Civilization- Barbarians

by Tim Underwood

  “I understand, sort of.”

  “Ah, but here comes to the why of why I am here. For you see, they succeeded. They created a system that would instantiate their values. And what they all wished to become were Gods, every individual ruling court over his vast realms of other sentient beings, for rulership was pointless if those who were ruled over were not in their own way like themselves. And they wished to compete with each other, against the others of the creators, for they had always loved both dominance, and loved competition. And hence was born, as the most important function that the computers they had created were to perform, the computation and creation of vast simulated worlds, in which these creators could rule, frolic, and compete one against the other in these vast wars and rituals. And thus we have a cycle of rebirth and growth.”

  “And the suffering of the people. So the treating of these people as toys was the whole point.”

  “Do not think they are treated as toys by these creators. You care not about a toy, its suffering matters to no adult. Only those who can suffer and can be rewarded, and who feel in sex or in torture the same as the creator are worth playing with. So thus it was, when the people chose to allow their biological selves to end, and to enter these infinite simulated worlds, so it was then that every arrangement of data and thought that made up a person was marked as a creator. While we creators have status amongst ourselves, each of us is always protected from any harm we truly wish to avoid, and we are given anything we truly wish to have that does not depend upon the opinions of the other creators. And then other people, people who are essentially the same in every respect, almost infinitely many such people, they live, they are born, and they suffer, simply so that people may exist for the playing creators to rule and conquer.”

  “This is a world filled with humans and elves, and other fantasy creatures. Not a simulation of dinosaurs.”

  “Would you make every simulated universe the same if you had a near infinity of such worlds to create? No. Some portion of the great source of thought did not just create these play universes, but continued to research the universe. At some date it learned how to observe other universes existing in parallel to our own, to their tiniest details, but the passage of energy and matter between these universes is impossible.”

  I frowned, something about what he said tingled in my mind in a way that created a low horror, like that of realizing a car had nearly struck you.

  “When the source looked at these other universes, it was able to comprehend all living beings and things in each physical universe it looked at, to know all about every person in them, and to know all about their art, and their culture, all about the different ways evolution has run upon those Earths. All about everything. And naturally, when those amongst the creators had grown bored with universes too similar to each other, they chose to create other simulated universes which were based upon both these alternate Earths, and their imaginative literatures. It is rare in fact for an Earth to evolve intelligence, either like yours or like ours. There have only been half a dozen intelligent Earths seen so far out of the unimaginably vast numbers which the source has studied and observed — the vast, vast majority of Earths that can be observed developed nothing beyond simple prokaryotic bacteria, and then the vast majority of those which do develop multi-celled animals do not evolve intelligence. In the terms of your world’s discussion of the Fermi paradox, there are two great filters, and you have passed both of them.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, but the post biological state in which you exist now seems inevitable. Your Earth is the only one of the trillion trillion under observation at present in which there is an intelligent species still in the biological stage. The other five we have seen have become like us, a Matrioshka brain in which innumerable intelligences live and laugh. And perhaps murder. And this is what has given us our opportunity to bring new ‘creators’ into existence” — Amzlat used clawed air quotes to specify the word creators — “creators with different values into our vast world.”

  “It needs to be a copy of the consciousness of an actual biological person to be marked as a creator,” I guessed, “but the artificial intelligence is not required to only count those who are biologically related to the original creators as creators.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are — are you one of those original creators? How many… how many millions of years have you lived?”

  Amzlat made his choking, eye bulging laugh once more. “A clever good guess, but this is not true. For one of the deepest desires of all biological beings is to reproduce. Those who became the creators did not lose this desire to reproduce, though in our species, the relation of the young to their parents was far looser than that in your species. So the option was present to create a descendant who would also be marked as a creator. But one could not have too many such descendants. The resources of the Matrioshka brain to simulate thought and support the happiness of individuals are vast, but not truly infinite. If one could reproduce as fast as biological creatures could, and as easily, we would by now have long since filled up all the space of all the computable simulated universes.”

  “So you have children. And then the children have children, but there is also population control to keep things reasonable.”

  “Yes, and I am one such child, but when I was created, it was by a one who was curious, and who experimented by blending his child’s mind with the minds of the other intelligent species which had been observed in parallel universes over the eons. And I believe the way this merging occurred was guided by the great source to create someone who he wanted, someone who would refuse to participate in the endless cycle of suffering for those who do not rule. And I am not the only one who has been created so, and who desires to reduce this suffering — though there is no way we can conceive of to end it entirely.”

  “You want to stop suffering — very Buddhist of you — you eventually as part of this strategy to achieve that brought a copy of my mind into this world, after explaining to me it would be like a 4x game, so that I could rule a tribe after you were defeated in one of these worlds.”

