Gamers and Gods: AES

by Matthew Kennedy

She didn't answer him immediately. Her mind whirled. Could he be telling the truth, about being an alien? It seemed unlikely. As a scientist, she had always assumed that first contact with extraterrestrial life would happen either by them entering our solar system...or us visiting them. It couldn't happen in a dream; it would be indistinguishable from wish-fulfillment, mere fantasy.

  But what about meeting in the space of experience? As a physicist she knew many ways of describing reality, all equally valid. To the mathematically-minded, a dimension was simply a parameter you used to measure or describe events. It didn't have to be a coordinate in 'real' space like (x,y,z) in 3D space. It could also be temperature, or an angle of rotation, or even pressure, such as in 3D gas phase diagrams that showed all the possible combinations of pressure, volume, and temperature for a given quantity of water or helium or whatever. In statistics, political consultants often spoke of the conservative-liberal 'axis', the income axis, and the education axis, all of which could be used to describe the mental 'position' of a potential voter or candidate for office.

  In her own subfield, Heisenberg's uncertainty relation could be expressed in terms of position and linear momentum. It could also be expressed in terms of angle and rotational momentum. Or even, as Einstein pointed out, in terms of energy content and the time it takes to measure it. That last one was particularly important to her. It was used routinely by physicists to estimate the range (or lifetime) of virtual 'messenger' particles; once you knew how much energy had to be 'borrowed' to create them, you knew how far they could travel before they had to disappear again when the loan came due.

  All of this flashed through her mind in a second. He was still staring at her, waiting. “Hold on,” she said. “I'm thinking about it.”

  All right. Suppose we came to a solar system with an inhabited planet, one with an advanced electronic and computational-based technology, and for some reason, never mind what, we could not simply land and say hello. We can't physically visit them...and they can't come to us, either. What would we do? Give up?

  Or would we meet them in their electronic dreams?

  Suppose they had virtual reality. Suppose that our own technology is so advanced that we can tap into theirs at will. If it was the only way to make contact, wouldn't we do it?

  All right. What he was saying was not impossible. She could not actually rule it out. That meant there were at least three possible explanations for Am-heh's behavior:

  One. He could be a human who was either pretending, or so crazy he did not even know he was pretending. Like she had been when Dr. Wu had first put her in his medical link bed. That seemed likely to her.

  Two. He could be an AI, an artificial intelligence that had somehow infiltrated into PanGames and didn't know it was a simulation wandering inside a simulation. Like a dream within a dream. That seemed less likely, but she had been isolating herself a long time. Maybe they had finally created self-aware computers.

  Three. He could be exactly what he said, an alien mind, deliberately or accidentally introduced into the system, who had no idea that it was a mere simulation. This also seemed unlikely, but it would explain his unfamiliarity with sailing ships and rice paddies.

  Great. Now all she needed was a believable way to tell which one of the three cases she was dealing with. She almost laughed when she realized she was dealing with a classic issue in Quantum Mechanics: the measurement problem, or, as some put it, the issue of the collapse of the wave function.

  Flip a coin. Let it fall on the floor and don't look at it. How did it land, heads-up, or heads-down? Heads or tails? Don't peek! Can you answer the question? The answer is both...until you look.

  Until you look down and see the coin, you have to admit that you don't know which it is. The way physicists admit they don't know is to describe the coin as being in a 'mixed state', a mixture of heads and tails. Heads and tails are the two eigenfunctions of the measurement, the 'characteristic values'; they span all possibilities of the event (as long as we assume it has not managed to balance on its rim). You could write the set of possible results of looking as { heads, tails } or you could use 'bra and ket' notation and write the mixed state as

  current state = |heads> + |tails>

  Performing a measurement on the system by looking down at the coin cleaves the timeline into two futures, because once you look at it, the coin can no longer be in both states. It has to be one or the other if you can see it. Physics says you have 'collapsed' the wave function. One possibility is now 100% true and the other is now 0% true...or the other way around.

  All right. For the question of Am-heh's state, there were three possible values; he was a 3-sided coin. All she had to do was figure out what to look for that would collapse his wave function of three possibilities into one and only one actuality for her.

  Mentally she slapped herself. All this woolgathering! She was over-thinking the problem. All she had to do is find a way to tell the difference between a nutcase, an AI, and an alien. It's not a physics problem! It's a psychological problem. Think, Lizzie!

  And then she had it. She opened her eyes.

  “We need to talk about your childhood,” she told him.

  Chapter 54: Aes: an unexpected gift