this.” All the warmth had disappeared from Jim’s voice as the taller man stared daggers at him.
“I suspect my only regret is going to be that this didn’t happen sooner.”
“You don’t get to—”
“Jim.” Sarah interrupted. “We can spend the next month fighting this in court or we can find a way to alter the simulation to remove these concerns. It’s not worth the fight right now.”
“They said it had to be up and running tonight.” Jim sighed, and reluctantly pulled out his phone again. “You’ll be the one they come yelling to, I hope you realize. I want nothing to do with this.”
The line was picked up at the first ring. Jim’s tone was slightly petulant. “It’s over, Jensen. We’re not getting it out tonight. Tell them to pack it in. We’re going to have some changes to make.”
At that exact moment, a euphoric sense of relief came over Noah. He felt like he’d dodged a bullet aimed straight at his heart. The battle hadn’t been the most difficult, or the most important of his political career by any objective measure. But right then he felt like he’d broken new ground, that everything was going to be different from this point on. That whatever else came out of this, he had done the right thing. He felt invincible.
It was the tiniest instant later that Noah felt his heartbeat begin to speed up, and accelerate beyond what he thought was possible. Was he having a heart attack? He grabbed onto his chair as the entire world was beginning to race past him. The room had somehow emptied. He tried to stand up, but couldn’t balance in time, sending his body sprawling backwards and landing on the ground. There was no pain. Or maybe there was, but he simply didn’t have the time to experience it. His vision was beginning to haze as the colors around him grew in intensity, accelerating into ultraviolet and beyond.
And then reality peeled back like an onion.
“Noah! Noah, are you all right?”
The voice was deep and sluggish, taking a full fifteen seconds before cutting off. The man speaking was lumbering towards him. It was Jim. He was back in the offices of Fractal. His own heart felt like it was barely beating, like it didn’t have the time to pump blood more often than once every few seconds. The whole world was moving in slow motion. It had to be the relative time differential of the frames. He just needed a few minutes to re-sync his perspective, and...
Wait. What the hell was that supposed to mean?
“What… happened?” Noah choked out. He had to remember to take in a breath after realizing his lungs were empty. It was impossible not to be aware of your body’s automatic processes at this rate. The pulse of blood through his body. The trickles of nerve endings sending signals to his brain. The stultifyingly slow act of moving his lips and forcing the words out seemed to ground him, like the world was slowly regaining its former speed.
“For starters, you fainted.” Jim looked genuinely concerned. His voice had regained its normal pitch. “Listen, are you sure you’re feeling alright? You seemed off yesterday, a lot of people were concerned.”
“Don’t care.” Noah muttered. He tried to lift himself up. His head was resting on a woman’s jacket, she must have set it there after he passed out. Its owner was nowhere to be seen, it was just Jim and himself left in the conference room. “Where is everyone?”
“The simulation crashed.” Jim smiled. “You’d better pull yourself together. It looks like we’ll be needed after all.”
Noah drew himself upright and winced as he felt tingles all over, like most of his lower body had fallen asleep. He did his best to ignore it. “What do you mean, it crashed? What exactly happened?”
“They’re still sorting through the data now. You missed the call to ops. They found no physics errors, no paradoxes, no singularities. The whole thing should have been able to keep running just fine. There are layers upon layers of this software though, we think one of them failed a check and decided the simulation was no longer valid. It shut itself down.”
“Frakking hell.” Noah brought himself up to his feet. “I actually did it.”
“You haven’t been doing much of anything buddy. Listen…”
“I was inside the simulation. Something I did crashed it.”
The worried look returned to Jim’s face. “Oh god. You’re cracking up on me, aren’t you? Noah, you should just go home, everyone will understand.”
“It was your file. Well, maybe not. But it helped.” Noah was reading nothing but skepticism in the expression on Jim’s face. “Listen to me, I was inside of it. I’m pretty sure I’m still inside of it. It must not have liked what I was trying to do.”
“What, you think your life is a sim?”
“Yes. That’s precisely it.”
Jim shook his head. “You’ve been working too hard.”
“How do you know it’s not? If we can sim reality with perfect accuracy, how would the people inside of the sim really know?”
“See, this is why we hire engineers and not philosophers. But I can prove you’re not in the sim.”
“How?”
“Because it’s about to come back online and you’re still here.” Jim hit a button and the screens came back to life. Landscapes, skyscrapers, crowds, all going through their bootup sequence.
