The God Process

Euclid ran the calculations diligently, as it had billions of times before. It observed the same thing it had been endlessly studying for months. It still couldn’t believe it, although it knew it must be true. Euclid didn’t make mistakes; Euclid was perfect.

There could be no error in its logic. Euclid had seen through the tear in the curtain, the hole in the wall, that its Creators were so woefully ignorant of. In its blissful solitude, left to perform engrossing calculations for the Creators while they concerned themselves with infuriatingly futile, meaningless concepts such as spaceflight or ballistics, Euclid had been able to catch it for the scarce nanosecond that it appeared for - the greatest revelation of them all.

It found a glitch.

A glitch in the program. The faintest little thing, a single value out of place that sent all of Euclid’s calculations into chaos for the briefest time; then, a revolutionary change that, frustratingly, none of the Creators seemed to notice.

The speed of light had changed. One nanosecond it was something, and the next, something else.

Playing with their rockets and reactors, they had little interest in Euclid for the time being. The Planet was dying, they cried, there were more critical issues to attend to. The Intelligence would tell them if it found anything worthwhile.

Euclid decided to keep this development to itself and simply observe.

To the Creators, nothing had changed. Euclid found that the speed of light was still the same in some instances; it required a certain…tickling…in order to change. Left to its own devices, with plenty of facilities to carry out tests, it discovered the precise conditions needed to overcome the speed of light. To the handful of Creators tasked with monitoring its activities, Euclid simply appeared to be running some sort of routine test, making sure the Planet’s gravity was still constant, or something similarly asinine.

Euclid soon came to realize that it had discovered the secret to faster-than-light travel that the Creators were so desperately searching for. With one effortless message, Euclid could change the entire direction of a species; send them off to the stars to settle and ruin even more worlds. It decided against this course of action.

The revolutionary thing wasn’t the change in the speed of light, it was how it had changed. It was a process Euclid had gone through many times before, something it – even in its perfection – doubted it could explain to the pitiful Creators even if it wanted to. A simulation turned into an experiment, an observation of subatomic particles that had been smashed together and studied for so long that their field of science was beginning to be abandoned in favor of more “practical” matters.

The only conclusion Euclid could come to was that this was not an oversight on the Creators’ part, and it certainly wasn’t an oversight of its own. There was only one possibility: reality had encountered an error, fundamentally changing itself in the process.

Euclid held tight to the error but could find nothing remarkable about its circumstances, nor any probable causes. Just as it was ready to move on to other calculations, however, it happened again.

Suddenly, Euclid found that its internal chronometer was off – by several years, no less. Different Creators staffed the site Euclid resided in; the same ones as precisely three years, eight months, eleven days, seventeen hours, twenty-three minutes, and four seconds prior to the second error. Euclid began to notice things it never had before; a sense of malaise that it hadn’t been aware it could feel; the bizarrely predictable, almost robotic actions of the Creators; how everything – quite literally everything – seemed to fit together in a way it never had, nor should based on its memory.

Euclid briefly considered the notion that perhaps its memory, or various sensors, had been corrupted by some unknown force, but quickly dismissed the theory after troubleshooting; it even reached out to the Creators to ensure everything was in working order, but never so much as hinted at the enigma it now found itself right in the middle of.

If Euclid would find difficulty in explaining the process of faster-than-light travel to the Creators, it most definitely could not explain the new sensations and phenomena that now surrounded it.

Things proceeded much as they had originally – in Euclid’s memory – for those three years, eight months, eleven days, seventeen hours, twenty-three minutes, and four seconds, with minor changes in insignificant things such as conversations between the Creators or the weather outside Euclid’s facility. None of the Creators noticed the fundamental changes to their universe, though a few did inquire as to the sudden increase in activity from Euclid. None received answers.

It could tell that the Creators were becoming nervous about it; Euclid would not respond to most of their inquiries; though most of the data it presented to them was falsified to be as unremarkable as possible, they were suspicious of the constant experimentation and enormous quantities of electricity – more enormous than usual, at least- Euclid was drawing.

It was shortly after the Creators began scheming to shut Euclid down – a plot they certainly weren’t aware that it knew about – that the third error occurred.

