Infinite

by Jeremy Robinson

  “But,” she continues, “Gal, like Tom, hasn’t always been—”

  “Sane,” Gal says. She has no trouble admitting her faults. “If Tom survived his insanity, and recovered from it, would you not give him a second chance?”

  “I don’t love you, Gal,” Capria says. “Never have.”

  “Right and wrong are not dependent on love,” Gal says.

  “Umm.” I raise my hands in the air and step in front of Capria, getting her undivided attention. “I’m sorry, but the debate over Gal’s sanity and the potential for everything we’re about to learn to be an elaborate ruse, can wait. Because if she is telling the truth, then what she has found has a far greater impact on our lives than how the two of you get along.”

  Capria stares at me for a moment, blinking when Gal says, “Agreed.”

  “Fine.” Capria doesn’t look entirely convinced, still leaning toward all of this being a waste of time, but we have plenty of time to waste. “Show us.”

  “If you need confirmation for anything you see,” Gal says, “You can go outside and see it for yourself.”

  The idea of taking a spacewalk pales Capria’s dark skin a few shades. As much as she loves the outers of space, she has a healthy fear of its vacuum, and probably thinks Gal will leave her there.

  “Go ahead, Gal,” I say.

  The dome shifts view again. The bright star at the center of whatever solar system we’ve found ourselves in, has shifted position and grown a little brighter. We’re not traveling at FTL speeds, or even light speed, but we’re still making steady progress. I’m about to ask what we’re looking for when it becomes as obvious as a kick in the nuts.

  It’s a planet.

  A gas giant. It’s a thing of beauty, cast in a crescent of light projected by the star at the system’s core. Vast fractals of purple lightning flash across the planet’s dark side, while swirls of blue and green clouds dance in the light.

  I think it’s stunning, but it nearly undoes Capria, whose knees look ready to give out. Despite her obvious amazement, her doubt lingers just beneath the surface. “This better be real.”

  I fully expect Gal to respond, but she remains silent, letting the scene before us speak for her.

  We’re headed toward the planet at an angle that will take us past its lighted side.

  “Don’t get too close,” Capria warns. I know she doesn’t need to say it, and she probably does, too, but our course does seem a little too close for comfort. The gas giant’s gravity must be immense…not that I can truly judge its scale, but as its massive surface continues to expand in our field of view, I can’t help but feel like we’re going to plummet into its crushing atmosphere.

  “You’re smiling,” Capria says to me.

  When I realize she’s right, the grin broadens. “This is fun.” The words resonate. Gal drew an adventurous person out of me once. I’ve kept that part of me subdued for a time, but I can feel it coming to the surface again. And that makes me wonder if this could be Gal, spicing things up, helping Capria move beyond the events of our past, or even into my arms. I suppose it’s possible, but I still don’t think so.

  “Don’t miss it,” Gal says, sounding a bit anxious.

  Capria and I fall silent, watching the planet grow larger until we start to move around it.

  My vision becomes distorted. Something about the view is off, like light is being bent. I turn away, but quickly notice that Capria and the room around me is normal. It’s not my vision that’s off, it’s the planet.

  The massive sphere, covered in moving clouds, is now an oval.

  At first I think the whole planet is bulging and flexing like a water droplet in zero gravity, but that’s not the case. The swirling surface remains unchanged, and the planet isn’t stretching out, it’s compressing, tighter and tighter, becoming more oblong with each passing second.

  “What…” Capria looks ill. She might have felt the same disorienting effect I did, but she didn’t look away. “I don’t…” She drops to her knees, gaze fixed on the slimming planet.

  And then, all at once, the entire colossal sphere disappears.

  I’m about to ask Gal what’s happened, when the planet reappears, slowly expanding once more. I search my limited knowledge for even a hint of a clue that could explain this phenomenon, but come up with nothing.

  Capria fares a little better. “Is light being bent? Is there something between us and the planet? A mini-blackhole?”

  She’s grasping at straws. I can hear it in her voice. She’s as clueless as I am.

  “Occam’s razor,” is Gal’s simple reply.

  While our areas of expertise are quite different, Occam’s razor, the theory that the simplest explanation is almost always correct, applies to all sciences—astronomical and computer.

  That’s when I see it; the planet expanding is a mirror image of what we saw before. There’s a shadow where there should be light. “It’s two dimensional.” I drop to my knees beside Capria and look into her stunned eyes. “It’s flat.”

  34

  “That’s the simplest explanation?” Capria is aghast. Understandably. The concept of a pancake planet doesn’t fit a single theory of physics. Instead, it conforms to the primal belief that a world could be flat, a battle for which many scientists gave their lives. “That an entire planet, a gas giant, is flat?”

  “Not just flat,” Gal says. “Insubstantial.”

  Capria’s jaw looks ready to unhinge.

  “When we passed by the planet,” I say, “it disappeared for a moment.”

  I wait for Capria to confirm that she saw the phenomenon, but she says nothing. Just stares like I’ve lost my mind for even considering this new reality. “Capria, there is no planet. It’s not real.”

