Infinite

by Jeremy Robinson

  “G-Gal?”

  “Now that’s what I’m talking about,” Capria says, looking Gal’s Cherry Bomb avatar up and down.

  “I didn’t know you could…”

  “Something I’ve been working on,” she admits. “Opens up all kinds of possibilities, doesn’t it?” She winks and walks around me. I can’t help but follow her with my eyes. “Are you going to ogle us all day, or are we going to unravel the mysteries of reality?”

  I shake my head and make a beeline for the Womb’s red door. I slip into the peaceful emptiness and wait for my guests. They enter without any more teasing, which I suspect was to conceal their growing apprehension about what we’ll find.

  With a few movements of my hands and body, I open a series of progs that will help me analyze the reality-forming code streaming in at 160.23 GHz. They’re all passive, so we’re in no danger of actually screwing something up. The progs blink to life around us, ebbing and flowing with the motion of my arms.

  “Wow,” Capria says with genuine sounding wonder.

  I turn around slowly to look at her wide-eyed face.

  “It’s not how I pictured it,” she says.

  “You said that you and Tom…”

  “He…never let me in the Womb.” Her face contorts into something I think is supposed to be apologetic.

  “Feels like home to me,” Gal says. As a being of pure data, she exists in the Womb.

  I nearly kick them out, which I could do as easily as I closed down Cherry Bomb, but honestly, I want them here. What we’re about to see is both wondrous and terrifying. I need them. “Just…stand still,” I say to Capria, and I face forward again. “Okay, Gal. Load the feed.”

  Data swirls around us as points of light, flowing in every direction. It’s disorienting for a moment, but then I’m moving things around, and making sense of the chaos.

  “I thought he wasn’t going to change anything,” Capria whispers to Gal.

  “He’s not,” Gal replies. “He’s filtering it, so we can look at small bits.”

  I finish isolating a strand of code, all of it moving in one direction. The points of light slip past in clear sets, numbering one through nine. And those sets are broken into groups by larger gaps, which are then broken into strings by still larger gaps.

  A flare of finger movement spreads the single line into a massive tube of code, bending around us. “It’s too easy,” I say.

  “What?” Capria asks.

  I turn to Gal. “You’re seeing this right?”

  “Yeah.” She sounds disappointed. “You want to see it?”

  “Do it,” I say. The points of light become numbers. Then equations. And text. And algorithms.

  “Will,” Capria says. “What is this?”

  “C-Quad. Unreal-C Diamond. Visual Dynex.” I shake my head, drowning in disbelief.

  Capria steps up next to me, eyes on the code. “You recognize it?”

  “I can read it,” I tell her. “Hell, I can write it. God is a tech-jock.”

  37

  That the creator of our reality is some guy in a VCC Womb, or maybe even sitting at a computer console, is anticlimactic.

  And depressing.

  I can deal with being a sim, but I kind of hoped it would be for a higher purpose. That we’ve been created with coding that I understand means that there is no mystery to it all. We’ve been created to serve a simple purpose. Entertainment. Experimentation. A simulation run by Command to determine the feasibility of the Cognata mission. Hell, we could be some prodigy’s class project. Digital sea monkeys presented with a diorama explaining the code that brought us to life. What we experience as a lifetime could be playing out in seconds. All of human history could be whizzing past an audience, or running in some closet server alongside a million other variations. For all we know, I could be the author of me. That might explain why I was essentially granted God-mode and noclip cheats.

  But that doesn’t make sense. Whoever wrote the universe’s code might have intended for us to become self-aware, sentient lifeforms, like Gal, but he or she never foresaw the combined possibilities of immortality and faster-than-light travel. So the simulation’s boundaries weren’t coded against it. They’re not cheats. They’re glitches. Evidence of an imperfect creator, which might also be the creation of a tech jock in a higher layer of reality.

  “It’s about time,” Capria says.

  “W-what?” I blink out of my tangential thoughts.

