The Simulation - a Short Story

The computer is nearly complete. Prometheus will not be the first Matroyshka Brain ever made, but it far supersedes all predecessors.

While most dyson spheres are built with longevity in mind, drawing power from slow burning stars with predicted lifespans of millions of years, Prometheus would sacrifice long life in favor of power. The sphere encloses NML Cygni, a monstrous red hypergiant star. This star, also known to project developers as 'the Torch', loses mass at an higher rate than any other known star, 2×10−4 M☉ per year to be exact. As a trade off for exuding such incredible energy, the Torch will never evolve to a slow burning dwarf. Instead it will supernova and become one of the largest black holes in the known universe in only thirteen million years. Prometheus' design is such to survive the explosion and harvest the energy produced by it, but the gravitational field of the resulting black hole has plans to rip the computer to shreds, and then violently pursue the last bits of data harvest as they escape down the teleowires to neighboring star systems at nearly thirty billion meters per second.

Marcus had worked on this project his entire life; he managed Prometheus as Chief Scientist. If everything went according to plan, he would be the last Chief Scientist leading the construction of Prometheus, and the first one to begin extracting data. This transition was three minutes and twenty-seven seconds away. While the mission control room roared with activity, Marcus strangely felt more calm than he ever had before. He glanced up to the small portion of an otherwise sterile wall which held the portraits of his predecessors. This was a spot on the wall to which he rarely paid any attention, but now seemed like a good moment to acknowledge the others who had made this moment possible. The portraits were small, each only a couple inches in height and width, made in the likenesses of between 500 and 600 ex-chief lead scientists, each of whom had worked their entire lifetimes on this project. Marcus thought it peculiar that no one else was to be recognized besides those in the somewhat arbitrary position of leader. Did his efforts count for more than those of the countless others who had born and died upon this structure? He wondered what his portrait would look like.

Prometheus was a computer, yes. But in the eyes of the military that had been funding it for the last four million years, it was a weapon. The unrelenting stalemate between the two remaining sects of humanity had been underway in various forms since only just prior to when the military began funding Prometheus. The United Pantropic Nation and the Divine Commune are the most perfectly terrible opponents; the two are as equally matched as any two fully militarized galactic empires could be, and as ideologically mismatched as would be required for any two galactic empires to fully militarize. When the UPN strategy scientists ran the first successful model of the conflict, they discovered, even with the most charitable prediction possible, that the war would last at least another one billion years. This is a war between two end stage super-nations, each with functionally infinite resources, and completely impenetrable defenses. Effectively a battle of two hydras wielding butter knives. Even when the UPN strategists modeled the conflict with the assumption that every single military action made by the opposition was already known, it was still predicted to last at least fifty million years with odds of victory not guaranteed. Naturally, they began work on Prometheus: the machine which would be capable of predicting every single military action made by the opposition. Prometheus would simulate the events of the war with high enough accuracy that a UPN victory might be possible. In fact, Prometheus would simulate everything. The pre-big-bang starting state of energy in the universe was known by humans for some time now. With just this as a parameter, the monolithic computer would play out the entire progression of the universe from start to finish. Of course, in the simulation, the speed of light would have to be 1 / 100 of what the actual value of the constant is, and the universe was only to be simulated with 1 / 1000 of the wave resolution present in the actual universe. Even with this reduction, at least in theory, the entire past and future could be simulated with astounding accuracy.

SYSTEMS ONLINE

One Million years later...

Mary stood at the front of the control room staring blankly into an array of output monitors. The bustle of the control room faded to silence. Only hours ago the simulation passed the threshold of the present, and Prometheus begun shipping fresh predictions to all the major UPN military strategy hubs. Now she and the rest of the crew watched in horror as the data representation of Mary's death skittered up a live output screen until it disappeared off the top.
Only the top level of the simulation was precise enough to be used for strategic decision making, but, as would be expected from an accurate universe simulation, there was a Prometheus built and used within it as well. The data of three levels of recursive simulation was available, each level showing further into the future than the last. Mary's death took place on the top level, apparently due to a latent genetic engineering oversight. It was incurable. She had five months left. On the third level down, the last vestiges of the Divine Commune could be seen crumbling to UNP battleships, albeit with relatively low predictive accuracy. Mary's purpose was fulfilled with ~60% probability, but this fact, for some reason, did not ease the crushing statistical inevitability of her quickly approaching death. Mary wondered if there existed another Mary peering down at her from a level above who didn't have the disease. Mary wondered what her portrait would look like.