by Andrew Busey
“Seventy-five percent,” Stephen reported.
This time, Larry called out a row and rack number, and Stephen got the briefest glimpse of Bleys rushing to his location to swap in another replacement.
“Ninety percent,” Stephen continued his count.
Three more bad computers were quickly replaced before Stephen yelled, “One hundred percent!”
Cheers went up.
Thomas asked, “So do we try to start universe processing now?”
“Let’s do it,” Stephen said. “Larry, are we all clear?”
“Ready!”
Stephen pushed another button. “The big bang begins with one button.”
Thomas laughed.
“It might take a few minutes to create the starting conditions,” Stephen said as they waited.
Ajay added, “It might take more than that. During the first era, that first unit of Planck time, it has to resolve a lot of open issues, so it might take a while to sort that out.”
Everyone was antsy, watching the monitor for any signs of progress.
Then there was a popping noise.
“What’s that?” Stephen shouted.
Smoke came from the back corner, near rack 1, row 1.
A siren wailed, and Larry yelled, “Get out!”
Everyone ran for the door. Gas hissed, and the halon gas fire suppression system kicked in. Larry shut the entire system down and followed everyone else out.
They watched from outside the room’s hallway window. The data center filled with the gas. The fires slowly went out.
Stephen frowned.
Ajay said, “Well, that wasn’t the big bang I expected.”
Everyone glared at him, even Thomas. Ajay shrugged as if to say, “What?”
Then Stephen laughed. “What was I thinking?”
Thomas asked him, “What do you mean?”
“It’s software. You should know as well as anyone. It never works the first time.”
Larry nodded. Bleys had already fled, as if being outside the data center was somehow dangerous—like sunlight to a vampire.
Ajay looked uncharacteristically introspective before he finally said, “I wonder if it worked the first time when our universe ‘turned on.’”
***
It turned out that two things had caused the smoky disaster of the team’s first attempt. First was a flaw in the cooling of the custom-built computers that did the low-level physics. Fortunately, that particular flaw was relatively easy to fix. Larry had thought he and Bleys might have to rebuild every computer, but a few spacing changes in the racks did the job. Each computer did require minor tweaks as a result. It was two months of tedious work, but it was a lot easier and took far less time than rebuilding all the computers from scratch.
The second problem was software-related and had really embarrassed Stephen. The system was supposed to be self-correcting and self-balancing but had aggressively clustered activity to gain a slight performance “improvement.” Instead of spreading the work evenly across the entire data center, the system had taxed only eight of the nearest computers with all the work. The heavy processing had not only caused those eight computers to get excessively hot but had also caused the other seventeen computers in the same rack to overheat, multiplying the problem. From there, it hadn’t taken long for the entire rack to go up in smoke, literally as well as figuratively.
After three months, the team had gotten the initial problems fixed and had worked out all the other kinks, and this time, when Stephen pushed the button, the system fired up perfectly and gave the right answer:
Universe Processing: Initiated
Big Bang: Complete
Simulated Universe: Initiated
SU Time: 0
Cheers went up.
“Wow!” Ajay said as if he hadn’t expected it to work.
Thomas beamed. “OK, tonight I’m taking everyone out to dinner at III Fork’s. Big steaks for everyone!” Then he thought for a moment and added, “Except for the vegetarians. You guys can have fish or vegetables. They have those, too.”
In the excitement, no one thought much about the next step: rendering the universe.
That took another three months to get right.
Chapter 5
Year 2
It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life.
—Captain Picard to Data, Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Peak Performance”
As he watched Thomas putting on the VR helmet, Stephen couldn’t help but blurt out, “What we need is a holodeck!”
Lisa asked, “You mean like Star Trek?”
“Next Generation,” Stephen added, “where you could see, hear, touch, and smell entire simulations. True virtual reality in every way.”
Ajay smirked and asked Lisa, “You’re a Trekkie?” He jutted his thumb at Stephen. “I expected it from him, but you?”
Thomas finished adjusting the helmet and said, “Render simulation from time zero.” He opened his eyes to the darkness, the VR helmet snuggly on his head.
“Beginning render,” Jenn said.
He could hear her typing on her keyboard, and Thomas saw in amber characters:
SU Time: 0
The readout, a reference to the simulated universe’s age, disappeared, and then Thomas watched as a small pinprick of light emerged in the middle of his vision and grew into a tiny sphere. In the blink of an eye, the tiny sphere jumped from the size of an LED to the size of a headlight and then continued at its previous expansion rate. Thomas would have thought it a computer glitch if Lisa and Ajay hadn’t forewarned him of that brief inflationary period.
Thomas said, “So Hawking and Penrose were right.”
“What’s that?” Jenn asked.
“Nothing or…” Thomas paused for a moment before continuing, “…at least our math works in here.”
