Aptitude
Page 3
She felt around the dial a bit—simple one-dimensional time for a simple spherical universe—and then looked around to see where she could scavenge more time from.
Now that her eyes were open to them, Alena saw the total carnage wrought by the passage of time on the remaining few universe models around her. Those that were left had expanded so much that they filled the simulation’s available space, each layered over the next.
She could see photons become ancient, frozen, wavelengths so long she lacked the imagination to measure them. Layer upon layer of stellar remnants sifted down from one universe to another until they formed an icy sediment, studded through with iron stars which collapsed into black holes which evaporated into nothing she could see or understand.
Simultaneously and in the same space, other universes were coming apart. Galaxies unraveled and planets splintered, victims of their creators’ wantonly unbounded cosmological constants. Dark energy, left to grow at an ever-accelerating pace, split atoms in front of her eyes. Universes surrounded her, each dying their own death. Alena wanted to look away but wasn’t quite sure how.
She closed her eyes and crossed her arms against her chest, hugging herself, and tried to pull back. When she opened them again, the garden was around her, now lush, dense and overgrown, drinking richly of an unknown light. The Beautiful Gardener was standing next to her.
They were both looking at the tree at the center of the garden, which now revealed itself to be a fig tree.
“—and here you are,” the Beautiful Gardener said. “I take it this means the other candidates have already been eliminated.”
Alena didn’t say anything. If the Beautiful Gardener wanted to know about the other candidates, she could look for herself.
The other woman didn’t seem put off by the lack of response, she just copied Alena’s pose, regarding the fig tree as well. Alena huffed and put her arms down.
She couldn’t see it, but if she closed her eyes again, Alena could feel the sun on her face. In the back of her mind, another dial existed, untouched, the one belonging to the Beautiful Gardener. The switch hadn’t been flipped, but regardless, the garden was still growing around them.
“Are you going to steal that?” the Beautiful Gardener asked. Clearly she could feel Alena’s groping at the fabric of time. She smiled and crow’s feet appeared at the corners of her eyes.
“Why do you look like that,” Alena demanded instead of answering her. “I’m sure they pretend otherwise, but those proctors would definitely look more favorably on you if you were still gorgeous.”
“I’m not sure I’d call my real body ‘gorgeous,’ but thanks,” she said dryly. “I look the way I do because where I’m from that’s how they want people to look. Our bodies are carefully edited as we grow to enhance our intelligence and health, but also for symmetrical features, an attractive body, a full head of hair.” She pulled off a garden glove and inspected both sides of her broad hands and short, callused fingers. “A certain long and elegant bone structure. I haven’t had my original nose since I was thirteen,” she said, tapping the nose in question.
She dusted off the baggy gardening clothes.
“My world made me beautiful. I made myself a botanist,” the woman continued.
“So what, you put on wrinkles and sunspots out of spite?” Alena asked.
“I feel fine. This is just an image; my body works well here and feels good. I just thought—” She paused. “Well, if I were going to wake up every morning and look in the mirror, I’d rather see this face than their face.”
That didn’t make sense. They were only in here for another hour. Or something. Another finite unit of time with the usual magnitude and direction, at any rate.
“Still,” Alena said, then trailed off.
The Beautiful Gardener reached up into the lowest branches of the fig tree and plucked a fruit.
Alena wanted to say something sarcastic, but she was distracted by the ringing in her ears, and the sudden recall of her attention to the void outside the garden. Outside the garden, all the other simulated universes had died, but somehow, Alena thought she could hear voices. She frowned and refocused on the woman in front of her.
The Beautiful Gardener handed her the fig. The skin was sap green, and it felt sunwarm and heavy in her hand. Vascular bundles made thin veins just underneath the surface, and it gave softly under her fingertips, at perfect ripeness.
Alena rubbed her thumb around the ostiole, before pushing her nail in and splitting the fruit apart. The inside was dewy and ruby red, and she even thought she could smell the milky-sweet juice. It was hard to believe it wasn’t a real fruit.
But it wasn’t. What she was actually holding in her hand was a mathematical statement that had been converted into a symbol. She looked around the garden. The mapping worked because no two formulas would ever have the same symbol, just like now two figs and no two blades of grass would ever be exactly the same.
