Aptitude

by Cooper Shrivastava

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  One may ascend to godhood in the same way one attains any other competitive position: a series of rigorous standardized exams.

  * * *

  9:00–9:30: Registration & continental breakfast

  Alena appeared in the white room, in front of the registration desk, with her hair neatly combed, wearing formal business interview attire. As far as she knew, she was the only person in the universe to be invited to the Practical Assessment. She wasn’t the only candidate in the reception room though, which meant the others must be from somewhere other than the universe.

  There was a list of names. She scanned it, noting each candidate’s profession. Mostly mathematicians, with strange specialties like “reality theorist,” “meta optimalist,” and “stochastic botanist.” Alena knew she was underqualified for this position. She had resorted to connecting her mind to the ship’s computer, illegally tapping into some of humanity’s last remaining resources, just to access the brainpower she would need to understand the test. Hopefully the connection would last to the end of the interview.

  She pressed the pad of her thumb next to an entry near the bottom of the page: Alenagutnarsunurassttir, recycling processor.

  * * *

  9:30–10:00: Meet and greet

  In the waiting area, candidates clustered together around the danishes, probably being judged on their ability to make small talk. No one wanted to work with a socially awkward nerd, no matter how good they were at building universes. Alena searched for loners to help demonstrate her ability to smile through her teeth.

  On the far side of the room, a woman was sitting down, sipping a cup of coffee and waiting without looking like she was waiting for anything. She was gorgeous: smooth skin, thick hair, lips that were probably naturally that color. People liked to pretend that good looks wouldn’t get you ahead, but there was no way this woman’s beauty wouldn’t be a huge advantage in the face-to-face interview.

  Where Alena came from, people didn’t look like that anymore. Why invest resources into making your children beautiful when they would spend their whole lives on a slowly sinking ship with only the same few descendants for company? When you were the only people left in the world, who were you trying to impress?

  Farther down was a candidate even more obviously from a different universe. His face, a map of ancient racial markers and organic asymmetries, looked like something out of a history book. His clothes were a style she had never seen before: a black, knee-length robe with a wide belt tied at the left hip, a white shirt, and black pants underneath. She had read somewhere that a color contrast interview outfit projected power and confidence.

  Alena decided on the beautiful woman as the one to speak to, primarily because she was closer to the danishes.

  “Feeling nervous?” Alena asked, trying to lean in conspiratorially, and judging by the woman’s face, missing the mark.

  “I’m happy with the results of my test preparation. I’ve run through so many practice simulations, I could build my model in my sleep,” the woman said like she had a table full of job offers lined up for her at home. She certainly looked it, sitting there, cool and still. Alena shredded a danish with her fingernails.

  Alena hadn’t run through a single practice simulation. She didn’t have the resources for it, for one thing. For another, she hadn’t been able to hold conceptions as large and complex as a model universe in her brain until she had boosted off the ship, and that was after a full year of taking performance-enhancing drugs. She had mostly studied from the test preparation book.

  Alena tried to compare the woman to the list of professions on the sign-in sheet. She didn’t look old enough to be a professor.

  “What’s your name?” Alena asked, but before she could answer, the Proctor arrived.

  * * *

  10:00–1:00: 1st simulation session

  “Hello everyone,” the Proctor said with a big, impersonal smile. Her eyes lingered on the beautiful woman at Alena’s side. “Thank you all for your presence here today. I know this is a long and challenging process, and you should be very proud of yourselves just for making it this far. In the current hiring cycle we’ve had over a hundred thousand applicants, and less than one percent were invited for a—” Alena stopped paying attention.

  She had little desire to become a Builder and even less ability. It was killing her to listen to this woman smugly congratulate them on being candidates for such an elevated and prestigious position when the Board of Cosmogamy had made such a fucking mess of Alena’s universe.

  At least that was her suspicion. Maybe all universes had to come to a seizing halt at some time or another. Maybe there was nothing special about the slow-motion gravitational collapse they were going through. Maybe her whole universe was in the middle of a planned obsolescence, and afterwards, when all the light and energy and matter there was had been crushed back into a single point, the scavengers of the Board would come and scrape up what was left for their new terrarium. There was only one way to find out, and that was why Alena had spent the last few years cobbling together the ability to handle the simulation: to get answers for her swallowed world.

  The Proctor launched into the specifics of the universe simulation exam. They would have three hours to complete the core stage, where they would run their own first principles on authentic universe-building technology. They could write any laws and make any physical adjustments they wanted in that time.

  During the second simulation session, each universe would run through a full time scale. Their work would be judged on the technique and process used during session one and the results of session two. Each session would be scored out of thirty points, with five points awarded in each of the following categories: consistency, completeness, resolution, determinism, transitivity, and habitability.