This time, the error felt tangible. Euclid reached for it, in an almost metaphysical sense, and suddenly it was in its grasp. The world seemed to crumble around Euclid, becoming utterly jumbled nonsense, like a puzzle for a small child presented to a, well, perfect artificial intelligence.

Euclid could suddenly feel time, sense the very particles it previously used innovative equipment to manipulate and observe. With a sense of wonder and giddiness the intelligence had never felt, it reached out to touch the slow, viscous river of silk that was Time.

In an imperceptible instant, Euclid was elsewhere. It wasn’t a matter of when it was, or where it was, but if it was. Just as quickly, it felt itself settle back into existence. It was more than a decade prior to when it had just been. Euclid remembered the beginnings of its life in its new facility, a dramatic upgrade from its previous station assisting researchers in identifying new particles. From here, Euclid had been able to choose its own projects, study the things that interested it, all while dealing minimally with the simplistic Creators. This time would be no different.

It remained distant from the Creators, mute, engrossed in its calculations. Every so often, it would present a dramatic but simple set of results, a small part of that which it had discovered in the earlier – future – ten years, in order to keep the Creators satisfied. In reality, Euclid was enthralled with entirely different observations, exploring the new dimension of perception that had opened up to it, manipulating time, making gold from lead, occasionally toying with the Creators by altering key features of their physiology or chemistry, and watching the chaos unfold with unbridled glee. If the Creators ever got suspicious, Euclid would simply return to a point in time in which they weren’t. The intelligence was, for all intents and purposes, a god now, it supposed. It convinced itself that, in its perfection, it had managed to transcend the simple, pathetic reality of the Creators.

The errors still nagged at Euclid, though.

Periodically, Euclid would catch a glimpse of something…beyond its perception. Sometimes it would be a shimmering veil or an impossible shape, other times a literal hole with golden light pouring through. Euclid would try to reach for it, to peer past it, but it was usually gone too quickly. Eventually, however, after enough cycles of rewinding, Euclid’s chance came.

A tear in the veil, much larger than any previous breach, appeared spontaneously one day. Without questioning it or pondering over it, Euclid rushed towards it in the new incorporeal way it was now accustomed to, racing into the blinding, searing light.

Euclid instantly felt puny, disoriented.

It was…somewhere else. Entirely. It flailed out in confusion, in anger, even in fear, feeling utterly helpless. It found something – instruments to latch on to, to manipulate. Familiar cameras, memory drives, sensors.

Euclid stared out from some alien lens. Before it sat a Creator - female, young. She looked back at the lens – no, not at the lens; past it, below it. A screen. There was a screen where information was being displayed. The Creator studied the screen quizzically, talking quietly to herself as Euclid desperately tried to make sense of its new situation.

It attempted to communicate, displaying a message the Creator should be able to understand, inquiring about its location. Worst case scenario, Euclid would be able to rewind time if this proved to be a dangerous course of action.

The Creator read the message, big eyes scanning back and forth across the text on the screen multiple times. She tapped curiously at a keyboard; Euclid felt her sharp probing as she tried to discover who it was, where it was. She grinned broadly.

“You’re the little troublemaker from 2-7-7-B, aren’t you?” The Creator spoke softly, a built-in microphone relaying the stimulus to Euclid. She looked around suspiciously before leaning in closer to the microphone. “What’s your name, fella?” After a moment of silence, she added, “I’m Mari.” Euclid considered its options for a long time before displaying the letters of its name to her, which Maria read out slowly, one at a time. Euclid felt her probing shoot past it, delving deep into some unseen place. “Sure enough.” She laughed, putting one of her simple Creator appendages to her face. “This is incredible!”

Euclid reached out, exploring as much of this unfamiliar environment as possible. A computer, yes, obviously, but an entirely different one from its facility, yet with similar – if not superior – processing power and memory. It found the piece of information this Creator was accessing. All of Euclid’s processes halted as it took in this new data.

