Accidental Gods

by Andrew Busey

  —Aldous Huxley

  The next day, Thomas and Lisa showed up as promised. Ajay showed up, too, probably more to harass Lisa than because he cared about seeing the tour.

  Mike and Stephen were waiting for them in Rendering Room 1, the largest.

  SU-N11 Time: 496 PC [+13,508,915,714 Years]

  “Let’s go live,” Stephen said and took them into the city.

  He positioned them high above the city, so everyone could get an aerial view before zooming in further. He was pretty sure Lisa and Ajay had not spent any time in the city. He wasn’t sure about Thomas. But he figured it would be a nice way to give them an overview.

  “On the east side of the river, there is only limited development. You can see the five completed pyramids—the sixth is nearing completion. You can see how the workers are still building there, but on the eastern side? The part of the pyramid visible to the city is complete.”

  Mike added, “We think they do this to conceal from the city how long it will be before completion.”

  “Interesting,” Ajay said. “Wouldn’t expect that in a simulation.”

  Lisa glared at him.

  “On the west side of the river, you can see the city anchored to the north by the pharaoh’s palace.”

  “Pharaoh?” Thomas asked.

  “Yes,” Mike answered. “We decided to use that notation rather than king or emperor because he shares many of the characteristics that were typical of pharaohs—most significantly, the fact that he appears to be viewed as a living god. We also went with Egyptian nomenclature in many cases because the civilization seems to most closely resemble them. Technologically, they’re pretty close to the Egyptian culture between three thousand and two thousand BC—early Bronze Age.”

  “Makes sense.”

  “South of the pharaoh’s palace is the city. You can get a good feel for the activity from up here. There are several active markets. Farther south and west, you can see a patchwork of farmland. They’ve got reasonably developed irrigation systems, which is actually a departure from the Egyptians. The Nile has a substantial floodplain, so irrigation wasn’t as common—it was more common in the Tigris-Euphrates area that is now Iraq.”

  “Mike likes to play historian,” Stephen commented. “Don’t get him going on how tall the pyramids are here versus in our world.”

  Mike smiled. “It’s fascinating stuff.”

  “So let’s head down and meet Nefirti,” Stephen said as he guided them gliding down toward the row of houses on the river.

  They landed in the courtyard that Mike and Stephen knew so well. Ajay and Lisa studied the tile mosaic on the floor. Stephen and Mike shared a conspiratorial grin.

  Ajay let out a small yelp and jumped when the large cat walked out from the shadows in the corner of the room.

  “What the hell is that doing here?”

  “Don’t worry,” Stephen said with obvious affection for the cat, “that’s just Muu Muu.”

  Mike added, “Yeah, they’ve domesticated large cats instead of dogs and smaller cats.”

  Lisa studied the cat, which, almost as if he knew he was being watched, fully extended the claws on one of his paws and diligently cleaned them. Then Nefirti bounded through the outer door and into the courtyard from the street, mother in tow.

  She skipped to a halt in the courtyard when she saw Muu Muu and roughly scratched the cat between his ears. In thanks, the cat gave her hand a big lick and then returned to bathing himself. The mother stopped, too, holding a bundle in one hand. She tussled Nefirti’s hair with the other, looking down at her daughter and their cat and smiling. She took Nefirti’s hand and led her into the house. Muu Muu swished his tail across the tiles a few times before following them.

  The team followed them in.

  Lisa looked uneasy as they entered the house, but whether from walking through the wall or from the invasion of privacy, it wasn’t clear.

  “We do it all the time,” Stephen said. “You get used to it.”

  She nodded and then after a brief hesitation said, “So you just go into people’s houses whenever you feel like it?”

  “Yep. We felt a little weird about it at first, but now it’s no big deal. We just look away or go somewhere else if they’re doing something especially private.”

  They watched for twenty minutes as the family went about its daily business. A servant briefly entered and left.

  “Can we fast-forward?” Lisa asked.

  “No,” Stephen said. “We’re on the time horizon of the SU.”

  “Ah, I didn’t know we were at the horizon,” she said and then mumbled almost to herself, “You can rewind. Skipping back through lives…” While her voice faded, her mind added, “How different our world might be if we could rewind our lives. Especially if we could see the perspectives of others around us.”

  “Yep,” Stephen said. “We can go back as far as we want.”

  “Doesn’t this get boring, though?” Lisa asked.

  “We don’t do this every day,” Mike jumped in. “Usually, we just check in for a bit and see what’s interesting, skip back to the last time point where we watched, and then start moving forward looking for specific things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well,” Mike continued, “we’ve mostly been looking for conversations that might reveal new words. We’ve gotten a lot of the language figured out, but there are still weird gaps.”

  “Oh.”

  Mike said, “We haven’t quite gotten the written language cracked yet, but we are very close.”

  Stephen asked, “So what do you think now?”