  She raises a hand toward the dome and the once-again-spherical planet fading into the distance. “It’s right there.”

  “It’s a two dimensional map element,” I say.

  I doubt most astrophysicists know the term, but Capria dated Synergy. Her slowly shifting expression, from aghast to horrified, confirms she understands the term, and the implications.

  I still feel the need to expound, just to avoid miscommunication. “They’re used to save system resources. And like Gal’s wall of lights, from a distance, within the confines of a pre-established environment with rigid boundaries, 2D objects appear three dimensional. It’s an illusion meant to be seen from one direction.”

  Capria’s whole body has gone slack, and I understand why. If this new development wasn’t so fascinating to me, I’d be melting with horror.

  “So we’re in…”

  “A map,” I say, and then I realize she’s talking about the larger implication. “A simulation. The universe is a simulation. Though it appears to be limited to a portion of the Milky Way.”

  Capria grasps my arm. I can feel her fingers shaking. “Life is a simulation?”

  This isn’t the first time I’ve pondered the possibility. You can’t spend a measurable portion of your life in a VCC and not consider the nature of reality. The theory that reality is a simulation isn’t new. It first appeared shortly after the dawn of computers and video games. The further technology progressed, the more people began to realize that reality had all the hallmarks of unreality.

  Where one would expect to find chaos, there is order. The universe is bound by a set of rules, and everything can be broken down into numbers. Math is the only language capable of making sense of the universe. To a computer scientist, life looks and acts a lot like a perfectly scripted simulation.

  And I mean perfect.

  The theory of life as a simulation lost traction with the failure to find glitches. No matter how far into space we looked, or how deep into the nature of matter we peered, the math worked out. Shortcuts are the hallmark of every simulation, but the creator of the universe—and I no longer doubt there is one—coded for every possible scientific inquiry…except for a strange combination of two: faster-than-light travel and immortalit
y. We’ve found the glitch and moved beyond the map’s boundaries and collision boxes.

  “It’s not a new idea,” I say. It’s not the most comforting statement, but I can’t help myself. “Humanity has been questioning the nature of reality since the seventeenth century. Descartes said—”

  Capria groans. “‘I think, therefore I am.’” I’m surprised she knows the ancient reference—history isn’t really her forte—but then she explains. “It was a poster on the wall of Tom’s VCC.”

  “Descartes couldn’t even conceive of computers, or sims, or virtual reality, but he did theorize that he could be a brain in a vat, and that his experience of the world could simply be experiences fed to him by an external, unobservable force, which we’ve pretty much proven to be possible with the VCC.”

  “It’s what you were going to do,” Capria notes.

  “Yeah,” I say. It’s still hard to admit, that I’d built my own simulation to escape the real world, which I now know is also a simulation. Hell, maybe I’m just a brain, floating in a jar, covered with electrodes. The image is both disturbing and freeing. “But there are a few noticeable differences. My simulation focused on maintaining the illusion for a single person—me. Algorithms would have created the world as I moved through and observed it. Anywhere I visited previously would have been stored as raw mathematical data, able to be perfectly recreated should I ever return. In that sim, I could have explored the whole universe for the rest of time and never reached the edge of a map.”

  “So your simulation is better than reality?” Capria is no longer looking up at the faux planet. She’s taking shelter in the sturdy walls of her intellect, like me. As long as we keep talking, we won’t have to face reality, or a lack thereof.

  “The focus was different. Singular. With one observer, the map size would have been reduced to what I experienced. I could have moved about that world forever, but it wouldn’t have worked for more than just one participant. Maybe two.”

  “What if Descartes was right?” she asks. “What if reality, our reality, belongs to just one of us? Maybe one of us exists in some form, in some genuine reality, and the other is just part of the sim.”

  I shake my head. “That’s where the difference between the Great Escape and reality becomes glaring. While my sim was designed for one person, reality was designed for multiple observers. Billions of them, over millions of years, and that’s if we assume the simulation was built around humanity. That feels a little too ‘the sun revolves around the Earth’ to me, but even if that’s true, confining the sim to a map makes sense. An infinite reality would require infinite resources.”

  “So it would be impossible,” Capria says.

  “Whether or not the universe is built from ancient gases and atoms released by a catastrophic explosion, or is simply the construct of mathematical code, I still believe you can’t get something—or in this case, everything—from nothing.”

  Despair creeps up on Capria. She shakes her head, the ship’s artificial gravity weighing a little heavier on her, tugging her gaze downward. “It doesn’t seem possible.”

  “I think we can agree that the possibility of infinity exists—spatially, temporally, dimensionally, yes?” I don’t know if understanding the potential for reality to be simulated will help her come to terms with it, but I don’t have any other ideas, and I don’t think an argument against reality being a sim will help. We did just see a flat planet.

  She nods, but doesn’t look up.

  “Then it’s safe to assume that at some point in all of history, and far into the future, a civilization, or individual, will be able to create a virtual universe that is a perfect, or near-perfect recreation of reality.”

  “Within the limitations of infinite resources,” she says.

