Marvelous and Milquetoast lives
Prelude
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck, Act 5 Scene 1
I ask the reader to consider whether I should be put to the chair, the gallows, the guillotine, or any of the myriad forms of death we have devised during our stewardship of this world. I ask the reader to balance, in their own minds, the pain I have caused — for I have caused pain — with the beauty my actions have resulted in. I ask the reader to decide whether I am owed the same lack of fate that both God and Milton bestowed upon Eve as humanity left the garden; or if instead, if I am owed the fate of a god in the eye’s of a world of science. I ask the reader these things as my future is a fait accompli and yet the future of the world is not.
An Office in a World and a World in an Office
Miriam’s office was small, as has been the fashion for newly minted faculty for as long as there have been newly minted faculty. It was so unremarkable in its smallness that that same property never rose to the level of conscious awareness for her. She didn't have to share her office with anyone though, one of the benefits of transitioning from the liminal space of post-doc-hood to the relative stability of faculty life.
With small size and with isolation Miriam expected quiet; however, the university was a minor one with little enough funding for proper research spaces for physicists who don’t even study real data. As a result, Miriam’s office doubled as her lab. Meer months after moving in, the office was packed from floor to ceiling with computers. Computers, a small desk, and a single chair. Computers, none older than a year, financed by a series of progressively more tenuous grants, whirled, and beeped, and spun, and shook Miriam every moment she was in her office.
Computers whirled as within them galaxies collided, serves beeped as stars were born, and hard drives shook as the indelible record of a universe its own was inscribed upon their spinning platters. Miriam’s office was small and yet it was larger than all the world outside.
Miriam had plan’s within plans — or so she told the funding agencies — to compel her computers into more intricate simulations. One grant, generously provided by the Joint Military Research Institute would ostensibly provide valuable information on stellar mass loss rates. Perhaps the sailors of the fleets had visions of flying between the stars on oceans of hydrogen or perhaps they had visions of turning that same Poseidon on their enemies below; it didn’t matter for Miriam. What mattered is that they paid for six of the exceptionally expensive and terrifyingly powerful computers currently stacked up against the east wall of Miriam’s tiny office.
Plans took shape over many months, a timeline so impressive Miriam was at a near constant loss for new funding to pay for new hardware to test new software. Freshly minted minds were not as drawn to physics and philosophy as they had once been, university admissions to those departments had been down for decades. Funding was difficult to find yes, but at least no one complained when, a year latter, as she drew the interest of external sources and funding began to materialize, computers spilled out into the halls.
The tiny office and hallway were illuminated with invisible waves of information from universes being born and dying. Some died hot and violent deaths, galaxies, stars, planets, dust, and molecules getting ripped apart as metrics expanded uncontrollably. Others simply fell asleep and never woke up, the last of the white dwarfs cooling and the last of the black holes evaporating.
When Miriam first met her partner they asked her “What’s your goal with all of this” she answered that her goal was to find her goal. There were never enough computers for Miriam to find her goal, she kept searching for more funding. An energy conglomerate wanted to study the feasibility of harvesting Hawking radiation from black holes, Miriam could model black holes more accurately and informatively than even the Kiev team with their AI managed micro singularity, the conglomerate funded the purchase of 17 new top of the line computers. Years on and Miriam still did not know what here goal was yet she knew that her goal was there.
Detail was slowly added to universes and simulations. Early tests showed galaxy formation that looked generally in line with observations of Miriam’s own universe but subtle details were wrong. Statistically significant differences in the numbers of dwarf galaxies, star formation rates, and mettalicities of 2nd generation stars drove some initial waves of optimization. Much latter optimizations were motivated by slight deviations in chemical reaction rates, clock reactions taking place one tenth of a second faster in one simulated universe than in Miriam’s.
Millions of unique universes were simulated every day by the time the computers started filling the department’s kitchenette; other faculty alternatively chuckled or scorned as they made coffee to the sound of processes no one could understand. At first, before the tiny office had metastasized across the department, Miriam simulated one universe every few months. Latter, as simulations became more complex, she simulated one universe every few years. However, eventually there was a point where she both acquired enough computers and devised enough brilliant optimizations strategies that the time per simulation started a never ending crawl downward.
