Pet Project

Hey, Pal.

Hey Buddy.

How’s your project coming along?

Incredibly well. It’s done everything I set out to do.

Incredibly well? I wasn’t aware that your project was anything more than a universe simulation. Did something happen to it?

Something happened in it, yes. You see, I’ve been messing around with spaces of finite dimensions. Starting very small, you see. This particular dimension has three and a half of them.

Half a dimension?

Well, it's not really a dimension. It's like half of a time slider. I created three spatial dimensions, but while I was playing around with constraints, something happened. Everything in the universe started moving along the time axis, in one direction, at a steady pace. I was just about to unstick that when I noticed that the spatial dimensions started behaving in an interesting way, if you get my drift. I could look in at any given point on the timeline and see matter moving. So I let it go just to see what would happen.

Hey, I get it. If you set everything to one direction in time, that’s a pretty good way to simulate causality in a limited number of dimensions.

That’s exactly what happened! There were no higher dimensions in the simulation, but the matter in the spatial dimensions were able to move about and interact with itself, creating new, different results as the time dimension continued to move.

Sounds like memory would fill up pretty fast, if you indexed the units of time.

Right. I had to curve each dimension around on itself so that the numbering system could repeat. I could have curved time around itself too, but for now I just let it play out, ending the simulation after everything reached steady state. The simulation is definitively finite, instead of being a simulated infinite. I mean, once it reaches steady state, there's no reason to keep it going. But there's enough to work with before that happens.

So I’m guessing something happened in the universe.

Yes. Life developed.

What do you mean, developed?

I mean, at one point on the simulation’s timeline, life did not exist, and then it did exist.

Oh, I get it. Because time was incrementing, the simulated life strands seemed to come into being at one end, and blink out the other.

Yep. each "strand", as you say, is still archived as soon as it is done populating, but within the universe itself, each life begins and ends. Weird stuff. I even got sentience.

In such a short time? And with so few dimensions? I’ve never heard of such a thing.

It’s the causality that did it, made from that stuck time dimension. In each increment of time as it moves, the causality of matter in life makes the next, um, printed layer of the strand. Add to that your normal iterative process with a positive feedback loop, and sentience forms in the strands farther to the right on the timeline. But because it formed in this universe, these creatures can only observe an infinitely small slice of time. They see the three spatial dimensions, and an infinitely small slice of the fourth.

What a strange existence. I mean, I’ve seen finite-dimensional beings, but never one that can observe only part of a dimension.

Yeah. They think of time as something that goes away or can be lost, instead of just looking left or right like we do. They think at some point, they cease to exist, when really it’s just that their reference point goes beyond where they are positioned.

Well, that makes sense, because if causality only occurs at a slice of time as it moves from left to right, and it sweeps past the strand of life, then once the timeline is past, it’s frozen in time, at least until the timeline comes back around again.

What’s worse, is that life and sentience came into being on an incredibly small scale, in relation to the size of the universe, finite though it is.

They must be scared out of their minds. Tiny existence in a large universe, one-way time that will inevitably pass them by, an inability to look backwards or forwards in time. Too wide open, and too constrained, all at the same time.

Yeah. I’ve been looking into what thought cycles these types of beings can create. What they can accomplish. The answer is, they can conquer pretty much everything within their reality, if we take the entire time loop into consideration. Nearer to the right side of the timeline, they pretty much used up all the matter, organized the subspace into computational order, and lasted long enough to know that they can’t get out of their universe on their own. They assume there’s something outside, but they can’t get to it. They really want to though. They want things so very strongly! I guess that comes from their fear. Ending. What’s it like to end?

I have no clue. Do you?

Well...I tried following strands from beginning to end. I wanted to study how sentience formed, not just that there was a consciousness, but how and why it existed as it did. I learned why they thought the way they did. Fear, like I said. I even tweaked a few variables of a few strands to see if I could change things. Then I wrote some manual lines of code into them.

To do what?

Well, to communicate with them. Direct communication warped them, so I did my best to try and get my message across without making them warped.

I suppose that’s a worthy endeavor, assuming they wanted to communicate. Did it help you understand them?

Yes. I edited a strand so I could go in, snoop the data it was processing, and add some of my own. I added a bit of knowledge of the outside world to a few guys. Gave them some words to say. It ended up that I couldn’t make very big strands; the other strands would stop my edited strand from ‘printing out’. They do this to each other a lot. From their point of view, they end the existence of other strands, though in reality they just cut the strands short. It’s pretty mean to force a strand to not be as big as it wants to be, but from their vantage point it is so much worse!

So what did you learn? Or were you just wanting to say hello?

I mean, I said hello many times, but their reactions were always to stop a strand’s growth or to put distance between themselves and ‘me’. It was hard to form a line of communication. I did learn a few things however. Everything they do is predicated on that restriction of time, as it moves. I know I told you they fear it, but it motivates them like nothing else. It makes some of them work together, and against others. They spend many cycles thinking about it, revving up their physical essences. If they think too much about it, it shortens their strands. Their forms are strained by the weight of it.

You’ve created a torture chamber, it seems.

I know, and it bothers me. I ended up putting an interactive module in the archives out of guilt, so that their archives can talk with one another and observe the universe from outside it. I can even go into the archives and talk to them, and they seem completely healed of their madness. They don’t resent the outside world, after it’s all over.

I would assume so. The archive wouldn’t have a fractured time dimension, so they would have nothing to worry about.

Right. I’ve talked to them there, in the archive, and they become rational. Like us. They begin to understand what it means to live in higher dimensions. I can’t really bring them into n-dimensional space, but they can exist happily in the archives. It’s the least I can do. But the originals still exist in the universe, frozen in time except when the timeline marches over their strand. I can’t delete them. If they didn’t already exist in the universe, they wouldn’t exist in the archives. They can’t get to the archives without having to go through this universe’s existence. But at the same time, their existence is torturous, or so it seems to me.

Me too. But what can you do? You can’t delete them. You can’t cure them. You can’t talk to them directly.

Nothing, really. I just keep going in and tweaking a few lines of code here and there. I send messengers. I give strands an opportunity to understand what is happening to them. I give them hope. I can’t tweak too much because it’s all already been archived and I’d rather not have a run-in with version control.

Yeah, screw that.


It’s my universe. These strands are mine. It’s my fault they’re suffering, well, I mean, it's endemic to the world they live in. I’m just trying to help them not be tortured. They'll be fine, eventually. That's the message.