1. Virtual Day
On the day the Entities materialized on Earth, every human authority felt its control begin to slip, from the UN to regional powers to the remaining nation states down to employers and parents.
Humanity was paralyzed by something fundamentally incomprehensible.
Humans who visited the Blue Room emerged profoundly changed, but tended to remember little of the encounter. The revelations were too deep. Descriptions of the alien interface were incomplete and contradictory. Departing visitors sensed a vast missed opportunity, like a forgotten dream.
- -
Leaving the Blue Room was like swimming out of the sun. As my mind imploded to its ordinary insignificance, I could only pass on the message the Entities wanted me to relay. Sentences assembled in my mind like parasites.
"Humanity has formed a Class 0.2 sub-civilization it considers the first stable utopia. Nevertheless its universe can be improved."
I stood in the sunshine of the last day, ignoring the impossible Escher-shape behind me.
They had explained how insanely wasteful stars and planets were, how much energy was radiated away into empty space. Every second the heat on my skin alone could power the thoughts of a trillion higher minds!
It had to end, of course. No human would sense the transition. Nothing would appear to change.
Everyone would live on in the coming simulation.
- -
All human futures were replaced by a vast computer program representing a subtly transformed universe at 4:26 PM last Tuesday. The laws of physics appear unchanged, but now they're just a software game, at least for us.
We know what happened, but can't verify it yet. No memories have been altered, but that may also change.
The good news is almost beyond belief: no one will ever die again, at least not permanently. All our memories are stored and will be restored when necessary. Most of us will end up in various heaven simulations.
UPDATE: It turns out we can't handle this knowledge, so the Entities are blocking this portion of our memories.
- -
There is a problem.
Reality is math. At the most fundamental level called nature, we're only numbers. Any simulation, natural or artificial, has multiple solutions, interpretations, possible futures.
The most effective universe equations inevitably imply some type of quantum physics, with many diverging timestreams.
So many parallel processes sprang forth from our abundantly redundant real universe that human-level awareness could be described as abnormally resilient and durable.
We never realized or cared, but our lives were absurdly predictable, at least compared to most possible minds. All the theoretically possible but highly unlikely outcomes were swamped by a sea of dull, boring, stupefyingly normal timelines.
We could count on things to stay mostly the same.
When something extremely unlikely does happen, like the Entities appearing, countervailing effects tend to 'seal off' these timelines, reducing their number of possible futures.
Virtual Day is a good example: things are about to get complicated.
Inevitably, the quantum principle will begin to reassert itself. It will merely apply at a higher level.
To predict our future, consider our new present:
Our simulation will inevitably begin to 'interact' with all the similar simulations in other universes. More specifically, our awareness will merge across identical timestreams.
These simulations were created by many different Entities with different biases and motivations.
This rather complicates matters.
Compared to nature, software is unreliable. The work of the lowest bidder, made up of shortcuts, always oversimplifying and deleting redundancies. Artifacts can appear and vanish without a trace.
Eventually, inconsistencies will emerge.
No matter what we do next, the world is about to get a lot stranger.
2. Local Shift
Here's what we know so far:
Last year, a high school student decided to issue his own currency.
Since then he has printed over ten thousand notes of ever rising denominations, with a total face value of almost seventy trillion dollars.
This student now owns most of the world economy.
There's only one explanation: we're living inside his dream.
3. Variable Planet
It's been said that the only real paranormal event is the belief in paranormal events.
There's simply no rational reason or explanation for such a belief. Believers don't care about underlying theories, logical explanations, or inconsistencies. Even if something anomalous ever did happen, the memory and description of the event would be inaccurate.
Those who believe in the paranormal have fundamentally different perceptions and experiences than the rest of us.
Crucially, this means reality itself is different for them. They literally live in a different world!
- -
The best way to modify reality is to wait for some incredibly unlikely event to happen by chance, and then to eliminate the vast majority of timestreams where the desired event did not happen.
The easiest way to modify reality is of course to modify the observer.
You are about to participate in the ultimate experiment. In fact, you will become the experiment.
A few geographers have always thought that the map of Earth should have looked more like the map of the cosmic background radiation. Many small islands filling a great ocean, within easy reach of each other, none too big and none too small, yet with many ecosystems.
What if the world map has always looked that way? At this moment, we just happen to remember it differently: a supremely unlikely coincidence, but not an impossible one.
Remember the world you thought you knew.
It's beginning to look blurry . . .
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Hard SF novel: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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