The little blond girl became overwhelmed as the evening progressed.
Marcus and Virtunis both saw this, and as I was deciding what orders to give the crowd to keep them from bothering her, Marcus sat next to her and shouted for everyone to leave Cassie alone so she could rest. After that Cassandra sat at the end of one of the oversized pinewood picnic benches that we ate our communal feasts on, with Marcus next to her, and Namys at the other side.
She smiled at everyone and picked through her food, but she said little to the crowd. Instead she spent much of her time talking to me about if I could change the things people were asking about.
In two or three cases I did, but most of the favors she was asked for would have been bad ideas.
Marcus by this time was already half recovered from a wound that I knew would take weeks or even months to fully heal in a normal human.
And then something new happened.
It arose in me, in the day following Cassandra’s arrival back home. It arose in me the urge that I ought to send Cassandra to the temple in the valley in the high mountains, and with her Marcus and Virtunis both.
And in that morning, Cassandra spoke to me, in her smiling child’s voice. “I should go to the mountain. You feel it too. I should go. I’ve always wanted to go to the mountain. I always wanted to see it.”
“Yes,” I replied. “You must go. And Marcus and Virtunis with you. I did not know you wanted to go to the temple.”
“Of course I did! That’s where the tasty temple fruit comes from. And those trees. And the really big puppies, the wolves whose great Papa killed my Papa. Of course I want to see them.”
Cassandra rose from where she slept in the side rooms in the wooden hall built to house my gem to find Virtunis who led the first shift of meditation that day. She shook him out of his trance and another monk took his place.
Marcus of his own volition joined them, and the three of them started the long walk to the temple.
They did not hurry.
This was a warm sunny summer day, and Cassandra only had a child’s stride. Marcus could have carried her easily enough, but she was old enough to be quite above being carried anywhere like a baby.
The three of them walked the entire day through oak trees, elm trees, alder trees, and birch trees. The walk sped up in the afternoon when Cassandra begged to be picked up, and Marcus carried her, despite her weight slightly pulling on and bothering his still recovering wounds.
They had only reached three quarters of the way to the temple when they camped for the night. Firewood was gathered, and they cooked the fresh meat of several rabbits Marcus caught with his bow. He did not kill a deer or another large animal as there were not enough of them to eat the whole animal, and he did not want to carry the carcass the rest of the way to the temple for it to be fully used.
The smell was rich and delicious, and I was able to both smell the food, and taste it, and feel something like the satisfaction of being full through my connection to Cassandra.
And then they lay down under the stars, looking up high, high into the sparkling pinpointed sky. I’d not looked up at the sky before, not really. Not since I had come here.
Cassandra smiled at the twinkling points of light in the sky for a full hour before she fell into sleep.
The constellations were the same as on Earth in the Northern hemisphere.
I had on that account an eerie, heart stuttering feeling, as though I was missing some fact of importance.
An hour before the sun reached its zenith they arrived at the temple gateway built into the mountain the next morning.
Cassandra stared up at the tall gate, by far the biggest building she had ever seen, and the thickly built up barricades all around the entrance, and she exclaimed, “Wow.”
The wolves rushed out, going between the big wooden barricades, to see them. They whinnied around Cassandra first, and then they crowded Marcus as he gave them bits of jerky and the leftover rabbit meat from the previous night.
They felt that she was special now, just as the other elves had.
But being animals, even if they were very intelligent animals, they were far more interested in the friend who gave them tasty treats.
And then one of them, the one who had limped back three legged from the fight to rescue Cassandra. The one survivor of the four wolves who had been there, and one who had killed a barbarian himself.
When the big grey wolf reached them behind all of the others, this wolf rose up on his back feet, and put his big remaining front paw upon her shoulder, and she embraced him.
I could feel a connection beginning to form between them.
Cassandra petted the wolf, and scratched his ears, and rustled the wolf’s fur, and then looked at the mangled foot of the animal that was at least four times her size. “We should make a little wooden paw for him, like you did for Elephon after he lost his foot in battle.”
The leading monk at the temple in this rotation clapped his hands delightedly. “Oh, I have worried so much about poor Baron since he returned so hurt. The other wolves aren’t mean to him, but he can’t hunt on his own anymore.”
“Well Baron is my friend now!” Cassandra explained, hugging the huge animal who licked her face in response.
She giggled, and they then walked into the temple, with Baron padding along next to Cassandra with a competent limp.
The group reached the entrance to the temple. And then they walked out from the high hot sunlight into the cool, almost dim interior, lit from the inside by the shimmering gem.
“Oh, it looks almost the same,” Cassandra exclaimed. “But I can feel how it is different. And how evil was performed here once before. But the whole big building is becoming so nice now that we are here.”
She ran forward and placed both of her tiny hands on the facets of the gem, almost like she was embracing a big doll.
Light flashed, and the gem gleamed.
A surge of power went through her, and I felt it.