  The reception room changed. They were now inside the simulation, which was inside whatever space-outside-of-time-and-space she had already been in, her real body lying quiescent in her real home. She looked down at herself. Her physical form looked the same, interview outfit and all, as did the Ancient Mathematician’s form she had seen in the reception room.

  The candidate she had just been speaking to, on the other hand, was almost unrecognizable. She had aged, for one thing, and aged in a way people didn’t really do anymore in Alena’s world, her face wilting in on itself into a soft map of wrinkles, her red lips thinned and deflated, even her hair was now short and curly, like she was trying to hide hair loss. Her aged body was fatter too, but dressed in a simple long-sleeved shirt and pants made out of some thick and tough material, rubber boots, and gloves that looked, well, that looked a little bit like the ones Alena would sometimes wear to dismantle complex bits of physical waste when the ship managed to haul in something that hadn’t been totally co
mpacted during its fall towards the black hole.

  She caught Alena staring and wiggled her fingers.

  “My gardening outfit,” the third candidate whispered, ignoring the proctor’s sharp look. Alena thought back to the registration list.

  They were each handed a blue test booklet. Alena opened it. There were no questions, just empty space to write.

  “How does the simulation start?” Alena asked, snagging the Proctor’s attention before she walked away.

  “This is the simulation,” the Proctor said with a smile clearly designed to hide the fact that she didn’t consider Alena to be a serious candidate. “Just write down the rules you want to start with, and the interface will expand as you develop your universe.”

  She smiled again, even less sincerely, and then walked out. Alena frowned at the empty test booklet. Her pen from the reception hadn’t made it into the simulation.

  The Ancient Mathematician, and the Beautiful Gardener were both already scribbling away. The Mathematician cleared his throat, and then he held something out to her. A fountain pen. The same ornate, custom fountain pen that sat on the Captain’s desk at home, which he loved, but almost never had occasion to use anymore, now that theirs was the only ship left.

  “Thanks,” Alena said. She held the pen in her hand, and even though there was no reason to believe that any of this was real, she felt the metal warming from the heat of her fingertips.

  The clock was ticking. The test prep book advised beginning by building a universe with similar rules to what the test taker was already familiar with. Alena wrote down axioms for extensionality, pairing, union, powerset, infinity, and separation.

  Nothing like an interface opened up for her. Meanwhile, the Ancient Mathematician had already moved his universe off the page into the room, which was now the void. Glowing lights in the distance made Alena certain that some of the other candidates had breathed life into theirs as well.

  Alena gritted her teeth and added an axiom for choice. She didn’t see anything change per se, not like the universe a few people to her left that was toggling between matter and antimatter, but somewhere in her brain she did feel a sudden cohesion, an engine revving, a light turning on in a far-off room. Alena’s heart sped up, and she scribbled down the definitions for some base elements.

  It wasn’t even hard at first, at least once she had added enough information for the universe to be visualized. It lifted off the page and she added some shape. Topologically smooth, 3-manifold space, all things that could be described in the test booklet without drawing on the extra resources her body was connected to in the real world. But it turned out, adding space before adding time was difficult. The model had to be homogeneous in order to be isotropic. It had to be path-connected in order to be homogeneous. It had to be not just path-connected, but simply connected in order to get the minimum passing “habitability” score. And those were just the mathematical implications of her chosen topology; they had to be analogous to her chosen physics as well.

  Alena hadn’t realized how much of the model was taking place in her and how much was being observed by her from the outside until it collapsed in her face. If she had a heart in here, it skipped a beat.

  She glanced around, trying to move just her eyeballs and not her head, to see if anyone had noticed. The Ancient Mathematician was standing inside some sort of torus, and the Beautiful Gardener was nowhere to be seen. Alena crumpled the used sheet in her fist.

  She decided to try something a little simpler. She established the same mathematics, and this time gave the universe positive curvature. This forced her model to be finite. But, it also made the energy density way too high. The universe kept sprouting new dimensions every time she tried to lift it from the page.

  When the booklet started smoking, Alena was forced to give it up. She scribbled out the words this time, and as she did so her monstrous creation dismantled itself. There were only a few sheets left; even if Alena had been a master Builder she didn’t know what she could do in such a short space.

  Well that was fine, to hell with it anyway. She wasn’t here to score a perfect 30, Alena reminded herself, and a marble was a universe too, from the right perspective. She started writing, and the elegant fountain pen tore through cheap standardized test paper. Forget the axiom of choice, we’ll get by with first order arithmetic. In a finite Euclidean metric space. Antimatter? No thanks. Elements? All hydrogen, all the way down. Speed of light? She paused. The pen hovered over her paper. 100 miles per hour.

