by Andrew Busey
“The original simulated universe has crashed and, well, burned.” He laughed, trying to add a little levity. “We need to find out why—or, rather, we need to find out if there is a why.”
Ajay couldn’t help but point out the massive elephant in the room. “You know, this would be a hell of a lot easier if we found a replacement for Stephen.”
Lisa and Catherine both glared at him.
“We’ll get to that as soon as possible, Ajay, but for now, we’ll make do with what we have,” Thomas replied with as little of a “you’re about to get yourself fired” voice as possible. After all, he did still need Ajay. He continued, “So, part of the big problem is that we’ve paid no attention whatsoever to the original universe. I don’t think anyone has looked at it in XX years. It’s probably full of cobwebs.
“Obviously it’s been running nonstop now for years with no oversight. Going forward, it would be prudent of us to modify our ‘Event System’ to work without cameras and patch it onto the rest of the universes. Unfortunately, that sort of thing makes for a really easy decision in hindsight. For now, all we can do is pull up the last few years of the SU and see if we can theorize what may have caused the failure.”
“Do we have any idea of what we’re looking for?” asked Mike.
“No.”
“Then how will we know when we’ve found it?”
“I don’t know.”
“So, what are we doing here?”
“All I know is Larry said there was no hardware-related reason why SU-0 crashed. As such, my hypothesis is that there must have been something going on inside the universe that caused it to overheat. There’s a ton of memory for it to expand, so it wasn’t that. It’s possible this could be something incredibly simple—a flaw in the original program, something like that,” Thomas said, hoping to prompt some sort of response. Unfortunately, the room was dumbfounded. Not a single member of the team was intimate enough with the code of the program to give a reasonable guess as to what caused the failure, so they just sat there—staring back at Thomas.
“All right, I can see the best option here is to simply load up the universe and start poking around. So let’s do that. Don, if you see any anomalies from the overall view of the universe or see a galaxy that looks ‘off,’ say something so we can dig through this as efficiently as possible. Everyone else, just look for anything strange or wrong.”
“Can do,” Don said, feeling useful again. He had felt less and less challenged since finding Alpha, so the opportunity to find something “wrong” presented him with a small challenge for now.
“It looks like the original universe is now almost twenty billion years old. Everyone, break off into pairs and go to other rendering rooms and start poking around. If you find anything, find me.”
***
Three days passed, and no one found anything. As a sort of cosmic Hail Mary, Don decided to fly through the universe from a zoomed out point of view that let him quickly see galaxies and the hints of stellar systems—while moving at very high speeds.
17320,311192,72189
17103,312014,72470
16250,315968,72608
“There!” Ajay said. “Stop moving!”
“What did you see?” asked Don.
“Go back!” Ajay shouted, like an excited little kid. “Go back!”
“What are we looking for?” Don asked as he backtracked.
“It’s not what I saw; it’s what I didn’t see. Zoom into the spiral cluster at the north end of the universe.”
Don did that, and still he saw nothing.
“There should be something there; instead, there’s nothing. Focus our view above that galaxy, and play history forward at one year per second.”
“Done,” replied Don.
SU-N0 Time: 18,908,992,321 Years
Don’s jaw nearly hit the floor. He snatched his phone from the desk and texted Thomas.
Don: rendering room 5, NOW
Thomas: on my way
***
Thomas rushed to Rendering Room 5, not even stopping to alert the other team members that Don may have found something. After all, he wouldn’t want everyone to be let down at once.
“Don, what is it? What did you find?” he said as he walked into the room.
“I’m…not sure,” said Don. “You just need to watch this.”
Don queued up the system to start playing the year 18,908,992,318. He set the speed to what would equate to week per second. The weeks, months, and years started ticking up, and Don zoomed in to a spiral galaxy.
SU-N0 Time: 18,908,992,321 Years, 7 months, 2 weeks
Thomas stared for a full five minutes. Finally, he managed to force his mouth to say the only words left in the English language he could remember:
“Holy shit.”
Author’s Notes
Writing a novel is hard and this is my first, so I am assuming it is the hardest. I wrote the first draft of this book in 2006. My primary motivation was to explore ideas around artificial intelligence. When I started writing I had a theory that a true artificial general intelligence (human level) was most likely to first appear in a closed system - like a game or a simulation. This idea of an artificial sentience, or a group of them, living in an artificial world was interesting to me and as I began to explore the idea and how it might come about I started to think about what the ramifications of such an environment might be. That became the genesis of Accidental Gods.
Since I started down this path both technology and philosophy have continued to evolve. Some of the most interesting developments revolve around scientific research into whether the universe might be a simulation or a hologram. When I started writing I was unaware that there was any academic research on these topics (even though Bostrom’s Simulation Argument was published in 2003). The best examples:
Fermi Lab is trying to prove (or disprove) whether our reality is a hologram: http://holometer.fnal.gov/
Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument proposes that we are very likely living in a simulation: http://www.simulation-argument.com/
Plank Lengths and living in a hologram: http://www.wired.com/2014/11/planck-length/
Living simulations: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429972.300-first-digital-animal-will-be-perfect-copy-of-real-worm.html#.VHzm4VXF_3o
I will attempt to update and discuss developments on Twitter (@andrewbusey) and andrewbusey.com.
Thanks
The most important thanks go to my mom. She encouraged me to read a lot and that is the most necessary prerequisite to writing. She pushed me, often with substantial resistance from me, to work hard in high school, which helped prepare me for the culture shock of going from a very small town to a major university. My love of reading (science and fiction and, of course, science fiction) has been with me my entire life.
Thanks to the many people have helped me make this book better. Eric Schild and Roger Siebert were critical in helping me through multiple edits and revisions of the book. Thanks to Ben McCraw for the cover. And yet more thanks to Shawn Ullman, Alyson Crater, Elena Schimming, John Miri, Nina Dobner, Ben Fox, Will Breetz, Jason Seats, Lloyd Walker, Ben Lamm, and many others for reading early drafts, encouraging me, and/or giving me critical feedback. This book has been a work in progress for about eight years so I apologize for not being able to list everyone who has helped. I also apologize to and thank my many friends who may see a little bit of themselves reflected in some of the characters.
Finally, thanks to the writers, philosophers, and scientists, both past and present, for helping educate, entertain, inform, and enlighten me.
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