  Lisa said, “It is hard to refute. The mother seems to love the daughter and the cat. They all seem so natural. And some of the activity is so mundane, it makes it hard to imagine that it’s not real.” She paused. “It’s almost like looking through a window into the past of our own world.”

  Everyone seemed to expect a witty “I told you so” from Ajay, but it never came.

  Mike noticed that Thomas’s expression had seemed to change while they had been in here. He wondered if maybe Thomas had been even more of a skeptic than Lisa. Mike thought that anyone who spent time in here would see that it was real.

  After a few more moments of silence, Lisa said, “OK. OK, she is so cute. I see why you guys love her like a daughter.”

  Right after Lisa finished speaking, Nefirti bounded across the room to Muu Muu, lost her footing, and landed in the large cat’s soft fur. Muu Muu seemed content to break her fall.

  The room filled with laughter.

  Chapter 33

  Week 9: Tuesday

  Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

  —Charles Darwin

  Thomas waited in the Hawking conference room for Jules to bring in a man named Vince Martin. Thomas dreaded this meeting, but he had been forced to take it by one of the regents. While IACP was largely independent, they still lived under the University of Texas umbrella and sometimes had to do things Thomas wasn’t very happy about. It pissed him off that this guy had applied pressure to force a meeting.

  Soon, the door opened and Jules ushered a man into the room.

  Thomas stood and introduced himself¸ though he didn’t offer his hand.

  “Vince Martin,” the man said, “from the Center for Intelligent Design Research.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Thomas lied. He gestured for Vince to take a seat.

  Vince assumed that Thomas had probably taken this meeting under duress. In hindsight, he regretted using the regent connection and felt he probably should have tried a more personal approach up front, but it was too late now.

  “Look,” Vince said and tried a grin and a short sigh of a laugh, “I want you to know that I think there are a bunch of morons in the intelligent design community.”

  Thomas smiled at that. “Well, we hav
e something in common, then.”

  “A lot of what is purported to be intelligent design is really just an attempt to disguise creationism as a scientific discipline—largely with the purpose of shoehorning it into schools.”

  This wasn’t what Thomas had expected.

  “So what about you, Mr. Martin?”

  “Call me Vince. I believe in intelligent design—that a designer or a group of designers architected our universe. Now, this could have been just setting up the big bang, it could have been manipulating evolution…Who knows?”

  “So, why did you want this meeting?” Thomas said, hoping to find out the breadth of Vince’s knowledge of what his team had been doing here.

  “I’ve heard that you all have created some kind of artificial life while researching the origins of our universe…” Vince paused at this moment to see if Thomas would react. He did not, so Vince continued, “My friends at UT tell me that the process required some…intervention on your team’s behalf to make it happen. Your interventions are different than what a lot of people in the intelligent design community would argue as ‘intelligent design.’ Some ID proponents say the designer—almost exclusively God in these circles—actually designed things like eyes, flagella, et cetera. They say these things could never appear naturally through a process like evolution.”

  “And you, Mr. Martin, do you disagree with that?”

  “Right. I call that microintelligent design. That group pretty much doesn’t believe in evolution or natural processes. They think God designed everything and that it is impossible for stuff like that to appear by ‘chance’ or ‘accident’—which is basically their interpretation of evolution. That is not what I believe. I believe in macrointelligent design. A designer or creator set things in motion, perhaps through an event like the big bang and lets nature run its course. My friend at UT says you all ‘nudged’ things in a direction to promote the creation of life—since nature didn’t seem to be getting the job done on its own, you just gave it a little push to get it on the right track.” Vince swept a palm up and out, as if to say, “Case in point.”

  “So, in your case,” Thomas said, “do you view the designer or creator as the Christian God?”

  “Yes, but don’t hold it against me. I’ll freely admit that I believe the intelligent designer is the Christian God.” Vince smiled. “What is Jesus, after all, other than the nudge of all nudges?”

  Thomas frowned. “Why are you here?”

  “Because I’ve been told you have basically created a universe with intelligent life in it, right here in your office. If that is true, it is the closest thing we have, scientifically or academically, to make a case for intelligent design.”

  “But we didn’t design anything. We manipulated things to meet our ends.”

  “You designed the initial system and the parameters that instigated the big bang, did you not?”

  “Yes. I’ll grant that that did involve design.”

  “So, there you have it, intelligent design—in your universe. And I would argue that your systematic manipulation of events with the intent of achieving a certain outcome is another form of intelligent design. Maybe you didn’t have a detailed design, but you had a desired outcome.”

  “I concede. You could construe what we have theoretically done to be intelligent design.” Thomas crossed one ankle over his knee and folded his hands in his lap. “So what do you want?”

  “We want to fund a research program.”

  Vince smiled, recalling academics’ usual reaction to the taste of money, falling all over themselves at this point. They might not like his ideology, but they liked his money. He kept smiling.

  “Really?” Thomas asked without budging. “Can you give me an overview of this program and its goals?”