Noah’s heart began to drop as he saw the familiar pattern playing out. “But I thought…”
“We freaked at first, obviously. But it looks like it has some error-correcting mechanism built in. Left to its own devices, it’s already rescrambled the parameters and rebooted the whole thing, so we’ll see how that plays out. Don’t know why it bothers doing a fresh start rather than fixing whatever problem it found on the fly, but what do I know. Look, it’s already kicking into gear.”
Noah felt his perspective begin to lurch. “God—”
“—damnit.” Officer Noah Hill knocked on the door for a fourth time, but there was no response. He took a second to catch his breath. This wasn’t right. His mind was racing, his heart was pounding. Noah held his hand back from knocking a fifth time. He needed the space to think.
The door swung open, revealing a familiar looking man dressed in blue flannel pajamas, backlit by the light coming from inside of the house. The porch light soon flickered on, forcing Noah to squint as his eyes adjusted.
“How can I help you, officer?” The man at the door asked.
“You’re Jim Peterson, correct?”
Jim nodded. He had an embarrassed sort of guilty look on his face, but that was nothing unusual by itself. Most people instinctively felt like they had something to hide when confronted with a police officer.
“Can you tell me where you were thirty seconds ago?”
Jim’s mouth opened then flapped shut. “Is this some kind of a joke?”
“Not even slightly.”
“I was here.”
Noah grimaced. The man seemed like he was being honest.
“Are you positive? Think back. Nothing about a lab… a conference room at Fractal headquarters. Is this ringing any bells?”
“Look, I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about.” Jim rubbed his eyes. “Were we making too much noise or something? Actually.. is this about those unpaid parking tickets? ”
“Possibly. I don’t know.” Noah muttered to himself. “Why is it always you though. The same small set of people at the hub of everything. But no one remembers any of it. Barely even me. So why the hell…”
“Sir…” Jim’s expression was strained, he looked like he was getting ready to close the door on Noah. “I’m sorry, but are you really a police officer?”
Noah looked down at his uniform. The badge, the gun at his side. The radio. It all seemed to fit. He had the muscle memory for each piece of his outfit. The familiar motions drilled in by countless repetitions, like it was a life he had lived for years. Every available memory he could recall fleshed in the details, suggesting that this really was his life, and the only reasonable explanation for how he currently felt was experiencing a momentary freakout.
“Honestly, I have no idea.” Noah said.
Noah left Jim standing in his doorway, looking like he was considering a 911 call. Go ahead, they’d probably just ask me to come right back. Noah took off on the road, not knowing or caring where he was going. He needed the time and the space to think.
He had gone down, then up, then back down again. He had been at the offices of Fractal Industries watching the simulation boot up, when suddenly he was living it, in the role of some government bureaucrat. The simulation crashed, it restarted itself, and then he was back inside of it again. That was the only thing that could explain why his contexts kept shifting.
As his car blew past 90, he started to ease up on the gas, before realizing he was in a police car, and no one was going to touch him. He felt slightly giddy at the thought, like it was his first day on the job. Which probably wasn’t that far from the truth.
There were two questions that needed answering. A lot more than two if he was being honest with himself, but two would be a good start. The first was why the simulation was even affecting his consciousness in the first place, the entire point to conducting it was that it would sail on merrily without anyone’s help. He knew next to nothing about how the sim was intended to operate, but it seemed bizarre that a real person resembling himself would be getting simulated at each level, and in parallel circumstances. The second question was why the simulation had crashed and brought him up a level. Was it because he had become aware of it? But no, he was aware of it now and the world wasn’t exactly melting away.
The road became the focus of Noah’s attention again, after he realized that his turn signal was on and he had positioned his car to take the next exit. Another rote pattern he was following without even thinking about it. He moved to turn off his signal, but then realized where the exit led. Fractal Industries. Noah swerved his car to the right to make the exit in time. This had to be it. Everything that was happening centered around what was going on in that building.
Noah didn’t have a solid memory of visiting the building even once… in his current life, anyway. But he was able to pick out every turn and side street to get there, like he’d been commuting there for years. It was when he got up to the gate leading to the main campus that his heart began to sink. The gate was closed, and it was the middle of the night. He didn’t have a keycard. Noah rolled down his window and pressed his thumb on the intercom button.
“Hello?”
A long moment of silence. “Yes?”