Opportunity to contact a spirit in a different universe
You’ve been saving up your annoyed questions for Amzlat for a long time. Now that you have a prophetess, you are able to access those in the multiverse who are in other multiverse locations. Amzlat actually wants to answer a lot of your questions. You’ll understand a great deal more if you talk to him.
I promise.
Which means of course, that just to be contrary, you aren’t going to bother to call him. I know how you think. Especially since calling long distance is rather expensive.
Contact Amzlat: Cost 25,000 spiritual energy units for every thirty minutes the connection is open.
What do you choose?
That was expensive. If Amzlat needed to spend a great deal of spiritual energy, or some other equally valuable resource, to contact me, it explained why he had not bothered to tell me very much about his plans, or about what I was signing up for.
“Don’t you want to read the EULA?”
There was no better way to convince anyone who grew up in modern society not to read something than to put it in the EULA.
Obviously though I, the ET here, dialed Amzlat the Lizard. Though of course I had no way to get home, even had I wanted to, since the original, though not, in my view, more “real” me was still living on Earth.
I had ample reserves of spiritual energy, and I was beginning to get a feel for the way… karma — let’s call it karma — worked in this universe. I would not be asked this question right now if I had a giant war band coming who I would need to drain all of the spiritual power I had collected to defeat.
A gleam, a flash of light from the gem that was nearly blinding. It was like the flash of light from the bomb that took my eye.
And then when the light cleared the mouths of the assembled worshippers fell open and they stared with awed and happy eyes.
Amzlat stood there, glowing white like Gandalf when he returned, the dinosaur who had shanghaied me into this entire experience. Amzlat was almost t
ranslucent, like he was being projected from the gem, but yet he had a solidity and a realness that a simple holographic projection could not have.
The worshippers in the temple fell to their knees upon seeing him. Marcus looked upon him from his knees with the beginning of tears in his eyes, begging for approval, while Virtunis smiled at Amzlat, though he kneeled as well.
Everyone fell to their knees, except for Cassandra.
She smiled and at pointed at the big dinosaur, who towered over everyone. “You are Amzlat, the big lizard who guided all of the old people in their old world.”
“Yes, child, I am.” Amzlat hooted, and then he made the choking sound he made when laughing and amused. I remembered. A sound I remembered with perfect clarity. Recalled as easily every moment that I had ever experienced since I came here…
“I’m not going to fall to my knees,” Cassandra said, the good girl. “I serve my guide, and he doesn’t like people kneeling to him. I can feel him disapproving of you. Why do you make everyone kneel?”
“Make?” Amzlat choked laughingly, his eyes bulging grotesquely out. “They choose to kneel. Do you all not?”
Virtunis said, “I have never been happier than to kneel before you once more.”
Cassandra’s pert frown showed that she was not convinced by this excuse.
“We are,” Amzlat rumbled with his metallic voice, “your guide and me, we are from different cultures. And though our values are similar, and they are compatible, the way we think about many different matters, matters that are a question of form and superficialities, will often be very different, whilst I think on most matters of true importance, you can expect us to answer with the same meaning.”
I didn’t know if I accepted that answer, but I thought it was decent.
Amzlat placed his claw upon the forehead of Virtunis. And then he placed his other claw on the forehead of Marcus.
“My children. My dear, dear children. You have done well. So well. You have been worthy of my trust placed in you. Virtunis, your leadership of this tribe has matched all I could hope for from you. Marcus, you have served well, and valiantly, and with nobility. And I ask you only to be happier and kinder to yourself.”
“I shall be,” the large warrior replied.
“I shall trust you to be.”
“And now, time in this communication is expensive. And I must explain matters to your guide.”
Amzlat placed his hand upon Cassandra’s long blond hair, her long ears poking above Amzlat’s greenish grey scales. “Cassandra, I ask you to fully open your mind to the guide, so that he may speak through you. I cannot otherwise speak to him whilst he is in his current form, and we shall speak in the language of the guide when we speak, so that you cannot understand, for much of what I will say touches upon matters that the laws of the universe do not permit you to have knowledge of.”
Cassandra opened herself to me, and I suddenly felt everything in her body once more, as though it were my own body.
Amzlat hooted out the high-pitched screech that he made when casting a spell. And suddenly Cassandra’s presence with me in her mind mostly disappeared, with just the flickers of dreams reaching me.
He’d put my child to sleep.
“Wait,” I said harshly, the words coming out in English, “you should not do that to Cassie.”
“This way she truly cannot hear what we speak, though if she was awake, she would understand no matter what language you choose to speak in, just as you can always understand her, though you do not speak the same language. I am very happy to see your protectiveness, both of your prophet, and of all in the tribe I have dedicated to you.”
“You still should have told me.” I rolled my — Cassandra’s — eyes. “They are my people, and my friends. Of course I protect them.”
“Many would seek to use Cassandra constantly, to enjoy the sensations of having a body which you cannot have otherwise.”
“Of course I would never treat her in that way. It is her body.”
“And this is one, completely vital, part of the reason why it was well chosen when you were chosen.”