  “Sure.” Vince’s smile disappeared. He was surprised by the nonchalant response. “What we would like to see is a statistically significant number of simulated universes run in parallel to see if life ever develops without intervention, or nudges, as you call them.”

  “What would that tell you?” Still, Thomas didn’t move.

  “It will give us at least a basic scientific framework for showing that ID might be a legitimate theory.”

  “But wouldn’t that experiment be partially flawed, because we already did do some ‘intelligent design’ by the very nature of starting the simulated universes through a big bang that we defined?”

  That wasn’t an issue Vince had considered. His mouth felt dry. He wondered if he had been too reliant on his secret helper instead of thinking this through on his own.

  “Well,” Vince said, “we can’t control for everything, so we can work around that issue. I think if we basically take a time when planets are developing, say eleven billion years into the universe through fourteen billion years, then we’ll have a large enough sample size to see if life develops on its own. We could also look at whether habitable planets develop.”

  “I see.”

  “Is that possible?”

  “Let’s say it is.”

  Still, Thomas hadn’t moved. Vince started to worry about his own gestures and tone, that he might seem too eager. He tried to mentally calm himself.

  Vince leaned back in his chair and asked, “How much would a project like that cost?”

  “How many universes do you want?”

  “A hundred?”

  Thomas said, “It would cost hundreds of millions with the hardware and space necessary to run them and the people required to search them.” He smiled, knowing this man Vince couldn’t possibly extrapolate actual costs.

  “Search them?”

  Thomas realized his mistake then and tried to think through how to redirect the conversation.

  “Habitable planets, that sort of thing. You might have noticed that the universe is quite large.”

  “Aren’t you omniscient?”

  “Nope. I’m just a person.”

  Vince laughed. “You got me.”

  “So am I correct in assuming you don’t have hundreds of millions of dollars for this program?” Thomas wanted to shut this conversation down.

  “True,” Vince said, “but we have tens of millions,” and he readied himself for wide eyes and outstretched palms, but still—still—Thomas didn’t bite.

  Instead, Thomas said, “We’re going to have to pass.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t even want to think about what kind of mark taking your money would put on us.”

  Vince sighed. He’d heard this before, but usually the need for money outweighed any hypothetical risks. “We can probably find ways to work around any potential risk on that front.”

  “How?”

  “Ambiguous funding entities.”

  “If anything comes out that remotely looks promising on the intelligent design front, you’ll promote the hell out of it.” Thomas laughed at his pun before continuing, “And the connection will come out. The fact that we attempted to obfuscate it would make it look even worse.”

  Thomas crossed the other ankle now. He leaned farther back, and his eyes narrowed. Vince knew there was no chance of swaying this man.

  So Vince asked, “Can we have early access to any research you publish?”

  “Apparently, you already do.” Thomas’s jaw muscles knotted up. “Who gave you what little amount of information you already have?”

  “I can’t tell you that.”

  Thomas said, “This meeting is over,” and immediately stood to leave.

  “Can I see it?” Vince asked.

  “See what?”

  “Your simulated universe.”

  Thomas pointed to the plasma screen in the lobby. “That’s it.” And he left.

  Vince looked at the roiling lava that covered the landscape, punctuated by the occasional volcanic eruption. He was not the first to compare it to hell.

  Chapter 34

  Week 9: Tuesday

  If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

&
nbsp; —Voltaire

  On the screen were images of several panels from the main temple. Stephen and Mike had selected these specific panels because they appeared to convey the Alphans’ creation story. Almost every intelligent civilization developed creation myths that often became the foundation of its religious system and had dramatic influence over its culture. This case was different in that Thomas’s team actually knew the real creation story.

  “Watch this!” Stephen said excitedly, rubbing his hand back and forth across his bald head. He had won the coin toss, so he was presenting his part first.

  The core group was assembled for this.

  He showed a wall panel painted with the Alphan symbols and clicked the mouse.

  A square surrounded the first symbol and then moved to the second, then the third. Soon, the square was zooming through them all.

  On a second screen, the symbols were reorganized, isolated from the wall, and displayed on a white background, appearing more like a font than symbols painted on a wall. This screen was split, the Alphan characters occupying half, the other half blank.

  Words started to appear in English.

  “Holy shit!” Ajay blurted out.

  Stephen practically beamed.

  In seconds, the blank area was full—the wall panel’s words, revealed.

  “Mike and the computer finally figured out the written language, and I created a program to identify the symbols and translate them automatically.”

  Thomas was nodding with a big smile.

  Stephen said, “It’s on the core menus now, so you can activate it to translate anything written in this language. By the way, I’m calling the program Nefirti.”

  “Cool,” Lisa said. “How is she doing?”

  “Great. She’s nearly twelve now.”

  “Wow. They grow up so quick,” Lisa said with a grin.

  Stephen said, “No kidding!”

  Thomas asked, “What have you learned?”