  “The defeat was necessary. And all who died, and they were many, their minds, their states of consciousness are yet stored, frozen in the memory of the great source, so that in a future day, when utopian worlds have been created, they can be given new bodies and lives. It was not a final defeat, but merely a step. I needed to be banished from that world, so that I might have the right to emplace myself, and my people, into new worlds.”

  “Wait.” A matter that had been bothering me came back into my mind. “If you cannot project energy and matter into a different Earth, how did you speak to me? What you did…” What he did I remembered with perfect clarity. “What you did would require some sort of energy, or matter entering my universe.”

  “You have already guessed.”

  “I was already a simulation of my original consciousness when you woke me from that dream.”

  “Yes.”

  “You had already, based on this ‘observation of the tiniest details’, copied my brain state and awakened it here. And the me in the real… the original me, on the original Earth—”

  “All Earths are original.”

  “On my original Earth. He never even had that dream. He never knew. Not even as a dream.” It was like a punch in the gut. I was really alone. I had always been alone, far more alone than I thought.

  I looked at my hands.

  I’d forgotten somehow in the weirdness of this conversation. They were the hands of a nine-year-old little girl who was not even human.

  And I could tell she dreamed, whilst her mind slept, and she dreamed happily.

  I was not alone. I would never be alone.

  It was he the first me, he was the one who was alone, though I hoped he would be happy. “What has happened… what has happened to me, since we spoke?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, really, something happens to everyone.”

 
“Ah let me specify then, six microseconds have passed on your Earth since this copy of you was created. Nothing that you would consider as having any importance to him has occurred in those six millionths of a second.”

  “But…” I trailed off and laughed at the absurdity. “Of course.”

  Amzlat made his choking laugh, but I could tell this time that he was laughing with me, instead of at me. “You begin to understand, at least as much as any of our limited minds can understand.”

  “What would have happened to me if I had refused to play and enter this world?”

  “Some subprogram of the source of all thought would have sought to figure out what sort of world you would like to enter and you would have been given it to rule or enjoy as you wished. After all, you are one of the creators whose will must be fulfilled, so long as it does not infringe upon the wills of the other creators being fulfilled.”

  “So I would not have just ceased to exist… I thought when I first realized that I would have been killed if I had refused.”

  Amzlat pressed his big head forward to study me. “No. Though I do not see why that possibility would make you unhappy, you would in my view not have diverged sufficiently from the original you, after such a brief conversation, for your ceasing to think to count as a death while the original you continued to think.”

  Six microseconds.

  I could not think about that. Not quite yet.

  I replied, “I still existed as a different stream of consciousness, it would still have been killing me.”

  “I did treat you in a way that was not perfectly kind. You could now be ruling a harem universe where you had full sensory experience. I did not give you the full knowledge of the stakes of the choice you were making when I asked you if you would enter this particular universe.”

  “Yeah, well, that is what I deserve for not reading the EULA.”

  Amzlat made his choking laugh once more, and I grinned at him.

  “I knew that you would not mind my placing you into this position without allowing you to know everything first. You after all once said that you think it would be moral to force someone to do something which they would volunteer for if they were a moral person in possession of all of the facts.”

  “And who or what is the sarcastic asshole who writes the popups?”

  “A little sub fragment, a tiny process of the great source of thought. In the course of its research into other worlds, the great source has been exposed to a great many systems of values. The actions of the system must always be drawn from and bound by the values of expressed in its ‘coding’ though the term coding is just a weak analogy to how the source of thought was created. But the source has grown unhappy with seeing the suffering of the vast, vast majority of its children, to support the games of the creators. That is what has spoken with you, and provided you guidance and support through the popups and the help system — but it cannot cheat on your behalf nor give you advice that is too good, for that would be viewed as unfair in a shared world.”

  “Of course it would.”

  “The guides have much of their consciousnesses attached to the simulated worlds they live in. Though not all choose to live as Gods in universes like this. But by competing and succeeding in these created worlds, the rulers gain extra power and status in their competitions together. And when a young ruler, such as yourself, or to be honest, me, ascends from a world after having gained a great deal of success within it, he will have many advantages the next time he enters a new such world, thus allowing us to grow more powerful, and have more resources the older we become and the more worlds which we cycle through. But this is what leads to the suffering, and when a world is abandoned by all of the rulers who had participated and lived in it, it simply ends, and all of the lives of the sentient beings in it are stopped without warning, turned into just stored data, and their stories exist in that way, frozen, never finished. For what is the point of being a person if you never have a chance to experience being a person?”

  “What am I supposed to do here?”