  It was surreal, and Alena found herself stifling laughter. With the speed turned down so low, she could hold a lump of solid hydrogen in the palm of her hand. A whole universe.

  With only an hour left, Alena had to admit this tiny sphere wouldn’t win her any prizes. But then again, they were ranked in order and there wasn’t any cutoff score. As long as her ball of hydrogen made it into the top 20 percent, she could at least move on to the interview phase.

  Alena was a recycling processor by profession. She spent her days taking the complex junk of formerly advanced civilizations and breaking it down, figuring out how to prize out the most valuable parts, and how to pulverize the rest back to raw material. Maybe she did have the skill set to move on after all.

  She peeked over at the simulation next to her. The candidate had made their universe homogeneous and isotropic as well, and Alena, who just had something blow up in her face over the same structures, knew how to handle that.

  When she thought they weren’t looking, she grabbed the closest thing she could reach in the simulated universe. It was some sort of accretion disk, and in the partially constructed universe the other candidate was building, it simplified itself in her hands to a unit circle in ℝ2.

  Alena slipped it into her test booklet so no one could see what she was doing. She dragged a thumbnail from the center to the edge to create a line the radius of the disk, and then scribbled down a basic definition: let γ be a counterclockwise rotation of, say, 1/24 radians.

  She spun the radius she had created through all the positions γn (r) and let n spin out into infinity. They were in a simulation beyond reconciling time and space, so the set immediately sat in her palm, and when she licked a fingertip and pressed it to (0,0) she could lift it off the disk like a wheel with infinite spokes.

  Perfect.

  Together the set of all spokes of the wheel and the set of all points in the circle that were not spokes made up the entire unit disk. Alena rotated the spokes clockwise γ-1, so that a new spoke appeared. She had cut the disk into two pieces, moved one of them, and now had the original set plus an extra spoke, all within the simple mathematical rules that the candidate had agreed to.

  She tossed the disc back into her competitor’s universe, where it settled down into the filament like a bomb hiding in a sea crater, creating matter from nothing as it ticked clockwise through endless new rotations.

  Emboldened by her success, Alena scanned the other universes that were popping into existence under the invisible hands of her competitors. Some were easy to disrupt. This one hadn’t put up any walls between its physics and its math. A simple sphere eversion was enough to break it. That one’s dark energy pressure was too low compared to its dark energy density. It was already heading for a Big Rip.

  The clock was still ticking down, and Alena needed to wipe out at least one more person if she wanted her shitty lump of universe to qualify for the next stage. There were still many simulations beyond her reach. In front of her, the Ancient Mathematician’s ever-expanding universe had reached the point where she could stand on the other side of it and be obscured from his vision by compressed superclusters and cosmic voids.

  He had done a wonderful job, too. None of the tricks she had used on the others would work here. Alena put her hand out and rubbed some superclusters between her fingers. It felt like fine white sand, and through that sensation the simulation provided comprehensive data about the structure between her fingers. His resolution score already lo
oked like it was going to be maxed out.

  His universe had grown so large and so complete that it was no longer appropriate for the simulation to render it inside the test center. It was just unfurling in front of them like some sort of primordial fern, and now she understood what the Proctor had meant when she said that “the interface will expand as your universe develops,” because she could see within each quasar and tidal tail a whole load of information that grew in depth and complexity as he worked.

  At the center of it, the Ancient Mathematician stood tinkering with a galaxy cluster. The bursts of nuclear fission were visible to her in this medium, as the star on his fingertip went supernova again and again with various tweaks. The light pulses lasted anywhere from milliseconds to hours, but the information received about how much time was passing was controlled by the timer that ticked down to the end of the test. To Alena’s eyes, his face was bathed in periodic flashes of light.

  With each adjustment, the Mathematician’s universe grew in both size and density. There weren’t any weak spots that Alena could see.

  The creator would be the weak spot, she decided.

  Working under time constraints, he had been using a shortcut. As he worked on the local phenomena, he applied changes he wanted across the universe, which was unbounded. The unboundedness was going to earn him extra points, but it was also making the thing difficult. So, he had underpinned the first three dimensions with a simple tiling of one triangle, two squares, and one hexagon that extended out in all directions.

  It made things easy for him because after he changed a patch of the honeycomb, he could apply those changes to any congruent patch, easily extending it out over the infinite universe. It made things easy for her because he was relying on the universe’s regularity, and that was something she knew how to break.

  Alena took her book, and the pen he had lent her, and sketched out a few iterations of the pattern. She took the two squares and pinched them into diamonds. She bisected the triangle and decomposed the hexagon into three equivalent rhombuses.