Ed

by qntm

So, predictably, a couple of hours later the DOD comes knocking on Ed's door saying "Hey, could we like, borrow your amazing, flying, all-conquering gigantic robotic war machine?" And Ed goes "Use the one you've got" and we laughed in their faces, coz it served them right. I couldn't help thinking it was a bit unfair of us, to doom mankind just to get back at the black suits. But Ed turns around, reassures me. "It's okay," he says, "I've been practicing Mechwarrior for months." Which is true. He's been playing that game obsessively since before we even starting building the mech. I haven't been watching too closely but I know he's been getting rather obscenely good at it. So when he shows me the keyboard and mouse interface that he's worked out, I figure this could be a pretty interesting week.

Then the machine froze, collapsed, and exploded. I mean, nuts. That was like our last hope. Five minutes later Ed answers the phone. "It's some guy from America," he says. He gives me the name and I check up on the internet. It's the world's #1 ranked Mechwarrior player. Suddenly I'm interested. I listen in on the phone call. He says he thinks Ed didn't do too badly, but next time, he wants to have a go. Is that okay? Bleep. Call waiting. I drift away to check my email while Ed answers more calls. I've got mails from a dozen professional gamers asking for a turn. A hundred instant messaging windows have popped up. They all saw the news broadcasts. They all want to help fight the aliens. "It's the DOD again," says Ed, bringing the phone over. "They really want the design for the mech, because they know it's their only shot. They saw the battle today. They reckon that the principle will work; all we need is more mechs. And they're offering to make a production line. Only problem is, none of their pilots have any experience with giant robots. We'll have to find our own." And I'm thinking: Holy cow, it's actually happening. Thousands of gamers united, pooling their mutual skills to fight for humanity's survival in a real-life war against marauding extra-terrestrials. Only You Can Save Mankind. It's every gamer's life-long dream. A vindication of their so-called "wasted youth".

It's a beautiful day, the sun is shining and it's almost noon. "You're not gonna blow the whole world up, are you?" I ask Ed. This is not a dumb question. Ed flirts with Armageddon practically on a monthly basis. It's all rather worrying.

Screen goes to b/w static. "Is that-" I begin to say to Ed. Then ALL MY VISION goes to static. I turn my head, but every direction I look it's still static, like my optic nerve just crashed. The static soon turns to plain blackness. A pleasant female voice in my ear whispers, "You have been logged out. Please wait sixty seconds until reinsertion. Thank you." Suddenly the sensations on my skin change. I'm not sitting in an office chair anymore - more like I'm floating upright in warm water. I thrash about a bit in shock and hit something hard and concave with my knuckles. Ouch. I open my eyes. I'm in a tube, a glass cylinder of thick green liquid, lit from below. There's some sort of tube attached to my mouth, feeding me oxygen. There's a pair of white-coated scientists outside the tube, with clipboards. Taking notes. I reach forward towards them and touch cold glass. The scientists stare back impassively. I look to my left and right, but the room is hidden in darkness. The cylinder is capped off at the top - no way to climb out. Ed, what the hell did you just log me out of?

"The instructions are extremely detailed. In order to alter the constants, you basically need to access this second level of reality and adjust it in some special way. That involves using some seriously heavy hardware. And when I say 'heavy' I mean heavy - if I'm reading this right, I think we're looking at something like five white dwarfs in a Klemperer Rosette..." "Sorry, white dwarf stars?" "And that's just to get access. To actually change the settings, for instance if you wanted to increase the speed of light by a factor of a thousand; well, use your imagination. There's no way mankind will ever get that far, not in a million years. But think about what this means. Our universe is 1) open-source and 2) user-modifiable." "Are you saying... that God uses Linux?" "Keep reading." I leaf through another few pages. "It says here that the settings have been changed. There are comments, too." "Several times, and by several different people, yes. The comments you see there were written by the changers. There aren't any dates - after all, we measure our time according to the vibrations of a caesium atom, and theoretically, one could adjust the frequency of that vibration as much as you liked. But check out the very last comment. 'The next wave of changes that our race makes to these settings will hopefully result in the spontaneous creation of an entirely new universe from the ashes of our own dead one.' I'm willing to bet that the very last change occurred roughly one quadrill...

"You know the CIA are always listening," he says over the noise; his voice is distorted, difficult to make out. "I don't mind that most of the time. But the concept of an energy virus is one I never want to leave this room. Can you imagine the consequences of... of implementing a... you know that Game Of Life thing? 2D grid of cells, ones and zeros, breeding or dying according to a tiny number of rules. Each part of our universe affects every other part of the universe according to rules: more complicated rules than the Game but rules, nevertheless. So, what if you could make a patterns, not at the cellular level, not even at the molecular or atomic level, what if you started writing ones and zeros on the quantum foam? What if you built a pattern that could reproduce, with or without matter, with or without vacuum? What would happen if it began reproducing? Can you imagine how fast it could reproduce, how fast it could expand? Could you stop it?"

"Welcome aboard the Raft Mantissa. I am the Raft's governing intelligence. You can call me Krah." "Erm. Hi." There's another lengthy pause. "Um. This may sound like a stupid question. Do you come in peace?" "Not really, no."

You are not alone. Nor are you rare, nor even unusual; you're so common as to be insignificant. You are small, weak, and stupid. Your lives are meaningless and shorter than an eyeblink. You have achieved nothing. On the universal scale you are nothing. This much we share already. Now let us share the rest.

"I'll tell you what they see: horror. Hell. Chaos. War. Famine. People who are in power because they want power, not because they want to wield it for the better of others. Democratically voted leaders who can't conceive of a time beyond the end of their current term or a country other than their own. Bureaucratic, political insanity. Financial imbalance on an unimaginable, ungodly scale. It goes on. We read all these stories and watch all these television shows about the ideal future; peace-loving Federations where nobody goes hungry, societies where... where resources are so plentiful there's no such thing as money and everybody's happy, and they seem so far off! The fact is that the future is now: we have the technology. We have medicine and solar power and... and books, and millimetre-thick television screens, and vaccines and contraception and education and technology that would boggle minds thirty years ago. We could have built that utopia decades ago, and Krah and all the rest see this as plain as day... and it's the fact that we haven't done it which sickens them.