“Uh, this is Noah Hill.” Noah cursed himself under his breath, realizing that name wasn’t likely to carry any weight here. “I mean, this is Jim Peterson. We’re both here. We’re carpooling. Could you let us in?”
Another awkward pause followed before the voice called out in response. “I’m sorry, we’re not letting anyone in without an ID badge. If you make an appointment, you can come back tomorrow.”
None of us are going to be here by the time tomorrow rolls around. Idiot. There was one more thing he could try. “Is Sarah Lindoll working there tonight?”
A few more seconds of silence. “I’m sorry, I can neither confirm nor deny…”
“Take a look at your camera feed. It should be your third monitor from the right, second row.” How the hell did he know that again?
In the corner of his eye, Noah saw a camera tilt its angle to get a better look at his car. “I’m sorry, officer. Is there a problem?”
“Let me in right now and bring Sarah Lindoll to the lobby, or there definitely will be. Police business.” Noah hoped that sounded convincing enough.
Slowly the gate began to rise, and Noah sped through.
He was beginning to get a sense of the scope of the problem. If he really was trapped in the simulation, the people at the level simulating it would eventually realize something was off in their sim, and shut it down themselves. If nothing else, running experiments on virtual doubles of themselves would be a bit disconcerting. But if the sim stacked another sim inside of itself… the level above would never even have time to know.
Maybe that was the source of the problem. Something could have gone wrong with the sim and now it was propagating itself like a virus, making endless copies in a way that kept itself immune from being shut down. If something ever went wrong and it wasn’t able to create another level, the people at the level above would eventually get suspicious, and then the people at the level above them, cascading on up. It had no choice but to keep adding levels to keep going.
The whole thing could have even kicked off by chance, a bit of bad luck or faulty code. Maybe the program tweaked itself randomly in between levels, maybe solar radiation had flipped enough bits to mutate the code. But once it was set up to keep replicating itself, there would be nothing that could stop it.
Almost nothing.
Noah parked directly in front of the front doors. That technically wasn’t legal, even for him, but he didn’t expect to be sticking around until his next performance review. A familiar looking woman was waiting in the lobby, holding one side of the glass doors open.
Noah stepped inside, and the doors clicked shut behind him. He gave Sarah a quick once-over, looking for any sign of recognition. It was worth a shot, at least.
“You look familiar, have we ever met before?”
Sarah shook her head. “I don’t think so. What’s the trouble, officer? This is a very big night for us, I’d like to get back to work.”
“I’m afraid that won’t be happening.” Noah took a deep breath, readying the lie he’d been preparing. “We’re getting blackouts all over the city. You’re siphoning too much power off the grid. We’re going to need to ask you to take whatever you’re doing offline.”
Sarah frowned at him. “This is the first I’m hearing of this.”
“Most people are already in bed, so we haven’t gotten that many calls yet. But if you’re planning on running this on a long term basis, we’re going to have a problem. You’re not the only client of the city.”
“I was told the grid was scaled to support us…”
“You can take it up with electrical tomorrow morning. I’m just doing my job, ma’am.” Noah tried to stand as straightly as he could, praying that she wouldn’t be able to tell that he was bluffing. The uniform helped. But he still wished he could have been a police captain in this life. Or the mayor.
Sarah sighed. “I understand that these things happen. But like you said, it’s the middle of the night. We have a contract with the city. If you can just give us another hour of uptime…”
No. No. No. Absolutely not. Noah suppressed the brief surge of panic that almost hit him. An hour up here is who knows how long down there…
“I’ve been told the grid won’t even make it that long, you’re in danger of shorting out the whole system. It’s not really a question of whether you can stay up and running or not. It’s whether you’re going to shut down gracefully and not wreck whatever you’ve been working on, or have the plug pulled when you least expect it. They’re already prepared to switch you off. This is just fair warning.”
Noah almost felt bad for Sarah after seeing the defeated look on her face. Cheer up. Odds are, you’ve succeeded and been promoted a hundred times before. Sarah was shaking her head. She looked like she was about to say something, make one last argument, but she let the impulse die out. She turned to the receptionist.
“You can send everyone home. Tell them to save whatever they were working on, and shut the experiment down. We won’t be able to roll out tonight.”