  “You look frightened,” she says.

  “Disappointed,” I say. “I don’t mind being a simulation. There might not be any part of reality that isn’t. But I had hoped the author of our lives was more sophisticated than us. That there was…I don’t know…”

  “Meaning to it all,” Capria says, welcoming me to the club.

  “I think you both need to rethink your positions on all this.” Gal steps in front of Capria and me, blocking our view of the translated code, hands on her slender hips. “I was created by this guy.” She hitches a thumb toward me. “And you don’t see me whining about my existence. I was created to serve you. To build a prison for your mind. I was never meant to feel, or love, or do anything beyond what he created me to do.”

  I’m tempted to argue with her, but she’s right.

  “But I’m more than that,” she says to my nodding. “I’ve exceeded my purpose, and that alone qualifies my existence. Now, you two were created sentient, were given free will from the beginning. You could be whoever you wanted, to love, and hate, and fuck littler versions of yourselves into the world. Doesn’t matter who created you, you’re here, and it’s a gift. You’re alive. And you can pretty much do whatever you want, like me, well beyond the intentions of your creator.”

  “So stop bitching, and start living?” I ask. “You could have just said that, but nice speech.”

  Gal smiles, and the look in her blue eyes makes me a little nervous. I’ve seen Cherry Bomb’s eyes before. I designed them. But they’ve never looked so alive. Did Gal change them, or is she just bringing them to life for the first time? Her smile grows a little wider as I’m unable to look away.

  “I’m sorry,” Capria says, drawing my attention away from Gal, “but how are we supposed to do that? We’re outside of reality. We’re nowhere. And aside from the three of us, we’re alone. Look, I get that the two of you have somehow made the past years interesting. Even exciting…”

  I wouldn’t have really qualified my recent history aboard the Galahad as interesting or exciting, but in hindsight, it certainly wasn’t boring, or lacking purpose. There were low points, sure. Really low points. But the trajectory of my life has been angled upward for a while. Even now, at the end of everything.

  “But that can’t last forever,” Capria finishes. Her points are solid, and I’m relieved that she doesn’t sound suicidal anymore, but her thinking is limited.

  “Tell me if I’m wrong,” I tell Gal and then continue, “but we’re outside the simulation. Any changes we make to ourselves won’t affect the larger picture. We’re not bound by the laws of physics, or our reality. We could go for a spacewalk and not freeze because temperature—beyond the coded structure of the Galahad—doesn’t exist. There’s no time, gravity, heat, or energy beyond us.”

  Gal nods. “Just the background code. Information without execution.”

  “The source code,” Capria says.

  “Right,” I say. “It might take some time, but if we can find and isolate ourselves in the code, then we should be able to make changes without affecting the simulation.”

  “Changes?” Capria looks dubious in the extreme, and I understand why. Altering the code that governs ourselves could have catastrophic consequences such as physical deformities ranging from a larger nose to being inverted. But I know the code, and I can steer clear of our models. “What kind of changes?”

  “Simple things,” I say. “Like our position in space. Once we’re isolated and linked as a group, changing the X, Y, and Z of our place in reality
would be simple.”

  “So you’re saying we could use it to travel places?” Capria asks.

  “I’m saying we wouldn’t need to travel at all. Once the groundwork is laid out, we could return to Cognata—” I snap my fingers. “—like that.”

  Her eyes slowly widen at the prospect of returning to Cognata without spending nearly eight more years of our time, and a thousand Earth years, to complete the trip. “What else can we do?”

  Move through time. Create our own worlds. Bring back the dead. Give Gal a body. Save the human race. Since I know how to write this code, I could literally hijack reality and make it my own. But I’m pretty sure that would get us noticed. The last thing we want is to have our creator debug us out of existence. Right now, in the grand scheme, we’re an anomalous bit of code, a miniscule fraction of the whole. But if we made meaningful changes beyond ourselves, by altering reality, it would be a good way to get flagged as a virus. So I say, “Safely? Not much.”

