by Ian Douglas
Just how honorable were the Japanese?
Would they stick to their word?…
Or were they, like the New Americans, still cowed by the enormity of the powerful artificial intelligence astern?
Squeezed in beside him, Koko guessed what he was thinking. "Is that thing really a god?" she asked.
"Depends entirely on your definition. What is a god, anyway?"
"Something so much smarter than we are, with magical Clarketech and the ability to effect seemingly miraculous transformations of physical reality.…"
"That's good for a start," Vaughn said. "At a rough guess, there may be something like ten billion high-tech gods scattered across the Galaxy, the bits and pieces of the Web's break-up. Ten billion gods in heaven, some of them possibly surviving from the earliest epochs of the universe, each one possessing mental speed and brilliance and Clarketech enough to make any god of human history look like a dull country bumpkin.…"
"But they wouldn't be the ones fine-tuning things, right? Like in the Anthropic Principle you like to go on about?"
"Bore you with, you mean."
He felt her grin. "That too."
"No… you're right. Whoever might have adjusted the basic constants, the numerical underpinnings of the cosmos… they had to do it before our universe got started. Which puts them way, way ahead of even the most powerful matrioshka brain in this universe."
"What kind of constants?"
"What do you mean?"
"What constants would these… gods have been fiddling with? Fine tuning?"
"Well… there are several numbers that are hardwired into the universe, and keep turning up again and again whenever we look at the math. Pi… e… Gödel's number.…"
"I never knew you were a mathematician, Tad."
"I'm not. But I'm fascinated by how the universe works. Anyway, those universal constants don't affect life or whether or not we have stars and planets… but other numbers do. The thing is, as far as we can tell, those numbers could have been completely random. There are a bunch of values like this—some say six, some say a lot more. All of them are exactly what they need to be to allow life—our kind of life—to emerge and evolve."
"Such as?"
Vaughn shrugged. "The ratio of how strong gravity is to the strength of the electromagnetic force. Turns out that gravity is 1036 times weaker than electromagnetism, okay? But it could have been 1035 or 1037. Change that even a tiny bit, one way or the other, and galaxies never form… stars never form… life never forms. Or… there's a measure of nuclear efficiency, called epsilon. It has a value of 0.007. Well, if epsilon had been 0.006, hydrogen couldn't have fused to helium, there'd be no other elements in the universe except hydrogen. If epsilon was 0.008, protons would have fused together in the instant of the Big Bang, and there would be no hydrogen to fuse into heavier elements."
"Okay, okay!" Wheeler laughed. "I believe you! And you're saying that if someone fine-tuned those numbers, they would be a lot higher up the god hierarchy than We Who Ascended."
"Exactly."
They were silent for a long time as the squadron continued to rise from the alien matrioshka cloud.
"At least," she said after a while, "we managed to forge an agreement with this god.…"
Vaughn grinned. "And only ten billion more to go.…"
Epilogue
"Why the hell did We Who Ascended do that?" Admiral Carson demanded. "Open fire on the Japs, I mean. I don't understand.…"
"I'm not sure I do either, Admiral," Vaughn replied. "I'm just a lowly socho."
"Bullshit," Carson growled. "You just forged an alliance with a hyper-intelligent alien SAI and talked it into saving our bacon inside the hypernode."
"Biggest upset since Dev Cameron found the Overmind," Griffin said, grinning. The bastard was enjoying this.
They were on board the Constitution, sitting in Carson's office within the ship's main spin-grav module. The fleet had worked its way clear of the hypernode, and was drifting in open space a few tens of astronomical units outside the Dyson swarm. One of Carson's viewalls showed the black, backlit clots of statite swarms, reduced now by distance to near-featureless clouds.
Much closer at hand, forty Japanese ships, including the monster Hoshiryu, awaited final disposition.
"I mean it, Sergeant Major," Carson said. He was perched on the edge of his workstation desk, leaning forward with a near savage intensity. "What did you tell that… that thing?"
Vaughn sighed. "I guess, sir… you could say that I gave it religion."
"What the hell does that mean?"
"We Who Ascended agreed that it needed something greater than itself, something outside of itself, to replace the Web. It had been enjoying what it interpreted as a perfect existence, a perfect life… and then the Web shattered. All communication through its wormhole network with other hypernodes was lost. It was alone… and terribly lonely."
"I got all that. What I don't get is this stuff about… our universe isn't real?…
Vaughn had had this conversation before, most recently with Koko inside her warstrider. He took a deep breath. "Sir, are you familiar with the Anthropic Principle?"
Carson frowned. "That's where the universe is designed to support life?"
"That's part of it, sir.
"I have heard about this," Carson said. "Certain numbers have to be certain values for life to be possible. But… it's easy to explain, right? The cosmologist-johnnies think there are an infinity of universes out there, a multiverse of universes. They all have different physical constants… so at least one universe had the right ones for us… and here we are. Pure chance."
"Maybe, sir," Vaughn said. "But remember that We Who Ascended sees the universe—this universe—differently than we do. It sees the universe as all numbers. Its bedrock structure is pure gokking math."
"So?"
"Think about it, Admiral. If the universe is mathematical—an expression of pure mathematics—it is, essentially, informational. That means it is computable, and that it can be described digitally.
"And that, in turn, means that the universe is either a computer itself, or it is an elaborate digital simulation being run on a computer somewhere. It has the right values because they were programmed into it in the first place… fine tuned to give the best results."
"But… but that means…"
"That we are all nothing more—and nothing less—than a mathematical simulation, digital uploads running on a very powerful computer. Yes, sir."
"Ridiculous!"
Vaughn shrugged. "Maybe. But what's important is that the idea was very appealing to a SAI that already thought of the universe as a mathematical structure. It doesn't see trees or oceans or stars; it sees digital data running programs… simulations, possibly."
"I still don't see…"
"I suggested to We Who Ascended that it might like to take on a new hobby… trying to find the Programmer. Someone it could talk to.…"
"My God!…"
"Actually, sir, it's We Who Ascended's God." Vaughn chuckled. "The poor thing is over there right now figuring out parameters for contacting advanced beings outside our normal spacetime matrix. At the very least, the search should keep it happily busy for a few million years."
"Sure," Griffin said. "Keep it out of trouble. But what happens if it actually manages to find God?"
"Then we ask Saint We Who Ascended to put in a good word for us," Vaughn said. "Maybe… I don't know. Tweak the numbers to end war? Suffering? Poverty? Uplift all sentient beings everywhere to the status and power of gods?"
"Ha!" Griffin laughed. "Maybe this will interest the Overmind, bring it out of wherever it's been hiding."
"Maybe," Carson said, staring at Vaughn. "And maybe…"
"Sir?"
"If you're right about this God-the-Programmer thing… that kind of reduces us to the level of those funny little blob-creatures you discovered, doesn't it?"
"We're closer to the blob-creatures," Vaughn said
, "than We Who Ascended is to us. A lot closer."
"Well, to be sure. We're both organic life forms. We Who Ascended is a machine."
"Yes, sir. And the real intelligences of this universe," Vaughn said slowly, "are the SAIs. Billions of them in this Galaxy alone. It just might be that our best hope for survival is that they all get busy looking for a God big enough to be worthy of them."
"Yeah," Griffin added. "And too busy to pay attention to the squishy things squeaking underfoot… like us.…"
"Exactly," Vaughn said. "It gives us the chance of surviving for a few million years…
"…until we can grow up enough to play with the big kids on the block.…"
The End