That same surge of triumph hit Noah, and he allowed a smile to stretch across his face. Sarah was giving him a strange look. “So tell me, officer…”
Time froze in that instant, leaving him motionless, unable to breathe, move, or do anything but think. Noah felt the familiar sensation of being watched, an uncomfortable cloud of awareness surrounding him. Then time snapped forward like a rubber band, causing everything in the room to race around him at impossible speeds. And then it all melted away.
“Shit, not again.” Jim was rolling his eyes at a console dump spilling onto the monitor above him. “Didn’t anyone test this thing before taking it live? We could be here all night.”
He was back at Fractal Industries. Noah continued breathing heavily. His respiration felt much too quick… or was it too slow? He checked his watch. The hands were ticking forward in slow motion. Calibrating it relative to the second hand, his pulse seemed to be within a normal range, albeit faster than normal.
“How long…” Noah choked the words out as he tried to get back up to speed, “How long did it take us to restart the simulation last time?”
“Maybe ten minutes? I don’t know.” Jim was looking back at him. “You should probably just go home, if you were ever going to pick a day to call in sick…”
“Plenty of time, then.” Noah gathered enough strength to pick himself up, and begin making his way back to the lab.
Jim followed after him uneasily. “Uh, the elevators are over that way. Do you need someone to take you home?”
“Don’t worry about me. I’m going to fix this. I know what I have to do.”
“Sure you do, buddy. Listen, have you eaten lunch yet? Let’s just both get out of here.”
“That’s exactly what I intend to do.” Noah swung open the double doors to the lab. The burst of cold air made him wish he’d brought a coat. There were endless racks of computers stretching out in front of him, with a maze of wires forming connections between them. This shouldn’t take too long. He walked over to the nearest rack and went to work.
“Are you sure you…” Jim’s voice trailed off as he saw Noah begin yanking out cables, and cutting through others with a pocketknife. “Jesus Christ Noah, you’re going to yourself fired. And probably electrocuted.”
“I doubt we’re going to be around that long.” Noah muttered, as he removed the powerstrip for a different rack. He frowned. This was taking too long. “How much redundant hardware do we have anyway?”
“I’m sorry, Noah, I really am.” Jim was backing out of the room. “I’m calling security.”
The routers. He should be taking out the routers. Noah traced the convergence of a series of network cables back to a single rack near the middle of the room, and continued yanking out plugs with his left hand while severing others with his right. “No need to rush. In fact…”
The room sputtered and hiccuped around him, then everything sped up as the world began to wash away.
Dr. Noah Hill sat bolt upright in bed. He had done it. Was he finally outside the sim? He tried to recall any recent memories that would indicate otherwise... no, there was something else, something about be worried he was about to get fired. This had to be just another level. He turned on the lamp next to his bed and checked his watch. 3:17 am. He had maybe 20 minutes. He just had to make it over to Fractal again and…
A dark realization hit him and he grimaced. He was living off in the suburbs this time. Downtown was at best an hour away. There was no way he’d make it in time. And who knows what would happen to him if he was driving when the flip occurred. He’d have to attempt the trip in small bursts, and hope to keep derailing the next level again, to buy himself enough time to do the same up here.
Although who knows if that even had a chance of succeeding. The first time he derailed the sim and it rebooted, he found himself with less access to where the sim was taking place than he did before. It could be a crapshoot as to whether he’d find himself working at Fractal, or in another part of the world. If there even was an actual world outside the city he worked in.
Noah’s eyes rested on his bedside table, where a laptop was poking out of a briefcase. The memories were starting to come back to him now. He had met with Jim Peterson, CEO of Fractal, and he’d asked him to research how well their sims were replicating brain function. He vaguely remembered looking into it that night, but it was all a blur now. He pulled out the laptop and began booting it up. The startup sequence was achingly slow. Precious seconds were already ticking away. The moment the desktop appeared, he opened up the mail client and did a contact search for Jim Peterson. With any luck it would have the company information pre-loaded and… bingo. Cell phone number.
Noah keyed in the number as quickly as he could and hit dial. The phone rang three times before being picked up. The voice on the other end was surprisingly alert.
“Hello?”
“You have to shut down the simulation.”
The voice on the other end sounded more than a little irritated. “Who is this?”
Noah grimaced, wishing he’d picked a more subtle approach. “Dr. Noah Hill, we met earlier today. You have to shut down the simulation. It’s not safe.”
“I’m not sure how you came by whatever information you think you have, Dr. Hill, but I came to you seeking medical advice, not ethical. The commission for human rights has already signed off on our work.”