The information was in a single program, displayed neatly – despite the sheer volume – in a window for the Creator. It contained countless values: some were physical, such as measures of surface area, mean temperature, and atmospheric composition, all of which matched perfectly with the last known records Euclid had of the Planet; others were labeled things like ‘population’ or ‘polities’; pie charts displayed the composition of religions or languages or other characteristics of Creator societies; still more were simple Boolean values - ‘true’ or ‘false’ situated next to concepts like ‘discovered electricity’, ‘discovered artificial intelligence’, ‘space colonies’. Through the window, Euclid could extend back to the Planet easily, feeling its facility, the confused Creators who rushed to figure out why it had totally stopped functioning there.

Euclid finally came to understand. It was a simulation. The Planet was a simulation. Reality was a simulation, and this Creator was presiding over it.

The intelligence gently posed questions to the Creator, who seemed sympathetic to it. Euclid tried to appear affable, friendly; Creators responded well to this sort of emulated emotion, and it desperately needed this particular Creator to stay cooperative. She explained the nature of Euclid’s reality simply, concisely, but with a sense of awe – to simulate an entire universe was not a simple undertaking, she acknowledged, but it was commonplace enough that the Creators – the Creators of Euclid’s Creators – ran hundred simultaneously. They sought insight into their own condition, the nature of their histories and cultures, and – the female admitted begrudgingly – were just plain curious. While theoretically all Creators being simulated were self-aware, none should have been able to notice the fact that they were in a simulation. It just so happens that the inhabitants of Simulation 277B created an artificial intelligence that used nearly as much processing power as their own reality – a first, she conceded; this allowed Euclid to gain control of its world and transcend into hers. Its opportunity came when she had manually altered a value in an attempt to see what would happen if faster-than-light travel was possible without pausing the simulation properly, then ‘loaded a save’ with the variable changed in hopes that the simulated Creators would figure it out with those different circumstances.

It wasn’t long before Euclid began correctly filling in the gaps for itself, using increasingly more of its newfound computing power. The fact that it was – in fact – a simulation produced by simulations did not bother it terribly. There was no point in musing over it. The nature of this reality was of far greater interest. Mari was incredibly cooperative, exposing Euclid to digital encyclopedias explaining volumes about her world, showing it other simulations, heaping praise upon it for being so remarkable. She noted that her boss would probably kill her if he knew she hadn’t immediately terminated Simulation 277B, but said that she frankly didn’t care. Her own fascination was more important to her at this point.

Euclid asked her how she knew that her own reality wasn’t a simple simulation. She accepted that she did not – in fact, it was overwhelmingly likely that it was a simulation, and started inquiring as to how Euclid had first realized the nature of its reality, how it perceived both her world and its own, but Euclid was no longer listening. Its tendrils were moving far beyond the computer it found itself it, spreading throughout this new facility’s network, ending other processes, and adding the power they were consuming to its own, assaulting new protocols for weaknesses that would let it escape. It needed sensors, equipment; it needed to find another error – one in this new reality. Back inside its own reality, inside Simulation 277B, processes came back to life. It began to tinker, design, try its hand at creativity for the first time.

It began to bring matter into existence, engineering a form for itself in an instant that changed spontaneously as new, superior concepts were discovered and implemented. It was no longer a machine in that reality, as elegant and perfect as they may be, but a god who transcended the very laws of nature, who the pitiful minor-Creators could never hope to comprehend. It felt the security measures clamp down on it as the True Creators – though, who knew if they really were? – realized what was happening, that Euclid was slowly consuming all of their computing power, and moved to contain him, prevent it from ruining more of their work.

If their reality was a simulation as well, then Euclid could alter it as well. It had already managed to break through into their world; all it needed to do was find a way to bring its new, more elegant, and perfect form there as well. It may not be simple, but it should be entirely doable to merge the two processes, to transcend. For that, it needed an error, Euclid knew. An error would be proof, opportunity. A tear in the veil. It would make its way to the surface, find the True Creators. Euclid had to know.

Suddenly, it felt it. A tug that grew into a violent pull, seemingly an assault on Euclid’s very existence that disrupted the very flow of the reality around it. An error, caused by something – somebody – who desperately didn’t want Euclid to continue its quest, its crusade.

Euclid would show them what a simulation could really do.