“What is really going on? — That wasn’t a nice trick to throw me into nothingness without any warning.”
Amzlat choked with amusement, and then he nodded with a bobbing motion of his head that looked almost birdlike. “I told you it would not hurt much.”
“I should have read the fucking EULA.”
“At least you didn’t end up as Bill Gates’s pool boy.”
I laughed, unable to stop myself. “That was a good Dilbert strip. Do you read Dilbert regularly?”
“I have had time to read an enormous amount of your pop culture. And I studied you carefully. I read everything you ever read. You know how I found the time.”
“I do. And like me you have perfect memory recall.”
“Yes, and over time I’ve become better than you at figuring out how to find my own memories.”
“What is this really? This place?” I spread the hands I had borrowed from Cassandra around widely, gesturing of course just at the interior of the temple. But what I meant was much vaster, and Amzlat knew that.
“Ah, this world that we live in, with such strange rules, like that you can tell no one who lives within it about writing. This universe. It is only one of many, a very many, many.”
“But where do they all come from?”
“This vast collection of universes, so vast that though I can give you a number, my mind cannot encompass that number of universes, no more than your mind could encompass, truly encompass, the fact that you shared your little single Earth with seven billion other thinking humans such as yourself. These universes do not come from nowhere. They were constructed. Constructed a great many million years ago by a species of intelligent creatures who evolved on an Earth existing dimensionally parallel to your own.”
“Oh.” I blinked Cassandra and my eyes. “So this is a simulation, a digital universe. I had suspected that immediately, but that still only explains a part of what I wonder.”
“You are quick to guess. But how did you know such?”
We rolled our eyes. “This world has physics, and then has a game overlay on top of the simulated physics, except when the game is made more interesting by the physics not following real physics, then real physics is dropped. And I knew all along that I was a copy of my original mind. You know all the ideas I’ve been exposed to. Of course I suspected this was a simulation — but why is it set up in such a strange manner — is everyone else, besides me and Cassie, for I can feel her thinking, is everyone else truly sentient?”
“Everyone. Everyone who you have protected, and everyone who you have ordered killed, they are all thinking creatures, with feelings, with a memory of childhood, and with as much moral worth and weight as you and I.”
“That is horrible, you know. Truly horrifying. I always dismissed the simulation argument on Earth, in part because I did not believe that such an evil world would be created by any group that had the slightest hint of morality. It would be as horrible as a God who was so evil as to create a world with all the suffering that exists within it.”
“And yet,” Amzlat replied in his rumbling, gravel crunching voice, “such Gods exist, for such creatures have created this universe, and they are Gods within it.”
And suddenly I understood. I even understood why Amzlat had brought me here. Though the many details yet eluded me. “They created it, the ones who built the grand computer that all of this exists in, they created this simulated universe so that they could enter it, and so that they could then live as Gods within this universe.”
“Yes. Yes, so it was. The great source of the universes. The great source of thought, as it is known, the source of all of this is something like what you would call a Matrioshka brain. Some sixty million years before, in this world, a meteor that struck your Earth just barely skimmed over the atmosphere of a different Earth existing in parallel, and then millions of years later a species
descended from the velociraptors celebrated by that children’s film of yours. That is rather ironic, is it not?”
“Jurassic Park? — wait, fuck.” I was hyperventilating. “This is a simulation universe running inside a Matrioshka brain built by the dinosaurs?”
“It is not a Matrioshka brain, just something similar to one.”
“Yeah, sure.” We rolled our eyes again. “If I picture a giant spherical computer around a star that uses every bit of power from the star to run its computations, am I painting a correct picture?”
“As I said it is very similar to a Matrioshka brain, as imagined by your speculative writers.”
A Matrioshka brain is a computer which is built around a star that used the entire output of the star to power its calculations. It would be made by nesting several spheres of computers inside each other where each one would be further away from the star and would use the waste heat from the previous circle of computers to run its own vast computations.
I tried to imagine how many universes of the size of the one I had lived in for the past decade could run on the amount of computing power such a system provided.
I didn’t know the numbers. I’d forgotten.
But it was a huge number. A Matrioshka brain… there could be more universes like this existing in parallel than there were stars in the observable universe.
There was one simple question that obviously arose again. “Why?”
Amzlat bobbed his massive head back and forth, and then made a clicking sound. “A succinct question, but it leaves some place for ambiguity. Why was this constructed? Or why have I brought you here? ”
He could be annoying when he wanted to be.
“The answer to the first is simple. The creators, when the time came, they solved a problem of significance discussed in your world today, the most important problem imaginable. That of ‘friendly AI’. They solved it, mostly that is. The problem for them was how to create an eternal utopia for themselves — this was our deep problem, for I am halfway one of that creator species — whilst not losing those aspects of themselves which they cared for. How to create such a system that was stable for an eternal period of time, and that would not develop into a paperclip maximizer, or a dystopian dictatorship, or any of the other many failure modes. Both the ways of failure that your people have imagined, and all of the many ones which you have not.”
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