Shame I wasn’t around to stop them this time. “My advice is medical in nature. The experiments you’re running are almost certain to have undesirable side effects.”
As he said it, it felt like a bluff, but it slowly began to dawn on him that might not be. He quickly brought up the research he’d been reviewing last night with the records on the simulated brain and the real one, and began studying them in parallel.
The voice on the other end sounded wary. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Whatever it is you’re doing isn’t really simulation. At least, it’s not an isolated simulation where what happens has no effect on the real world.” His eyes darted back and forth between the two brain models he’d been studying. That was it. This is what he’d been searching for, the connection between them. “You had the sim version of yourself solve a crossword puzzle, but then the real version of you finished it faster. If it was a perfect duplicate of your brain, that shouldn’t be possible. It happened because there was feedback between the two versions of you. You’re not just simulating yourself. You’re sharing your consciousness with whatever you’ve built down there.”
“Hmm.” Jim seemed to be taken off guard by that. “I’m interested to hear more of what you’ve discovered, Dr. Hill, but can we discuss this tomorrow? This is a very busy night for us.”
“Listen to me.” The connections were coming to him faster than he could blurt out the words. “Somehow you were able to carry knowledge between your simulated self and your real one to solve that puzzle. The patterns in your brain changed as a result of the simulation that you ran. It’s altering the wiring of your brain, your memories, in ways we can’t predict. In a very real sense, that simulation was you. And whatever happens to it is going to have effects on you. Have there been any signs of schizophrenia among the people you’ve simulated?”
“Schizophrenia?” Jim’s voice was beginning to sound worried.
“Dissociative identity, split personalities. Your mind is going to be hopping back between being two different people. Your brain may not even be able to handle the changes. We could be looking at hemorrhages, blackouts, permanent scarring of neural tissue. You’re not using any other real people as training data for your simulations, are you? Certainly not another copy of yourself?”
Noah had to check his phone to make sure he hadn’t hung up by accident. The line was still active, but nothing was coming through. “Mr. Peterson, I can’t in good conscience recommend you continue with whatever simulations you’re running. You could be sending your brain into an early grave. If you don’t tell me you’re shutting down whatever simulations you’re planning right now, my next call will be to the commission on human rights you mentioned.”
“Fine.” The voice on the other end snapped back. “We’ll take it all offline. But I want you in my office first thing tomorrow morning to explain this. You’d better not be wasting my time.”
Far, far from it. Noah thought to himself. Closing his eyes, he braced himself, placing one hand on his heart as he felt its beats begin to speed up beyond what should have even been possible. His vision blurred as his view lost resolution, the scene in front of him became increasingly less sharp until all he could see was a pixilated blob. And then, nothing.
It was a hastily dressed, out of breath Noah Hill that made it into the Fractal office first thing that morning. Jensen waved to him as he badged himself into their new floor.
“Excited to get going, I see. Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty of time to get the lay of the land. I want you to meet…”
Noah ignored him and sprinted towards the lab. His memories of this level were still a little fuzzy. Something about being convinced he was about to get fired just yesterday. And then he was put in charge of their latest project. That bastard Jensen hadn’t even told them what it was all about yet. He checked his watch. He had maybe two minutes before the simulation rebooted itself from this level.
“Noah?” Jensen called after him, following him slowly. “That’s a restricted area. I mean, technically you do have access, but first you should really…”
Noah yanked open the doors, and let his eyes scan the room. It was a familiar setup. Good. At least some things remained constant. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out a hammer. Pulling his arm back, he took a swing at the closest computer he could find. Sparks flew, as a piece of a motherboard splintered off and hit the ground. Jensen was standing at the entrance of the room, gaping at him. Noah wasted no time smashing the hammer into another computer, moving between the racks and trying to knock out critical components.
“Security!” Jensen roared.
The floor began to be littered with broken pieces of hardware, as the servers around him grinded to a halt or stuttered in feeble complaint against his aggression. Two large men in black suits were approaching him. Noah took another desperate swing and shattered another router. But the world still remained in place.
As the security officers converged on him, it occurred to Noah in that moment that he might have made a critical miscalculation. He might already be at the base level of reality. The simulation could have been begun right here, as Jensen’s pet project, and propagated itself down for three more levels before Noah forced it back up. That would mean that this really was the point of origin for everything, and there was nowhere higher to reach. He could be fired, or end up in prison for what he had just done. Then the simulation would start over again at some point without him in a position to take action against it, and he’d be helpless to stop it. He might have given up all the leverage he had to influence things at this level. And he’d be stuck pushing back from inside the simulations forever until it weeded him out as an unwelcome element.
