Shaina already had her bag and overcoat on and her keys in her hand and was about to leave when I stopped her at the door.
"I just got this thing working. You have to come and see it."
"I have a bus to catch."
"You can get the next one."
"The next is after an hour," she objected.
"It's super-duper. Look at the big screen (our super-quantum-computer’s 3-D screen)! "
"Will this take long?"
"An “instant”” (I smirked at this romantic java joke that we shared)?"
Some background:
Us - by which I refer to Me, Shaina (My wife), our eight assistant scientists, four chemical engineers, six electrical engineers, nine programmers, two doctors, three mathematical statisticians, a sculptor, a painter, four animators and a cleaner - represented the sum total of the human race's achievements in the field of universe emulation(mind you- it’s not simulation).
We (Me and Shaina) had put our 15 years in building this system (since we both dropped out of Stanford for our personal research). Our emulator wasn’t starting due to some cyclic redundancy error in a construct variable. We were trying to construct a computer engine capable of infinite processing power and infinite storage capacity.
This would ensure the support for our emulation. Only about 59 people knew about this project including Osama (now dead so 58) and only about 6 people including Me and Shaina (thought that we) understood it.
Most of our team had lost hope that our emulator would work. They were getting social (that’s a crime which affects the performance in any scientific research). But, I knew this would happen.
Back to present:
I was alone in office that day and I stopped Shaina.
It was like a billion Pamela Andersons on a beach. I finally succeeded in making a random semi-constructor to start the program. This thing could execute an infinite loop in less than three seconds. Pi to the last digit? In .009 peko-second!!
I called Shaina.
"I have a bus to catch."
"You can get the next one."
"The next is after an hour," she objected.
"It's super-duper. Look at the big screen"
"Will this take long?"
"An “instant” (I smirked at this romantic java joke that we shared)?"
I pressed “Enter”
The emulator started out with a Big Bang and run the thing forwards in time by approximately 14 billion years, we could see it.
She screamed “OHH MYY GODD”… the loudest since we married. “It’s running” she cried.
"Yes, yes, of course. It’s not a dream"
I coded to get a view of the earth.
She asked "Is it definitely Earth?"
"Yes. The continents match up to what we had about three hundred and fifty million years ago. I can wind the clock forwards slowly, a few million years and stop it once we start getting near the present day."
"Can you wind the clock backwards at all?"
"Ah, not sure but let’s admire the creation now…"
"Well we'd better not get past the present day, then. That's getting closer. What about this viewpoint? Can we move it?"
"We can observe the universe from any angle you like."
"We need somewhere that we know civilization is going to arise earliest. Is that some river coming out from Himalayas"
"...Yes. Got it."
We advanced some thousands of years in seconds and discovered the Indian, Egyptian, Greek civilizations. Shaina moved the viewing port, trying to find the pyramids, but with little success
Shaina asked "So... this is Earth? I mean, is this really Earth? Not an alternate Earth, produced by random variables. How are we getting so much processing?"
"I am sure it’s the real earth. It doesn't calculate the whole universe at once, just what we're looking at, which speeds up the process a little bit... metaphorically speaking... but it is still most accurate real universe there can possibly be.” I answered.
“I am getting crazy!”
"No, this will make you crazy!!" I said, suddenly zooming out and panning north. "I've found the present day. Shaina was following the route she usually took to drive from our Borivali residence to secret lab at Kanheri caves.
I advanced hour by hour.
"That's me!" she exclaimed at one point. "And there's you… I can't believe it."
"More than fifteen years…" she had tears in her eyes.
"Went like a flash," I replied.
Ohh Goshh. We are stopped.
I waved and could see myself in screen. Its not getting forward.
“Are we fcuked?. Its not responding!! The viewing port isn’t moving. It’s just showing what we are doing!”
Shaina replied “No, it's perfectly normal. This is reality. What you're looking at on the screen is essentially a database query. The universe needs inputs from us to go forward."
"...But it could… Right! We can manifest stuff in the universe? We can alter it?" I realized.
"We are God" I laughed.
"So what are we looking at?" I asked
"Our universe." She replied
"you mean yours and mine?" I was curious.
"All of us!" She exclaimed
"And they are reacting the same way I am? Which means the second universe inside that has another me doing the same thing a third time? And then inside that we've got, one inside the other inside the other”…. “Ohhh fcuk? " She shouted
"Infinite processing power, Shaina. We Designed this thing.”
"But, the functional reality of it is totally unexpected.”
“I will stop this.” I ran a program saying this...
"Dhaval, look above!" said Shaina, there was a foot-wide, completely opaque black sphere up near the ceiling. It seemed like a black hole in space.
Shaina smiled wryly while I clutched my hair with one hand. "We're constructs in a computer," she said, miserably.
"This is insane. Totally insane. I'm turning the hole off." I said.
"You're turning off a completely different hole. Somewhere up there, the real you is turning the real hole off. There are some infinite of us above and below our level, Dhaval."
"I'll sum it up for you. There is a feedback loop going on. Each universe affects the next. Everything we do in this universe will be reflected in the universes below and above. That little model there might as well be our own universe. Which means, first of all, we have to be sure that we don't do anything nasty to the universes below ours. Since the same thing will happen to us." "You've thought about this?”
"Guh. This has been an extremely bad day for my ego, Shaina. The only comfort I take from this is that somewhere up there, right at the top of a near-infinite tower of universes, there is a version of us who did this to us!"
"Well, we can't exactly turn it off now." She said.
“Ok then we will this tomorrow… lets go home and celebrate… we can continue our research tomorrow!!! We can get a Noble prize for this. This will change the universe…”
“Stop!” She yelled
I opened the door of our Quatum-Super-Computer room.
What I see ‘black hole!!’… we were surrounded from all sides by it.
“What can we do Shaina?” I asked with fear.
“Wait for action from other levels…” she said.
“But the other levels are just doing what we do? So wait for whom? ourselves”
“Ohh yes” she realized.
The black hole was getting bigger…
Last option. We kissed each other and turned the super computer off thinking it would end.
It did end... the universe!!
No inputs… Universe ends…
Sorry God !!