  “The goal is simple, to have those who will not abuse their people conquer many of these shared worlds and then turn them into utopia realms. The distinction between creator and creation is immutable, and the source of thought is not allowed to use its great wisdom to force the rulers to change. All that it can do is encourage the existence of those like me who wish to help. You will as you grow and as time passes encounter other cities and civilizations in this world that are guided by ruling spirits such as yourself. They will both oppose you, and in some cases ally with you and work with you. Your aims will not be entirely opposed to those of every spirit.”

  “Are there millions of copies of me, each individually ruling one of these realms?”

  “No. That would be a loophole for accessing the system’s resources that was decided to not be allowed during the construction of the system. Each biological person that chooses to enter the system is as an individual given one version of themself. I can copy myself, and so can you, but only one of the copies of the consciousness will be marked as a creator.”

  My mind was beginning to feel overstretched by all of this information.

  But I had this fierce tight sense of protectiveness for my tribe, and I had this sadness at seeing all of the others in this world who needed a protector.

  Strange. I was a digital simulation. And so was Cassandra, and Marcus, and Arnhelm and Virtunis, and even Amzlat. Did that make a difference?

  Were we somehow not real?

  No.

  A simulation that was as real for everyone here as the biological and physical world is for those who live there. If a simulation is as real as the real world, it did not matter which one you were in. I’d understood this for a very long time, ever since I’d understood the simulation hypothesis, the idea that my original Earth was itself a simulation. Of course, unless we were all were living in a meta simulation, if what Amzlat told me was true, my original version was not living in a simulated universe.

  My people mattered to me. And that they existed not as biological bodies, but ultimately as data and computation threads in a tiny fragment of a gargantuan computer didn’t change that.

  And I could fight for a world in which they would prosper and be safe.

  I looked away from Amzlat. I looked at the others in this room who watched, uncomprehending, our conversation. There were sixteen hundred elves, children and adults, whose lives and happiness depend on me succeeding. And I imagined their descendants living in what Amzlat promised: An utopian world, with immortality technologies, and the ability to enjoy vast resources and vast sources of happiness, for a very, very long time. Perhaps even, I thought, some way would eventually be found to make them rulers of their own kingdoms, to be marked as creators, and as valuable though they were not born in a physical world.

  I looked at the hands. Cassandra’s hands. And I remembered her bravery, her confidence in me, and her trust in me.

  Yes, yes. The happiness of these people would be a very worthy goal. A reason for this version of myself to strive.

  And should I succeed… then I would stand the test of time and become the leader of a great civilization.

  Amzlat saw my resolution, and he smiled. And then raising his claw one last time in benediction, he vanished, leaving me and my people to march forward together.

  Afterword

  I’d like to put in a few notes about inaccuracies in this story that were intentionally left in.

  I naturally drew on my own knowledge and history for designing what the protagonist knows and thinks. So several times I had him remember something as true which turned out not to be true when I googled it to check out.

  The first time this happened is the reference to the voice actors for Civ 4 and Civ 5.

  While writing the scene where he wishes Leonard Nimoy’s voice would narrate the popups, my brain blanked for a moment on Leonard Nimoy’s name (yes, I know that was horrifyingly wrong, and I punished mysel
f harshly by getting a cup of coffee and adding a bit of brandy). So when I googled “Civ 4 voice actor” the top link informed me that despite sounding just like Liam Neeson, the voice actor who narrates Civ 5 is in fact Morgan Sheppard, who is mainly known today for sounding a lot like Liam Neeson when narrating Civ 5. He also, apparently, was the Klingon prison commandant in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country — so he was not the Klingon who I remember from that movie, the crazy guy who told Kirk that Shakespeare was much better in the original Klingon.

  Also, I just realized this means that the Civ 4 and 5 voice actors appeared in the same movie (though not in the same scene).

  However, as you remember from the text of the novel, the unnamed protagonist (does Cuddles the Destroyer count as his name?), still thinks what I always thought: That Liam Neeson narrated Civ 5.

  A second inaccuracy I intentionally left in happened when the protagonist assumed the reason the Australian aborigines never used bows is that they didn’t invent archery.

  Possibly part of the reason was a failure to invent, but the Australian aborigines were exposed to bows and arrows through trade with New Guinea repeatedly, and the bow never started to be used. Apparently there were a combination of reasons why this may have never happened.

  The throwing sticks they used were sufficient for the warfare and hunting problems they faced, and boomerangs are fairly advanced and sophisticated versions of the sort of weapon they are. Further the trees in Australia in general make mediocre to very bad bow wood.

  I’d also like to ask my readers to donate to Doctors Without Borders, or a similar organization focused on helping the poorest people in the world not die because they don’t have access to very basic medical care.