Thomas pushed a small knob in his right hand forward, and his view zoomed in. The sphere grew rapidly in size and brightness, and he passed through the edge of the expanding universe and into its interior. Although he knew the renderer could not produce an actual tactile sensation, he had an uncanny sense of passing through a viscous barrier.
Inside was a dazzling sea of light, like he was adrift underwater with bioluminescent plankton in every direction. But it seemed the computer could not fully render it, and sometimes, it would clip to an infinite inky blackness.
Then it blinked out.
“What the hell?” Thomas shouted.
“Um, that’s it,” Jenn said.
“That was barely an hour.”
“Yeah. That’s all our systems can handle.”
Thomas pulled off the goggles and squinted in the bright light of the tiny room. Jenn was a blurry dark-headed mass in front of what looked like an ordinary PC.
“Didn’t we just spend millions of dollars on a state-of-the-art storage system with ten petabytes of storage?” Thomas asked.
“Yes.”
“And you’re telling me it can only hold an hour or so of rendered data?”
“Yes.”
Thomas did a quick calculation. “That’s two point seven terabytes per second. How did no one notice this before?” He rubbed his eyes.
“This is the first time we’ve run it,” Jenn said. “And this stuff is all new. It’s really hard to tell what it’s doing.”
“But universe processing is still running?”
“Of course,” Stephen said.
Jenn was clearer to Thomas then, brown eyes, closely filed nails poised above her keyboard.
Thomas asked her, “Then what’s it doing?”
“I don’t know. My guess is the universe is expanding, but it’s not getting written anywhere.”
Stephen nodded in agreement.
Thomas sighed. “Well, we can analyze the storage issues for our new universe now. Sounds like we’ve got two major hurdles: a storage problem and whatever the hell was going on in there. We’re going to need to find out
if that first ten minutes happened as expected, also, why the computer seemed to get confused on what it was supposed to be showing us.”
***
Ajay, Stephen, and Thomas watched the large screen in the rendering lab. It was showing a replay of the ten minutes recorded from the simulated universe.
Thomas asked, “So? Is that what’s supposed to happen?”
Stephen said, “Technically. Looks like it ran and recorded correctly…at least up until we ran out of storage space. In my opinion, the system did what it was supposed to.”
“Maybe,” Ajay said. “It looks like we are seeing what some call a ‘sizzling sea of quarks’ before things settled down. Though, technically speaking, light should not yet exist. I think this is just a computer being confused about what it should be drawing.”
Thomas asked, “So, you’re saying what I saw shouldn’t have even been visible?”
Ajay shrugged and set the VR helmet in the seat of the chair. “We will need to run much further into the future to know if the system is doing its job. Energy, not matter, is dominant for the first ten thousand years. Photons can’t move freely until about three hundred and seventy-seven thousand years after the big bang. How can the renderer show anything we can even understand or visualize before that much time has passed? We’ll start recognizing things once hydrogen starts condensing and clumping up to form the precursors to stars and galaxies. Stars don’t start being formed until the universe is about one hundred and fifty million years old. It’s possible we don’t even recognize things until our universe is a billion years old. Then…we might see something we are familiar with. That is, if the system is working as intended.”
“One hundred and fifty million years?”
“Probably. Maybe a billion.”
Stephen punched the back of the chair. “Damn it!”
Ajay flinched and squinted. “What?”
“That’s going to require a lot more storage than we anticipated.”
Thomas frowned.
Chapter 6
Year 2
A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.
—Anna Mary Robertson (“Grandma” Moses)
“Sit,” Thomas said and motioned toward the easy chair in the corner of the kitchen.
Larry plopped into the chair and folded one sandaled foot over his opposite knee. His other foot’s heel bounced rhythmically.
Thomas leaned back against the corner of the table. “Larry, we’ve got a big problem. We keep running out of memory.” He folded his arms. “We’ve been using these MC2 storage systems, almost a petabyte each, but they just aren’t enough to let the simulations run. We’re getting just shy of an hour out of each one. They’re expensive, and for our purposes, they’re very slow, which means…they’re not even remotely cost-effective.”
“Well, how much memory do we need?”
“About one hundred exabytes per simulated year—for four hundred million years, at least.”
“Whoa!” Larry’s upper foot slid back to the floor. Both were still. “Are you sure? That’s…” He scrunched his brows, his mouth moving in silent calculation. “Roughly speaking, eighty-five billion million gigabytes.”
“How come no one thought of this beforehand?”
“I don’t know.”
“Reminds me of the design process at our old company,” said Thomas. “Sometimes the dumb pseudo-obvious questions slip by. Like, ‘Hmm, I wonder how much memory it will take to store a year of time and space?’ Or ‘I wonder how much time it will take for us to really know whether it’s working?’ This all seems so obvious now.”
“Yeah,” Larry said and sighed. “The blindingly-obvious-in-hindsight questions that should have been asked.”
“So I need you to figure something out.”
“You want us to invent a newer, bigger, faster storage system.”
“Yup.”
