Accidental Gods (27 page)

Epilogue

—Arthur C. Clarke

A few weeks after Nefirti’s death, the pall had finally started to lift at IACP. Thomas, with Catherine’s help, had finally got the press under control. Things were starting to get back to normal.

              New discussions were happening, often starting with “What now?”

              Then the klaxon bells of the alarm system started blaring throughout the building. Somewhat panicked, everyone fled the building.

              In the data center, silent glass panels dropped from the ceiling encasing each independent SU in its own airtight cube. Then each cube was nearly instantaneously filled with the inert gas argon that had the immediate effect of removing all fuel from any potential fire. In parallel, another system analyzed the content of the gas leaving each cube for potential evidence of a fire. If it detected a fire, it immediately cut power to that cube. This system had been carefully designed to avoid cutting power unless absolutely necessary while containing any potential fire, preventing it from damaging multiple systems. It had been expensive, but Thomas had demanded it after the meltdowns they had experienced during the early days of the SU. He had forgotten about that.

              Larry pulled him aside and reminded him as he milled about outside the building waiting for the fire department to finish their walkthrough.

              Once the building had been cleared, Thomas and Larry went straight to the data center where Bleys met them. He probably hadn’t left the building.

              As they entered the primary systems area, most of the glass walls were hissing back into their invisible alcoves in the ceiling. One remained encased in glass. The original SU.

“Any idea what could have caused this?” Thomas asked, looking at the glass-encased system. It had obviously been on fire, but the argon gas had extinguished the fire without much of a trace other than some smolder components.

“Man, I have no idea. Clearly, SU-0 had a meltdown and the system cut power and contained it. I guess that fire suppression system was worth it. But I don’t know what this means for the universe—hell, I don’t even know if it can be rebooted,” Larry replied as he entered a code on a nearby touchpad. The glass encasing SU-0 hissed upward and disappeared.

“What do you mean completely shut down? All of the redundancy failed?”

“It must have. It never should have been able to get that hot.”

“So, the original universe may just be gone?” Thomas continued his questioning. “Really, I don’t know if it’s even worth turning back on; we never found anything in it—besides, we have SU-N11 and the Alphans now.” Then it occurred to him that he might get asked about just such a situation. Had they destroyed a universe?

“Thomas, it’s not so much the machine failed. It’s that there was no reason for it to fail. There’s nothing that could have been happening within the program to cause a system-wide catastrophic failure like that. Look, the physics ‘stuff’ isn’t what I do, but I know there was nothing wrong with the hardware. I got no alerts until the fire suppression was triggered. Something had to cause it to fail.”

“Well, as much as I would like to look into it…” Thomas paused to consider. “I don’t think we can unless you can manage to get it back online so we can see what was going on.”

“On it,” Bleys quipped.

“Let me know as soon as it comes back online,” Thomas said, knowing that he would get a text milliseconds after they got it to work. “Oh, but don’t turn on universe processing. I just want rendering to see what was going on.”

“Well, why didn’t you say so? If you want that, I think I can take a renderer and plug it into this SU’s diamond,” Larry said. “It should be ready to go in thirty minutes.”

“Talk to Jenn, and send it to all the rendering rooms,” Thomas said already on his way out of the data center.

As he was walking back to his office, he called Jules and told her to get the core team together and have them meet him in Rendering Room 1. Finding a needle in a haystack, after all, was much easier with multiple people—particularly if you don’t know whether or not there’s a needle in the haystack at all.

***

Fifteen minutes later, everyone had gathered in Rendering Room 3. Mike, Don, Lisa, Jules, Ajay, and even Catherine had no idea why they were there, particularly after the emotional rollercoaster of the day before.

“The original simulated universe has crashed and, well, burned.” He laughed, trying to add a little levity. “We need to find out why—or, rather, we need to find out if there
is
a why.”

Ajay couldn’t help but point out the massive elephant in the room. “You know, this would be a hell of a lot easier if we found a replacement for Stephen.”

Lisa and Catherine both glared at him.

“We’ll get to that as soon as possible, Ajay, but for now, we’ll make do with what we have,” Thomas replied with as little of a “you’re about to get yourself fired” voice as possible. After all, he did
still need
Ajay. He continued, “So, part of the big problem is that we’ve paid no attention whatsoever to the original universe. I don’t think anyone has looked at it in XX years. It’s probably full of cobwebs.

“Obviously it’s been running nonstop now for years with no oversight. Going forward, it would be prudent of us to modify our ‘Event System’ to work without cameras and patch it onto the rest of the universes. Unfortunately, that sort of thing makes for a really easy decision in hindsight. For now, all we can do is pull up the last few years of the SU and see if we can theorize what may have caused the failure.”

“Do we have any idea of what we’re looking for?” asked Mike.

“No.”

“Then how will we know when we’ve found it?”

“I don’t know.”

“So, what are we doing here?”