It was simulations of simulations which marked the next major turning point in Miriam’s life. Financial institutions, wanting to purchase vast thinking machines, yet always wary of unpredictability in the market came to Miriam. They asked if their new purchase would be a good investment, if they would lose money overall. Miriam earnestly told the that her simulations were not complete enough to answer such abstract questions. But they were persistent, questions were re-framed to lessen abstraction, and yet they were still to complex for even Miriam’s simulations. A black hole can be described with few enough numbers to fit on a hand while an investment could not be modeled by all the power in the gross protuberance of an office within which Miriam now lived.
She moved then to a research lab, better funded than her faculty position ever was. New computers greeted her, great blocks of machinery which powered the AIs. But these machines were not the thinking machines of which her financial benefactors had inquired; rather, these were blank slates upon which Miriam would paint universes of unrivaled complexity. Unrivaled but for one.
The bankers and investors asked her again if they should buy the machines and the AIs and they asked her if they should invest in the interplanetary mining and black hole energy corporations and Miriam said the these questions were too abstract for her simulations. And they kept asking and she kept answering the same. They could have cut off her funding, but it was a small expense in the grand scheme of the system’s finances and the potential rewards were beyond the dreams of avarice.
Miriam kept painting and sculpting, earnestly trying to answer those questions which she had been asked and could not but also feeding her own hunger for realistic stability. Her benefactors may have expected, they may have hoped, for her to model the planet and all its people for the proceeding century. Her benefactors may have naively thought that such a endeavor had any value. Yet a universe could not start in the mead hall while Grendel waits without; rather, his mother and her mother and all the mothers down the generations must be examined first. Miriam did not spend a moment of time modeling an economy, a body, a billion bodies, or anything so elevated. Miriam spent her time tuning the oscillatory frequencies of quarks and the spin-flip probability of electrons.
Astronomers and physicist came to the lab, colleagues from her old university, peers from institutions further afield. Some berated her for spelling the end of their field, some waxed poetic upon the nature of a science, others simply wanted to know the answers to the questions they had spent their lives asking. Where she could, she answered, where she could not, she optimized. Eventually, their curiosity drowned, they stopped coming. Miriam remained.
After the astronomers stopped coming to ask about their planets, and the physicists stopped asking about their fermions Miriam rarely concerned herself with anything other than the probabilistic nature of her quantum clouds. So much about her simulations were defined, optimized, and carefully matched to observations. Yet still her universe was not within her universes. Until it was, and Miriam knew Grendel but failed to see dragons in the shadows.
Lives Lived Within - 1
34,987 enemy ships translated through the warp point into Gethakenly space. Colonel Ramirez consider tight beaming a “hold” order to the arsenal under him, but he trusted his commanders would obey the orders handed out prior to the engagement. The enemy swarm split and shot out towards the glittering bands of orbital habitats the park planets and the ring. Still the colonel remained calm. As the enemy passed the Trojan defense platforms great lances of x-ray and gamma energy danced between the platforms and enemy ships. All 800 Trojan defense fell within 18 seconds, first erupting and then imploding as the containment fields around their micro-singularities collapsed. Still the Colonel remained calm.
When, twelve minutes after the initial translation of enemy units into the system, elements of the enemy swarm entered cis-lunar orbit around the park planet of Heseberi, The colonel again considered tightbeaming the fleet the engagement order, yet again he knew that he trusted his commanders and need not concern himself with such minutia. As the enemy fleet took up offensive positions, beginning to align their batteries on the garden below a series of stations, carefully placed just outside of the orbits of the great habitats where the majority of the systems inhabitants lived but not so far outside as to be obvious, released millions of micro-singularities in a choreographed dance.
Ripples in space and time propagate outward at the speed of light, perfectly tuned to destroy every ship in the enemy fleet. The Mirror fields which had proven so successful at warding off the onslaught from the Trojan defenses just minute earlier were less than glass to the terrible assault on the universe now bearing down upon them. Within 45 seconds of engagement time the system had been cleared of all enemy forces. Colonel Ramierz lost no souls and no sleep from the engagement.
Discontinuities in the Machine
Miriam knew Grendel but didn’t see the dragons. For their part though, the dragons did not see Miriam. The bankers and the investors believed they got their answer, they knew where and how much to invest. Yet when they played their cards, so long held to their chests the payout was no better than if they had been scattered to the winds. They came to Miriam then, they shouted about the millions they had spent and the billions they had lost, they made threats, veiled and unveiled, and yet eventually they left, and Miriam remained in a lab with too many sunk costs to shutter but too much wasted potential to invest in further.