“Just like that?” asked Larry.
“Just like that. After all, necessity is the mother of invention.”
“Am I on a budget?”
“Not really, but if you’re going to spend a lot, let me know first.” Thomas crossed his arms again. “Larry, this is critical. It’s our biggest roadblock right now.”
“I know, but it’s not like there’s some obvious answer just sitting there.”
“You should talk to Stephen. He’s a brilliant computer scientist.”
“Yeah, he’s super smart. Sometimes he just doesn’t have a solid grounding in reality. But I’ll definitely bounce some ideas off him.”
“That’s why I hired you, Larry. You get things done—and that’s why you brought Bleys along. Figure this out. I don’t have to tell you how high the stakes are.”
***
The next day, Thomas called Stephen and Ajay into Bohrs.
“You know about the storage issue.”
Stephen said, “Indeed. We didn’t really design this thing to be storage-efficient. A focus on the big bang itself really doesn’t need that much simulated time.”
Thomas paused. Ajay and Stephen could both tell he had something important to say. Thomas finally spoke. “So…I’ve been thinking we should let it run as far forward as we can.”
“Why?” asked Ajay.
“I’m interested in seeing what could happen. We could extract real, working models of stars, look for black holes. All sorts of stuff could be discovered.”
Ajay nodded. Stephen frowned.
Thomas said, “And, most importantly, it would be pretty useful as a reality check for how accurately we’ve built the system.”
“Ah, yes,” Ajay nodded more vigorously, glancing at Stephen. “The longer the program runs and the longer things seem to behave roughly as they would in our own universe, the more it proves that our underlying system mimics our own reality. Any early mistakes should be amplified over millions of years and would likely show up as glaringly obvious anomalies.”
“Exactly,” Thomas said. “So I want to run fifteen billion years.”
Stephen stood up immediately. “I knew it! I knew it!” popped out of his mouth before he could stop it. He sat back down and, as calmly as he could, asked, “You want to see if life develops, don’t you?”
Thomas nodded.
Thomas expected Stephen would eventually figure this out—just not as quickly as he did. Stephen was usually oblivious to the implications of things outside the core work. Thomas guessed that Stephen must have plunged into this project like few others. “Just don’t tell anyone yet,” Thomas said. “We’re at least a year or two from having the storage capacity to do it anyway. Which brings us back to my original point. Now that we’re thinking in the long term, is there anything you can do to decrease the storage requirements?”
Stephen ran his hands through his hair, not noticing the ever so slightly receding hairline, before standing up and speaking. “Two options come to mind. First, we could develop some compression mechanism.” He picked up a dry-erase marker. “Or second, since we’re stepping through time in single-Planck-unit increments, we could skip a few increments.” He drew a series of a dozen vertical, short, parallel lines on the board. “Right now, each of these ticks is a slice of time that is recorded—the entire state of the universe. Storing every tick is expensive. We could store every tenth tick.” He swapped the marker for the eraser and wiped away the second through tenth lines. “And if we ever need to, we could reconstruct the intervening ones.” He put the eraser back and brushed his hands. “There is some risk that skipping ticks and reconstructing skipped ones won’t always work because of a certain amount of uncertainty in the system. We’re just not sure how much uncertainty there is.”
Ajay said, “By the way, I think this represents one of the biggest potential holes in our strategy. If we can reconstruct the intervening ticks, it means everything i
s completely predictable, which means either that life won’t happen in our simulated universe or that everything is preordained.”
“Preordained is a powerful word,” Stephen said. “Predictable is more like it. Predictability versus uncertainty.”
“Preordination. Predictability. Uncertainty.” Ajay grinned mischievously. “At the quantum level, those words lose any distinction they may have.”
Thomas asked, “Are you guys talking about the Heisenberg uncertainty principle?”
“Yes,” Ajay said. “Heisenberg said, ‘The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa.’”
Stephen said, “I love physicists. They always make things sound new and complex. Why didn’t he just say, ‘If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, did it make a noise?’”
Thomas laughed.
“It’s not the same thing,” Ajay said. “Heisenberg is saying that measurement impacts the results. The tree-falling thing is more about a philosophy of reality—if there is no observer, can anyone say with any certainty that it is really happening? Which is kind of interesting because it fits with our model—processing the universe is vastly different from observing it.”
Stephen smirked. “So if we haven’t rendered something in our universe, did it really happen?”
Ajay shrugged. “Anyway, what Heisenberg is saying is that you can’t get a completely accurate answer because you can’t truly observe anything at the quantum level in complete independence of influencing it. Observation or measurement at the quantum level itself inherently distorts that answer as you find it. The act changes the result. That’s a lot of what quantum physics is trying to do: create a statistical model for things we cannot measure.”
“But that isn’t true in our system,” Stephen said. “Our observations do not inherently affect the system. It’s like we’re looking at things from a higher dimension. Our observations and measurements in no way impact the progression of the system.”