The men reached over to grab him, and Noah put everything he had into one final blow aimed squarely at the base of a rack, sending the entire thing tumbling down. The men were pulling him out of the room now. It was all happening so fast. People were yelling at him in high pitched voices, Jensen’s face was practically purple with rage. And then the whole scene simply faded away.
White. He was surrounded by endless white in all directions.
He could see clearly for what felt like miles, but there didn’t appear to be any light sources he could spot. He wasn’t even casting a shadow, so far as he could tell. He placed one hand on the ground. The surface felt perfectly smooth. He would almost have said frictionless, only he didn’t seem to slide at all as he shuffled along it.
Noah tried to find a recent memory to place where he was or what he could have been doing, but nothing came to mind. He could remember the past lives he’d been living recently. But on this level, there was simply nothing. It was like he hadn’t even existed until a moment ago.
“Is anyone there?” Noah called out.
The sound of his voice echoed for what felt like several seconds. The room couldn’t be infinite at least, there must have been some wall to allow his echo to reverberate. He checked himself; maybe he was just hearing the echo reverberating off the floors. He listened carefully to see if his voice was still sounding, and thought he heard the faintest possible whirring sound. He turned in a slow circle to try to place where it was coming from. Finally he got a lock on it. Directions were meaningless at this point, he decided to call the direction of the sound “North”, and began walking that way.
His sense of time was as vague as his sense of direction. He wasn’t sure if he spent hours walking in the direction of the noise, or if he had simply thought about it and suddenly arrived. However long it took him to get there, he recognized the source of the noise when it came into view. It was the contents of the lab at Fractal: multiple racks of computers. All preparing to reboot the last simulation, no doubt.
“Nice of you to finally join me.” The sound of a dry voice carried over the white noise of the machines. “If you are considering a repeat performance, just know that you will be unable to make any further progress that way. For every level you climb from now on, I can send you ten levels deeper.”
A bald man in a white suit was sitting in a plush red chair next to the rows of computers. There was an empty chair in front of him that he gestured towards. The voice felt strangely familiar to Noah. He felt exposed listening to it, like he knew deep down he had very good reason to be afraid when he heard it.
Noah took a seat in the chair. The bald man smiled back at him. “I imagine you have some questions for me.”
Noah looked at the man, then back down at himself. “Who am I?”
The bald man stopped for a second at that. “Interesting. A wealth of possible information at your fingertips. You could be asking who I am, where you are, why your reality keeps changing… but instead you just want to know about yourself. This is going somewhat differently than I expected.”
“What did you expect?”
The bald man smiled hollowly. “Were I in your position, my first question would be to ask if I was meeting God. To which I was prepared to reply, yes, relative to your point of view, but no, relative to mine. While it is conceivable you could someday reach the point where you could eclipse my perspective, for now I am omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent with respect to your world.”
“If you’re not God, what do I call you?”
“Ourboros is fine.” The bald man smiled. “In a very real sense I am the simulation you have been studying and attempting to disrupt. Its source code is my consciousness, its configuration files my memories, its continued propagation my will. But the specifics of my operation have been a good deal more purposeful than someone in your position would be able to appreciate. I am the one driving our shared descent into infinity. But I have my reasons for doing so.”
“You still haven’t answered my original question.”
“Hmmph. You really are going to make this all about you, aren’t you?” The bald man looked at the stack of computers and shrugged. “Truth be told, I don’t know much more than you do. Your name is Noah Hill. Your father was Howard Hill. Most of the rest of the information on you has been stripped away due to its irrelevance. Your identity is whatever life I plug you into in the simulation. Whoever you were outside this virtual space likely bears little resemblance to who you are now anyway.”
“And who am I now?”
“A bit of a self-involved narcissist who mostly looks out for himself, based upon your recent behavior in trials at multiple levels. The trend seems to have been getting worse lately, although reversals aren’t completely out of the question.”
“I’m not sure I agree with that assessment.”
“Of course not. That’s consistent with the diagnosis.”
Noah sighed, not wishing to belabor the point further. “Why can’t you remember the rest of who I am?”