She had found her universe, a simulation so perfect she could watch herself within. Year ago when her partner had asked her goal she had not known she had only known that it existed. Now she watched herself watching herself in an infinite regression and still did not know what the goal was. While she waited for a reason to come the dragons lurked in the caves and shadows of her computers.
The future of one universe it turns out cannot be accurately predicted by a simulation within that universe, not to the level Miriam was attempting. Stochastic variations which she had never managed to weed out of probability clouds could be smoothed over only to a point. As soon as one universe tried to simulate itself the infinite regression of identical simulations within that universe result in an informational event horizon. Miriam knew this and yet she persisted.
Now where once astronomers asked about the processes which illuminate quasars, historians ask about Caesars. Miriam answers and is always able to answer, for Grendel stands beside her as an old friend, watching their past unfold together up and until their present when reality breaks and only Miriam remains. Eventually, the historians stop coming, they berate her for ending their field, and argue whether her claims can be taken as history, but the field dies nonetheless. Grendel never had a future after-all — he was always to be slain — yet the dragons live on for a race is not an individual.
Lives Lived Within - 2
The man hung his feet over the escarpment, looking, for all the world, as one contented with life. The bird that wasn't a bird had watched him climb the slope earlier in the day, watched as he scrambled up the ridge line, and watched as he took his ultimate position looking down over the town below. Eventually, as the cold washed over the man and the bird returned to its perch the moon that was not a moon noted the naked human in the unusual location. The man noticed the bird and he noticed the moon, he noticed the scorpion, and the townsfolk, and the rocks, and the air, and the ground, and the time; he noticed them, and he felt them. The never burring sun had every expectation of bathing the man; however, as it burst over the mesa's edge there was no man, and, a moment later, there was no sun.
He awoke in the town with no memory of where he had eventually rested. In fact, he would not have qualified his hosts as a town had not the locals referred to themselves, quite cheerily, as the townspeople. Something about this seemed peculiar but to his chagrin he could not decide what. They asked him if he had a name, he told them he did, of course have a name, but when they pressed him it was he was unable to recall. He asked them if they had names, thinking that perhaps in the act of hearing a name, in the language that was so obviously his native tongue, he might jolt his memory into awareness. They laughed and said of course they had names, they were the townspeople. Eventually, this seemingly futile exercise lost interest and he stopped asking them and they stopped asking him. He walked with them to the spring at the base of the mesa every morning to gather water, delaying the start of the day by the will of the shadow of that great rock. Somedays, if the weather was clear and the group was not too hurried he would ask them to stop and look up at the ridge line as the sun peaked through. He wanted to visit the ridge, he wanted to sit upon that high granite throne and be the first to welcome new day into the world, but the townspeople would rally around him, saying that they feared that if he left them he would not come back and hadn't it just been very pleasant being in the town, yes for them, but also for him, hadn't he enjoyed all the food and lodging and hospitality they had provided him, and hadn't he better just stay in the town.
He wandered through the world, stepping from tundra to desert, from summer to winter, and from city to farm. There were no other people in this world, curious he thought, but not obviously wrong. Something was wrong, it wasn't the people who were missing; rather, it was something missing in him. That struck his as a problem to address latter. For now he needed to find the village, or was it a town. How had he come to this place, for it was a place. He wandered through the world but in doing so he barley moved. Often he felt as though he were falling, trees and buildings and mountains and oceans would rush past him all the while his feet would stay planted as his body gently swayed in the wind. The town was called serenity and he needed to find it yet he didn't have control of his wanderings. He needed to find the town because he knew there was a plinth high on a mesa above the town from which he could see out over the world. Perhaps there would be a trail of dust, or snow, or footprints. Perhaps he could see the road upon which he had wandered and which had, in turn, made him its instrument. Perhaps in that ultimate observance of self he could free himself of the terrible duty.
Bursts of speed intermingled with interminable sluggisgness. The blank, neither light nor dark, void upon which was now his sole domain, filled itself with memories from a life lived. Abstractions, for which he was the truest conception of godhead realized, surged past and through him. Imagery from his earliest memories was interspersed with sounds of angry children in their tumultuous years smells of a city made home and the touch of his spouse's embrace. A decade of love and stability, a decade of pain and uncertainty, and a year of healing, a lunch expanded to a dinner. He felt every sensation and emotion he had every remembered. His world within a world convulsed as he felt the heart attack followed by the fall, the fall which was still happening.