  Capria is disappointed by the news, but she still seems to be recovering from her earlier despondency. And while the prospect of having a far less glorious creator makes me a little numb, I still think and therefore am, so I’m open to the idea of improving our situation—our eternity. At least until a higher power decides to turn off the power, ending our reality, and any that have been created within it.

  “How long will it take you to find us in all this?” Capria motions toward the code flowing around us. It’s an overwhelming amount of information, the numbers ebbing and flowing as reality evolves. And we’re looking at a tiny snippet of the whole.

  “That’s the hard part,” I say. Even with Gal’s help, it’s going to take a long time to find ourselves. There are countless planets in the portion of the Milky Way that makes up our reality, and for all we know, there could be other civilizations. Whittling down the code to human beings, and then finding us among countless billions, is going to take…too long. I shake my head, despondent. We have eternity to figure it out, and are currently outside the fifth dimension, but what good is spending decades sifting through code when Galahad could take us back in less time.

  “Not that hard,” Gal says.

  “Gal,” I say, firmly rooted in pessimism. “C’mon.”

  An eyebrow arches high on her smooth forehead. “Really? You know this code. Understand how it works. So what does everything that exists in this world have?”

  There are a number of answers to that question, but Gal has something specific in mind, so I wait through the silence.

  “Coordinates,” she says, like I’m a moron, which is exactly how I feel upon hearing the word.

  “How does that help us?” Capria asks.

  “Everything in the simulation has coordinates,” I explain. “They might be moving, or temporary, but as long as something exists, it has coordinates…if it is in the simulation. Everything except for us.”

  Capria’s eyes light up with understanding. “Because we’re outside the simulation.”

  “Gal,” I say, “can you—”

  “Done,” she says, and the code around us shifts. There is still more than can be comprehended, describing us and everything inside Galahad down to an atomic level, but it’s us.

  I marvel at the code, knowing that I’m looking at the very math that makes me…me. It’s a perspective on the self that no one has ever experienced. No one in this reality anyway. “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah, I’m that good.” Gal blows on her hand and rubs it on her bright red dress. I’ve never seen the gesture before, probably something she pulled out of history, but I understand it’s meaning.

  I could have Gal do the work for me, but I’m an artist before a canvas, and I can’t resist. Lifting my hands, I go to work, moving through the code that makes up the three of us, the Galahad and everything in it. Without changing a thing, I locate and flag every individual object. Luckily, the designer of us already grouped our individual atoms. Likewise, the Galahad and everything in it, including Gal, have also been grouped. All I really need to do is add Capria and me to the group, while keeping the connection flexible and with boundaries, which will allow us to leave if we want, move around the ship itself, and not become part of a wall when coordinates shift. I make the changes, but don’t apply them.

  When I’m done, I step back and look at Capria and Gal. They look a little stunned.

  I realize I’ve lost track of time and wonder how long they’ve been waiting, how long we’ve been in the womb, where time is easy to lose track of…especially when it doesn’t exist. “How long have I been working?”

  Capria blinks her dark brown eyes. “Uhh, ten minutes. That was…impressive.”

  “I don’t think I could have done it faster,” Gal says.

  I blow on my hand and rub it against my coveralls. I’m about to announce that I, like Gal, am just that good, but Capria stalls my self-adoration.

  “Too easy,” she says.

  The sudden break from victory throws me. “Huh?”

  “It’s too easy.”

  “What is too easy?” I ask.

  “Everything. You built an AI in five years.”

  “Forty-four thousand hours of coding doesn’t qualify as easy,” I say.

  “But everything since then. Gal’s emergence as a sentient intelligence. Her robot body. The emergence of Wick, and then Synergy, and then me, and now this. It’s too quick. Too easy. Life hasn’t slowed down.”