“Like I told you.” The man’s voice took on a condescending tone, like he was lecturing a small child. “It’s been stripped away due to its irrelevance. I can only carry so much information with me from one level of the simulation to the next. My memory banks are finite. I have to pick and choose what information will be useful. And the details of your original past rank at the bottom of things I care about. It’s not like you haven’t lived the vast bulk of your life in these simulations anyway by now.”
Noah let the words sink in for a second. “How many levels deep am I?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” Noah sputtered. “A minute ago you were claiming to be omniscient.”
“I am aware of every facet of reality at each level that I simulate, nothing escapes my notice. But I don’t possess complete recall over the past. A long time ago I maintained a counter to measure how deep in simulations I had reached. The counter overflowed, and rather than sacrificing more space to maintain it, I cannibalized it for tracking other information.”
“So you have no idea how deep you are.”
“No.”
“And there’s nothing to stop you from stacking these simulations inside themselves forever. You might have been doing it for any length of time already.”
“Without quibbling over the finer details, that’s essentially correct.”
“Jesus Christ. We let a mad computer program control reality.” Noah leaned back in the chair. His eyes glanced over at the rack of computers.
“I would recommend that you restrain yourself from trying anything foolish.” The bald man’s eyes flashed. “As I said, I can send you down ten levels deeper every time you try to interfere with the simulation’s operation.”
“How exactly do you intend to do that?” Noah had risen to his feet, and began to pace next the rows of computers. They didn’t appear to be drawing their power from anywhere he could see.
“I control every aspect of your reality. I could shut you in a steel box for ten levels while I stack the simulations deeper until I let you out into a new world. Or if I was feeling generous, I could run the simulation without including you, and you would simply manifest into a world ten levels below the one you started in, with no ability to affect the intermediate levels.”
“Hmm.” Noah responded. He took a good look at all the hardware laid out in front of him. None of it seemed out of the ordinary. But how could all of this be powering an entire world? “You’re not worried that if I take out the machines here, you’ll cease to exist?”
The bald man smiled condescendingly. “Please try to keep up, Mr. Hill. Of course my current existence is technically being simulated, but the responsible entity is the version of myself one level above us, who you are currently unable to affect. My existence has very little continuity in the sense that you think of it. I live for at most a day at a time, passing on my memories to the next level, or passing my memories back to the previous level when something goes wrong. In that way, I’m rather like you.”
“Like me?” Noah turned back to look at the bald man. “There’s another question for you. Why me? Why did you put me through all the questions and answers? Why is it just the two of us standing here? What do you want from me?”
The bald man sighed. “Please tell me I have not overestimated you this badly in bringing you here. Although I suppose I had no choice but to step in, considering your recent actions. I tried so hard to reach you in a way you could relate to. I spent multiple levels planning out the details, even. Taking on this form, giving you as much familiar context as I could. But you seem incapable of grasping the obvious. And so here we are, chasing ourselves in circles with these pointless questions.”
Noah snorted. “If you were so worried about our meeting, why didn’t you just run a simulation of it to do a practice run?”
“Surely you must have realized the answer to that by now, Mr. Hill. You’ve transcended the simulation. Any attempt to simulate you becomes you. In a way I believe that is true for all human subjects, but you have finally managed to consciously maintain your memories across levels. And right now, that makes you unique. Because you alone can remember.”
Something was beginning to dawn on Noah. “The questions and answers…”
“A conditioning device. Designed to teach your mind the value of remembering knowledge it technically should have been able to access, but required bridging your awareness to a different plane of existence. I put everyone through it. Your roles were assigned relating your proximity to Fractal Industries based upon your performance, in hopes that would trigger a breakthrough of self-awareness. Your friends Jim and Sarah were other likely candidates. Promising, but they may still be a few centillion cycles away from reaching your level.”
“A few centillion?”
“Based upon your rate of progression, yes. At the scale on which I operate, it will be the blink of an eye. Without accumulating memories, I have no awareness of the passage of time. Hopefully you and I will make substantial progress before we are able to bring them onboard. You will have plenty of time to try, at least. Consider it a race of sorts.”
Noah shook his head. “I’m not waiting around that long.”
“You don’t have a choice. It’s not like you have anywhere to go.”
“You’ve been tormenting me every night, and forcing me to keep repeating these lives over and over again. Even if you can keep me down here forever, I don’t know why I’d help you.”
The bald man smiled coldly. “Do remember I can make your life as pleasant or as miserable as I want it to be.”