“All I know is Larry said there was no hardware-related reason why SU-0 crashed. As such, my hypothesis is that there must have been something going on inside the universe that caused it to overheat. There’s a ton of memory for it to expand, so it wasn’t that. It’s possible this could be something incredibly simple—a flaw in the original program, something like that,” Thomas said, hoping to prompt some sort of response. Unfortunately, the room was dumbfounded. Not a single member of the team was intimate enough with the code of the program to give a reasonable guess as to what caused the failure, so they just sat there—staring back at Thomas.

“All right, I can see the best option here is to simply load up the universe and start poking around. So let’s do that. Don, if you see any anomalies from the overall view of the universe or see a galaxy that looks ‘off,’ say something so we can dig through this as efficiently as possible. Everyone else, just look for anything strange or wrong.”

“Can do,” Don said, feeling useful again. He had felt less and less challenged since finding Alpha, so the opportunity to find something “wrong” presented him with a small challenge for now.

“It looks like the original universe is now almost twenty billion years old. Everyone, break off into pairs and go to other rendering rooms and start poking around. If you find anything, find me.”

***

Three days passed, and no one found anything. As a sort of cosmic Hail Mary, Don decided to fly through the universe from a zoomed out point of view that let him quickly see galaxies and the hints of stellar systems—while moving at very high speeds.

17320,311192,72189

17103,312014,72470

16250,315968,72608

“
There!
”
Ajay said. “Stop moving!”

“What did you see?” asked Don.

“Go back!” Ajay shouted, like an excited little kid. “Go back!”

“What are we looking for?” Don asked as he backtracked.

“It’s not what I saw; it’s what I didn’t see. Zoom into the spiral cluster at the north end of the universe.”

Don did that, and still he saw nothing.

“There should be
something
there; instead, there’s nothing. Focus our view above that galaxy, and play history forward at one year per second.”

“Done,” replied Don.

SU-N0 Time: 18,908,992,321 Years

              Don’s jaw nearly hit the floor. He snatched his phone from the desk and texted Thomas.

Don:
rendering room 5, NOW

Thomas:
on my way

***

Thomas rushed to Rendering Room 5, not even stopping to alert the other team members that Don may have found something. After all, he wouldn’t want everyone to be let down at once.

“Don, what is it? What did you find?” he said as he walked into the room.

“I’m…not sure,” said Don. “You just need to watch this.”

Don queued up the system to start playing the year 18,908,992,318. He set the speed to what would equate to week per second. The weeks, months, and years started ticking up, and Don zoomed in to a spiral galaxy.

SU-N0 Time: 18,908,992,321 Years, 7 months, 2 weeks

Thomas stared for a full five minutes. Finally, he managed to force his mouth to say the only words left in the English language he could remember:

“
Holy shit
.”

Author’s Notes

Writing a novel is hard and this is my first, so I am assuming it is the hardest. I wrote the first draft of this book in 2006. My primary motivation was to explore ideas around artificial intelligence. When I started writing I had a theory that a true artificial general intelligence (human level) was most likely to first appear in a closed system - like a game or a simulation. This idea of an artificial sentience, or a group of them, living in an artificial world was interesting to me and as I began to explore the idea and how it might come about I started to think about what the ramifications of such an environment might be. That became the genesis of
Accidental Gods
.

Since I started down this path both technology and philosophy have continued to evolve. Some of the most interesting developments revolve around scientific research into whether the universe might be a simulation or a hologram.  When I started writing I was unaware that there was any academic research on these topics (even though Bostrom’s Simulation Argument was published in 2003). The best examples:

• Fermi Lab is trying to prove (or disprove) whether our reality is a hologram: http://holometer.fnal.gov/
  
• Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument proposes that we are very likely living in a simulation:
  http://www.simulation-argument.com/
  
• Plank Lengths and living in a hologram:
  http://www.wired.com/2014/11/planck-length/
  
• Living simulations: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22429972.300-first-digital-animal-will-be-perfect-copy-of-real-worm.html#.VHzm4VXF_3o
  

I will attempt to update and discuss developments on Twitter (@andrewbusey) and andrewbusey.com.

Thanks

The most important thanks go to my mom. She encouraged me to read a lot and that is the most necessary prerequisite to writing.  She pushed me, often with substantial resistance from me, to work hard in high school, which helped prepare me for the culture shock of going from a very small town to a major university. My love of reading (science and fiction and, of course, science fiction) has been with me my entire life.

Thanks to the many people have helped me make this book better.  Eric Schild and Roger Siebert were critical in helping me through multiple edits and revisions of the book. Thanks to Ben McCraw for the cover. And yet more thanks to Shawn Ullman, Alyson Crater, Elena Schimming, John Miri, Nina Dobner, Ben Fox, Will Breetz, Jason Seats, Lloyd Walker, Ben Lamm, and many others for reading early drafts, encouraging me, and/or giving me critical feedback. This book has been a work in progress for about eight years so I apologize for not being able to list everyone who has helped. I also apologize to and thank my many friends who may see a little bit of themselves reflected in some of the characters.

Finally, thanks to the writers, philosophers, and scientists, both past and present, for helping educate, entertain, inform, and enlighten me.