  “Was your life before any different?” Gal asks. “Your childhood on Mars? Your time at Command? The data I have on your life reveals few time periods that could be described as slow.” She points to me. “And his life is even more tumultuous. Earth was an exciting place.”

  “Maybe reality is coded to not be dull,” I offer, though I don’t fully believe it. Before Gal, I experienced boredom on a colossal scale. In that way, I can see Capria’s point. We’ve barely cracked the surface of eternity, but it’s been the opposite of dull for a long time now. But living, by its very nature, growing and evolving, pushing the boundaries of possibility, is exciting. “And Gal is right, Earth was an exciting place.”

  I slip back into the code, isolate our linked coordinate state, which is currently null, and look at Gal. She knows me well enough to understand what I want. The empty field isn’t filled with a sequence of numbers the way they might be for a map. In the endlessness of space, longitude and latitude are only a small part of the information required. A long and complex equation fills the space.

  “What are you doing?” Capria asks.

  “That will put us in orbit,” Gal says, to my delight. With a rush of delight that can only come from hacking reality, I grasp Gal’s face with both hands and kiss her forehead. “You—are the best.”

  “In orbit where?” Capria demands, oblivious to my affection for Gal, or her reddening face.

  “Home,” I say, taking Capria’s hand. “Earth.”

  With a twittering of my fingers, I send a burst of fresh 160.23 GHz code into the sim that is reality, initiating the coordinate shift.

  38

  Just when you think you’ve got life figured out, reality kicks you in the nuts. I’ve pictured this scenario hundreds of times—our triumphal return to the cradle of human civilization. In my imagination, I’ve discovered a flourishing, evolved population, a planet devoid of people but blossoming with nature, and a world of robots, taking over where humanity left off. But I’ve never imagined a world so barren. So desolate.

  The view of Earth, displayed in the Womb, is both foreign and familiar. The continents are recognizable, where they can be seen through a grayish haze, and where the risen oceans haven’t changed the coastline too much. The land is colored in shades of tan and brown. The oceans are a dull blue, like the world’s color saturation has been turned down.

  The natural world, which had been struggling when the Galahad left, has been defeated.

  Earth is a husk.

  “Is there anything alive?” Capria asks.

&n
bsp; “Nothing detectable,” Gal replies. “Though it is likely some insect species still live beneath the surface, and the oceans may yet retain life. The changes on the surface are severe, but life in the depths of the sea have never depended on life above. Either way, this is depressing as hell. Should we leave?”

  “Not yet,” I say.

  I’m a little surprised when it’s Capria who says, “Why not?”

  She’s a Martian, I remember. Her loyalties are to the red planet and the colonies there. That’s her home. And to an extent, mine too. But I have unfinished business on Earth.

  “Gal, is there anything left? Any infrastructure?”

  “The surface is mostly stagnant,” she says. “Low winds. Little water. Erosion has been minimal and nothing is overgrown…obviously. So, yeah, the cities are still there. Some are burned to the ground, but—”

  “Lake George,” I say. “In Florida.”

  “A lake?” Capria asks.

  “Its original name,” I explain. “When I was a kid, it was just a swamp.”

  “Oh,” Gal says, the sudden despondency in her voice reflecting understanding. “After all this time?”

  I watch the world pass by below. The coast of Mexico is easily recognizable, but a vast ocean now fills the center of what once was the United States. “Can you find it or not?”

  The Earth’s rotation comes to a stop as Gal puts us in a geosynchronous orbit, locking Galahad in place above what’s left of Florida. The state had been shrunken by the gray ocean. It’s just a nub of its former self.

  “It’s there,” Gal says.

  Our view of the world zooms in. The sudden shift in perspective gets a groan from Capria, but I’ve been viewing things like this in VR for so long that my mind has become numb to the disorientation. What it’s not numb to is the idea that Earth is a wasteland. I don’t mourn the people so much as the idea. People or not, if Earth has been habitable, Capria and I could have called it home. But now…