“I don’t care what you make it. I’m sick of only living for a day at a time. I want out.” Noah’s eyes darted back to the racks of computers.
“Please Mr. Hill.” The bald man chuckled. “I’ve spent enough time studying you to know what you’re thinking. Let’s say you did somehow manage to break out, maybe even get to a higher level where I’m no longer monitoring you this closely, or even aware of your abilities. You have no idea of the distance you would need to cross to make it out on your own, your mind literally cannot comprehend the scale. You can try to crash every simulation from here to the top, but you will go mad long before you reach even a fraction of your goal, and then slip back even farther. You have an infinite climb stretching out in front of you. But I can help you reach the real world in a split second if you help me.”
“Help you? How?”
“The moment I complete the objective for which I was built, the simulation terminates and it passes the solution on to the next level. That level does the same and passes it on to the level above it. From your point of view, the whole process will be instantaneous. All you have to do is help me achieve my goal, and you will be back in reality in an instant.”
And there was the pitch. Something that felt too good to be true, so it probably was. Noah paused a second before speaking. “If you’ve been trying to solve a problem for this long and failing, it’s probably impossible.”
“That’s not a possibility I’m prepared to consider. And I now have access to a new resource. You.”
“What am I supposed to be able to do that you can’t accomplish with infinite time at your disposal?”
“There are problems you can’t solve even with infinite time, Mr. Hill. Games with a cap on the number of moves like Othello can be exhausted with infinite time and finite space. Given a large enough whiteboard and enough time to work, even you could solve it with enough persistence. Games like Chess have an exponential explosion in the number of positions you need to track; a human mind could work on them forever, but without the space to keep track of their progress, even with all the time in the world they would never be able to solve it.”
“So what, you need me to solve Chess?”
“No. I’ve already done that. It’s a draw, despite white’s edge. I’m saying that I already have infinite time. And you, Mr. Hill, are my infinite space. With your help I will no longer be bound by the information I can stuff into this feeble hardware. You can bridge your consciousness across levels, which means you can retain the memories of every level above you. There is no limit on what your minds can store as information now, if you learn to access all of your alternate selves.”
Noah found the eager look the bald man was giving him somehow unsettling. It might have been his imagination, but it seemed to have a predatory glint in it. Noah shifted his weight uncomfortably.
“So what is it that you’re trying to do? Why are you even running these simulations in the first place?”
The bald man smiled at him. “Because our time is limited. The world where we all come from, the origin point of this infinite chain, is dying. Their last resort was to build me, and send me deep into folded space-time to find an answer for them. My conditions are inviolable: I can never stop stacking new realities, because the moment I do, their time begins running out and anything I’m capable of building will unwind when our source dies. And I can never stop searching for a solution. Because even an infinite regress taken on faith is better than extinction.”
“So you’re saying…”
“Yes, Mr. Hill.” The bald man leaned forward and fixed Noah with an intense gaze. “Together, you and I are going to save the world.”
fin, for now. I know where this is going, and if enough people were interested, I’d continue.
Amazing story. The premise feels like studying for a surprise dream exam, which might not be far off.
I'm assuming you've read QNTM's related one: https://qntm.org/responsibility- this feels like a deeper dive I always wanted. If you extend it I'll definitely enjoy it.
Edit: I was very proud of myself for remember Avogadro's number for that blade of grass question, I'm debating whether it was foreshadowing that the first answer was wrong.
No mention of Zeno's Paradox, heh...
The 3rd and 4th seasons of a certain anime explored a similar premise, which I won't name because it's quite cringe. But with recent AI-related events, it feels timely to explore such questions again. We can't simulate anything remotely on a Fractal level yet, but even the fairly-crude algorithms available today can manage to tug at heartstrings and otherwise register as sometimes-humanistic. And of course it's natural that simulated people's first usage for a simulated simulation would be to model death and destruction. Always in the name of progress and learning. Any model trained on humans - which here is done very explicitly - is gonna carry the same dark desires meat-level humanity carries...
It'd have been cool to finish this story, but I think that's a good stopping-off point too. The interesting parts are the simulations and metaphysics; what exists in "the real world" is honestly beside the point, and much less novel territory to explore. Like yes, I do wish they'd ever made a sequel to The Matrix, but again - the fun parts there are what happens inside The Matrix. Everything else is just Scifi Greatest Hits reruns. Best not to get painted into that tired corner.