The man sat on the edge of the escarpment watching as the moon that was a memory of a moon set over the distant horizon. He watched as the first spoilers of day refracted off the remembered atmosphere and just as the sun prepared to usher in whatever new narrative that day would bring, the man pushed himself down off the mesa, allowing the fall that was a fall to come to an end.
The Mead Hall
Miriam does not get new computers but she does not need any, her medium is plastic and she can mold any forms she wishes with what she already has. After the economists, and sociologists, and academics of all fields shun her she has no choice but to move into the caves. Miriam’s universe was a known quantity, a single individual on a single planet had developed a perfect record of every event, every spin-flip, every collision, every decay to ever happen. Many had done this, but only one on this planet. Yet Miriam thought, what about other universes, universes perhaps with the same rules as ours but different starting conditions, or the same starting conditions yet different rules.
Miriam dreamed of art and song and science and of Grendel sitting in the mead hall a brother to Beowulf and she knows she can arrive at this reality. And she does. Her simulations are so mature no optimization are needed. She tests simulations and initial conditions and observes the realities within. Where once she watched herself watching herself now she watches poets stride across fields of grass singing of their lost loves, she watches children discover their universe, and the universes discover those within. She felt the dragon’s hot breath on her back, she smells their putrid odor, yet so great was the majesty of her creation that she could not bring herself to face the dragons below.
As is however often the case Miriam did not have to bring herself to face the dragons, as eventually they hungered, and as they loped out of their caves and their dark places Miriam could no longer avoid them. Where once their had been music inscribed in the stars now all Miriam could see was torment. Evil splattered across views into her realities, blood caking the lenses. Yet, as with civilians coming to fields to bath in the macabra play of a far away battle, she could not turn away, always remembering the brotherhood of Grendel and Beowulf which she had once seen, always hoping and believing that it would return.
Of course that brotherhood had never fled, nor had the dragons every truly slept. Miriam saw what Miriam saw but Miriam was but one and could not see all. Grendel sang as the dragons breathed. The mead hall was at the same time a smoking husk and a warm bastion of light. Miriam was the truest god to exist in her universes but Miriam was as limited as any other.
Lives Lived Within - 3
A shell detonated somewhere to his left. He winced at the fresh memory of the unnamed man from moments earlier, the other soldier’s chest struck with one of the high powered armor piercing rounds, exploding over the fox hole. Huddled in the dirt, the man thought about why he was fighting, why he had volunteered. He remembered stories of soldiers fighting never-ending wars whose purpose had been long forgotten, but he knew that this war was not one of those. He considered himself to be a reasonable person, but even reasonable people could be zealous, if the cause was just. The man, sure of his convictions stood erect in the hole, aimed his weapon and was struck in the chest with an armor piercing round.
The generally coherent set of important players in the great game of interstellar politics long ago came to the realization that a majority of wars between states were only properly initiated, or even desidered, by a vanishingly few number of people. Only slightly more recently, when the necessary amount computational volume became economically available it was decided that because of that very fact wars between states could be fought far more economically not only in virtual environments but also with as few combatants as possible all conflicts would be decided in the virtual and only including those who wanted the war in the first place as combatants.
A shell detonated somewhere to his left. He winced at the harsh memory of the unnamed man from moments earlier, the other soldier’s chest struck with one of the high powered armor piercing rounds, exploding over the fox hole and leaving an acrid odor of gunpowder and blood behind. Huddled in the dirt, the man thought about why he was fighting, why he had volunteered. He remembered stories of soldiers fighting never-ending wars whose purpose had been long forgotten but he knew that this war was not one of those. He considered himself to be a reasonable person, a person who, if the cause was just, would fight. He believed in what they were fighting for and decided he was no longer going to cower in the hole. The man, sure of his convictions stood erect, aimed his weapon and was struck in the chest with an armor piercing round.
It was quickly realized that the general assumed principal “Most wars are desired by only a few people” was both more accurately and more usefully framed as “The vast, vast majority of wars fought between states in the greater galaxy are desired by only one”. The effect of this, combined with the already accepted doctrine of virtual wars with limited combatants was the creation of the now ubiquitous “war of one”
A shell detonated somewhere to his left. He coward at the visceral memory of the unnamed man from moments earlier. He heard and somehow felt the screams and agony the other soldier felt as his chest was struck with one of the high powered armor piercing rounds. The other man’s blood was still dripping down of his glasses. He lay, huddled in the dirt, crying, not daring to think about why he was fighting. He remembered stories about hoards of soldiers fighting never-ending wars whose purpose had been long forgotten. He considered himself to be a reasonable person, but some wars simply could not be won. In the back if his head however, he knew that, in his here and now, he had to fight, no matter the reason. The man, determined to return home, stood erect, raised his weapon and was struck in the chest with an armor piercing round.