The Gardener’s cosmic orthogenesis was a map of statements about the simulation into the simulation, a mapping that allowed the universe to talk cogently about itself.
And that meant that Alena knew how to break it.
The pressure from outside the garden grew stronger at that thought, and the strange ringing cohered into the voice of the Proctor but she brushed it off.
It wasn’t even a trick actually; it was just the nature of the garden. The universe she had built must contain only those fruits and leaves that had been birthed through the process of cosmic orthogenesis. That is, they must be a universe of mathematical statements consistent with each other, and yes, she thought back to the first simulation, so the garden grew subject to the constraints of her weeding. Even the gardener’s actions had been a member of the set of all statements within the universe.
And if they stood in a universe of consistent statements, then that universe itself could never be fully written. The garden could never stop growing; this was a garden of forking paths. Down one path, the inconsistent state, all fruits were possible because they grew from a statement that was both true and untrue. Infinite proof by contradiction, unlivable, that would grind the delicate machinery of the simulation into dust before ever creating a real universe. A universe in which anything, right or wrong, could be proven.
It would be so easy to break it; she had the key in the palm of her hand, in the tiny grey marble. This was a formula that hadn’t been produced by the garden itself, but which the garden could easily talk about. Introduce it to the system and with a few tweaks she could prove both its truth and untruth, bringing the whole thing to a crashing halt.
Down the other path, the incomplete state, the garden could flourish, infinite figs on infinite fig trees, myrrh and Mecca balsam, root and vine; one day she would even see the sun.
And all it would take is the acceptance of the core flaw of the Beautiful Gardener’s creation: that there was knowledge outside the scope of what the garden could generate.
There was sugar on her tongue. Pulp oozed between her fingers. Alena realized she had eaten the fig. Nothing had ever tasted more real.
Somewhere, the Proctor was trying to stop them. She was reaching for the untouched dial and switch that controlled time in the garden. The Beautiful Gardener couldn’t touch it herself without changing it; Alena pushed the Proctor’s hands away.
The Beautiful Gardener handed her another fig, and Alena ate it in one bite, skin and all, and her eyes were closed but she felt like she could see the whole garden, and that the garden was compact and twisted in space, and she was standing in her own line of sight, eating fruit after fruit.
To accept that the universe was consistent but not complete was to accept there would be things beyond the garden’s ability to prove. There would be true things about the garden that could never be revealed by the churning wheel of orthogenesis.
But more specifically, she knew, clutching the cold grey marble, there was one thing that she herself would never get to know, would never have a
nother chance to ask.
She couldn’t see beyond the garden anymore—the simulation was getting stronger—but she could hear the Proctor’s voice screeching in the void, demanding to shut it down and to pull it apart. Alena wondered if the Beautiful Gardener could hear it too.
Come out, the Proctor was saying, come out and we’ll tell you everything you want to know. The Beautiful Gardner was gazing at the sky. There was nothing she would be able to do. She was within the system, and Alena was the crack that they would use to prize open this cocoon. Trust us, the outside voices demanded as one.
She couldn’t. She wanted to move on, to move forward, to walk under the sun, but—
She held up the blue test booklet, which was creased and crumpled from her death grip. The Beautiful Gardener’s smile made her look young again. She gently pulled the paper out of Alena’s hand.
She took up Alena’s pen and struck out the curvature, struck out the field equations, the matter, energy, density, light and dark, and every axiom and base definition on the page, and as she did so, the tiny cold ball in Alena’s hand loosened, dissolved, and then finally was no more.
And as it dissolved, the garden became a closed form, infinite but bounded, self-contained, and the voice of the Proctor, and the Interviewer, and Others which Alena couldn’t place cut off.
The sudden quiet startled her; it was like she had been surrounded by shrieking cicadas and had not noticed until they were gone. Now there was total silence, waiting to be filled. Not even a rustle of leaves disturbed the quiet; there was no wind to move them. But there would be.
Alena turned to the expectant face of the Beautiful Gardener.
“Do you know how to make birds?” she asked.
The woman handed her a pair of gloves, and together they disappeared into the foliage.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Begin Reading
Copyright
Copyright © 2021 by Cooper Shrivastava
Art copyright © 2021 by Kellan Jett