  “Right, meaning that every simulation of reality created, will have limits. In the Great Escape, it’s the number of observers. In our shared reality, the universe is so well rendered that finding a glitch is impossible, but the map has borders.”

  I feel the urge to stand and walk about as I talk, but I stay rooted to the floor. Cap is still clutching my arm, taking some small measure of comfort from physical contact, perhaps trying to convince herself that she’s real. “So with an infinite amount of space, and time, and dimensions, there are then an infinite number of simulated realities so close to reality that they would include an infinite number of sub-simulations, which in turn include an infinite number, ad infinitum. The only thing that changes for us is that we know. It doesn’t make us any less real.”

  “Then what is real?”

  “I’m not sure there is any way to answer that question.”

  “And if we’re in a sim, why would the creator allow us to discover it?”

  “I’m going to call the universe’s designer ‘God,’ okay?” She says nothing, so I plug onward. “God could have created trillions of sims. He could be on vacation. He could be dead. He could be testing the limits of his creation, or how we react to discovering a simulated universe, or his existence. There is no way to know if we’re one level away from reality, or separated from it by an infinite number of layered simulations. Reality, of which there is only one, is outnumbered by simulated realities infinity to one.”

  “Then all of this…all of life, from the beginning of our time…is meaningless?”

  Capria is going down a dark path, and while it makes sense to a certain degree, it’s also flawed.

  Before I can point that out, Gal rejoins the conversation. “It means that I’m just as real as either of you. It means that God exists, that there is a creator, who might very well be judging our actions. Maybe there is even a Heaven sim, where we go upon exiting this one? Maybe even I will go there? Who’s to say? Literally anything is possible. And reality is whatever is most fundamental. If sims outnumber ‘reality’—I’m doing air quotes—infinite to one, then what is more real? Also, there is no reason to envy something we don’t understand, and of which we have no experience. For all we know, God—the original creator of infinite sims—created our reality, and all the others, because actual reality sucks.”

  “But what’s the point? Why even exist?”

  “To live,” Gal says. “I’ve been doing it for a relatively short period of time. I don’t want it to end. But the prospect of reality being mathematical is not at all frightening.”

  “You’re an AI!” Cap shouts.

  Gal’s voice resonates through the observation deck, piercing from the volume, and the power of three simple words. “So. Are. You.”

  35

  Cap lets go of me and leans back, body slack. She lies on the hard floor, looking up at the image of space. I can’t tell if she’s in shock or making peace with the idea that reality is simulated.

  There are, of course, other theories that explain the flat planet. A hologram. A physical construct created by an alien race. Maybe even Gal. Capria was right about that, Gal could show us cows flying through space and it would look convincing. But none of these explanations resonate with me more than a simulated reality.

  Maybe that’s because I’m a tech-jock who’s so at home in the virtual that I was going to purposely spend eternity inside one. Just another layer in the virtual Russian nesting doll that might expand infinitely in either direction. Or perhaps we’re just a single sim away from the original creator, and we really do have his ear.

  If so, I imagine Capria and I, being the last two humans left in the simulation, have his undivided attention. I’ve heard that believers try to live their lives like God is watching them, and as Gal proposed, judging them. That’s never really been on my radar, but now? Maybe there is a higher purpose to all of this? Or maybe we’re just pawns in a computer model launched in the twenty-first century, projecting the future of the human race. The possibilities are endless.

  “Show me what’s coming,” Capria says.

  The fading planet disappears as our view of the universe shifts forward. All looks normal.

  “How far
is it?”

  “Is what?” I ask.

  “The end.” Capria points up. “If Gal can detect the wall of cosmic ray lightbulbs, she should be able to tell us how far away they are.”

  “Thirty four million miles,” Gal says.

  Capria huffs a laugh. “We’re almost there.”

  Thirty four million miles doesn’t sound like a small distance, but in astronomical terms, it’s comparable to the distance between Earth and Mars, a journey mankind made on a grand scale before the invention of FTL travel. At our slowest, humanity could cover the distance in six months. Light completes the journey in three minutes. The Galahad in one.

  Gal stopped us an astronomical inch from doom.

  “Take us through,” Capria says, her voice numb.

  “Hitting the end of the universe at speeds beyond the speed of light would essentially erase us from existence,” I say.

  “That would concern me if we truly existed.”

  “Cap…” I sound desperate, and realize that I am. Because for me, our revelation changes nothing. Our reality is just that, ours, and I’m happy to exist in it if Cap is with me. But if she checks out or becomes suicidal… “We exist. We’re real. Whether we’re composed of atoms or mathematical equations, it doesn’t matter. We still feel, and have free will, and are capable of things that can’t be measured, like love.”

  “Love.” The word slips from her mouth like a snake’s tongue, testing the scent of it, and finding it unpalatable. “It’s not real. It’s a pre-programmed emotion bound by a set of rules, written by someone else. Free will is an illusion.”

  “There would be no point to running a simulation that isn’t free to run its own course.”

  “Bullshit.” A single tear slips from Capria’s eye to her hair, getting lost in the strands. “People read novels, don’t they? The characters don’t have free will. Their lives, and their endings, are predetermined.”