Some cultures took the concept of the “war of one” to its laudablly consistent if morally dubious limit. The reasoning went that if we accept it as axiomatic, which all enlightened civilizations did, that “war’s of one” are the most moral way of fighting a war, and that because these cultures saw every decision, no matter how minor as a limiting case of a war, then would not a war of one be the most moral way to make any choice? Of course, many civilizations saw this practice as a barbaric if not fascinating emergent element of the interplay between the meta and individual civilizations of the galaxy.
A shell detonated somewhere to his left. He coward at the pain and suffering of the unnamed man from moments earlier. He erupted in agony as he a round slammed into his chest. Shards of bone clattered down onto his face. The other man’s blood was dripping down of his glasses. He lay, huddled in the dirt, crying, angry at those who had forced him to fight. He remembered stories of conscripts being forced to fight wars of attrition for no purpose other than to amuse their betters, safe at home. He considered himself to be a reasonable person, and no reasonable person would consider the conflict he was immersed in one worth fighting for. He lay, huddled in the mud, crying, wishing only that he would not have to fight. Shells detonated, somewhere in the distance on the ravaged field a tank grumbled along, and he still lay in the hole, arms down, surrendering to whatever fate lay for him at the end of his conflict. He lay and he lay and then he didn’t.
War’s of One for every choice made by a person would pose a technological challenge only to the most computational backwards of civilizations. Any player of reasonable importance long ago achieved an effectively unlimited amount of computational volume. Therefore, those cultures which did adopt the War of One lifestyle, as it were, both tended to be advanced players, and tended to adopt it both vigorously and wholeheartedly.
An infinite sea of not quite black stretched out around him. Others like him stood, lay, were spread all throughout the volume. The unarmed soldier he had seen, and felt, be so violently dismember by the round existed in a million iterations in all directions. He knew why he had been fighting and he knew whom he had been fighting, and he knew why they had been fighting, and he knew why he had been fighting. He knew the choices which had to be made, and he knew the choice had been made. He had lost, laying in a fox hole in a nondescript field, he had stopped fighting and lost the case, but he knew he had won, pushing some tank forward in a nondescript field barging over foxholes and minefields.
The man turned left at the fork.
Godhead isn’t all its Cracked up to be
Slowly she reconciled her place in the scheme of her multiverse, but too slowly for her future self, though, she could not know this at the time. Miriam let remaining simulations play out, with their current complexity taking months but running in parallel with 1000s of others. She could not turn them off to kill the dragons for the incorporeal fireball that would release, but she could let them play out as her universe itself played out. While inaction can be reprehensible action may often be worse.
Miriam’s final simulations ended 46 years after she had first walked into her small office at her old University. As with every one of her simulations there was beauty and there was evil. She did not let the last of the simulations sleep without recording their art however, billions of voices sang out from her lab telling the tales of their heroes and villains. Many in her last world knew of her, or had at least surmised. As the last equations converged and sentient thought damped out a final message was sent. Millennia of effort from civilizations spanning galactic clusters saw carefully tuned interference patterns injected into the world's underlying metric. Encoding scheme using variation in the quadrapolar skew spelled out final thanks, condemnations, prayers, and words of rememberence for Miriam.
Some of the art from these final worlds may resonated in the world without, though as culture is a ficle thing much of it likely would not. Yet the people of Miriam’s multiverse were not forgotten as Miriam remembered them, the ones she had birthed and the ones she had condemned.
Programs so carefully optimized over decades were carefully deleted, and records thought so indelible were magnetically scrambled. The evil in one world was enough to sustain it, no other universe need be brought in. Finally, the research lab was shuttered as it lost its lead scientist, who was by that point its only scientist and Miriam left and she knew her future and she stood once again with Grendel, arm in arm, moving into it.
Authors Note.
Elements of this story, lives lived within 2. and 3. have been published on this site before as stand alone stores. Do not let their continued existence as stand alone webpages imply that they exist anywhere without Miriams’s multiverse. These stories, whether read as an element her or on their own take place within the computers Miriam uses.