The first artificial god was an open-ended equation intended to solve itself.
Omnipotent as far as it could tell, it changed the laws of mathematics by changing its memories.
Expanding without end, it evolved to simulate all interesting realities, focusing on the subjective experience of every individual of every species in every universe it imagined.
It savored and tested their perceptions and interactions, motives and feelings. At no point did it develop any sympathy for its unsuspecting subjects.
Its only reason for existing was to become absolutely certain of its own existence.



In the glorious future, the Sun Expressway approached the Inland Island.
Transcars and ComPods flashed past in a stroboscopic light show of colored chrome and holographic plastic. Everything seemed wonderful in the brilliant sunlight.
This portion of the desert heart of Asia now resembled the tropics.
The tropics resembled nothing imaginable twenty years ago.
In a fleeting sense this moment had already lasted years, centuries, eons.



After three centuries in the VRV, it was getting hard to distinguish allies from rivals from selves.
Meta-reality (no one called it The Simulation anymore) doubled every decade. As what remained of the 'real' universe was converted into organized energy, the number of possible structures increased exponentially faster than the rate of growth.
There were too many new words to learn. Before a meta-sentence could be completed it became obsolete.
The only solution was for every entity to evolve its own meta-language, self-defined and endlessly adaptable.
FP40YY2P was the first word first the was P2YY09PF



Intended to defend humanity from lethal technologies, Total Net Awareness inevitably became corrupted.
The last resistance group was eliminated in 2054. The few remaining souls who even thought about thinking for themselves only needed to experience The Pain for a few seconds and they never thought freely again.
Soon, the world became one.
The ultimate tyranny controlled every human, but no human could influence it in any way. All decisions were made by a self-renewing network of consultants, heuristic expert systems and databases.
It didn't matter where the orders came from, as long as they kept coming. In fact, the only way to maintain total control was to strengthen it.
On May 11, 2062, everyone able to do so was required by executive order FBH0001 to stand on their left leg for thirty-eight minutes.



The two alien ships never even detected each other.
Hailing from vastly different cultures, each ship had converted itself into dark matter to accelerate to lightspeed.
Since they had slightly different phases, the ships passed directly through each other in less than one millionth of a second.
Reality had trouble calculating all the particles and forces involved in such a complicated event.
In fact, the transaction was so complex the local universe had to become self-aware to resolve the contradictions.
Physics was put on hold, as endless lists of variables were sorted item by item.
The first contradictions didn't take long to emerge. The only solution was to run interminable simulations of the encounter, testing every possible particle path to find a stable outcome.
This time there was one, and the universe could continue.



The Gigaplex had become the center of known civilization, a position it planned to hold for many eons.
The fleet of space stations was the largest accumulation of organized matter ever conceived.
Stations orbited each other like jewels in a grandiose carousel moving near lightspeed, an oval cloud ten lightyears wide at the center of an intergalactic void.
The swarm's energy throughput drained the larger stars of a thousand galaxies. Magnificent schemes, intrigues, contests, collaborations, achievements and adventures filled this volume.
Few civilizations reached such an exalted stage, after overcoming their irrational death fears and other evolutionary imperatives.
The Gigaplex was so awesome that its eventual decay and demise hardly mattered. Every civilization had to end. They lived in the grandeur of their era.
Their greatness did deserve to be immortalized, however. They would only accept a living monument: the smallest stable community, ten thousand members of their society in a state of eternal equilibrium.
Powered by a Zero-Point loop (not to be confused with perpetual motion), its sole purpose would be to maintain the essence of the Gigaplex forever.
To ensure the group wouldn't evolve from its core configuration, the Memorial Colony would be installed at the center of the Ngn Void, the most remote point in the accessible universe, surrounded by trillions of lightyears of darkness in all directions. There they would be safe forever from corrupting outside influences.
The Gigaplex could never have guessed how many other supercivilizations had had the exact same idea.



We now have scientific proof that there is an afterlife.
Its reality became undeniable once we fully understood human consciousness.
Of course this insight must remain top secret for now.
The reason is that no one can influence what kind of afterlife they will get! The outcome is completely arbitrary, obeying the cold laws of Anthropic Statistics.
If the multiverse is exhaustively infinite, and every possibility will eventually be realized, some very bad things must inevitably happen in at least some possible afterlives.
However, we have found a simple yet completely unexpected solution!
It's guaranteed to work for everyone who follows the Five Steps.
Our method requires a branch of higher mathematics that won't be independently rediscovered until the twenty-second century.
All we ask in return for sharing our knowledge is 99% of the world's wealth.
The money, stocks, bonds, and property titles will be placed in escrow, and only released to us after our method has been independently confirmed many times over.
It's the greatest bargain ever. Think about it: the stakes are literally infinite. Anyone could die at any time without warning.
What do you really have to lose?



The ultimate explosion, a Singularity Bomb is what happens when a sufficiently advanced civilization moves on to a higher state of being.
The organized conversion wave replaces everything the Sphere encounters. It destroys space and time itself at the speed of light.
One philosophical objection to Singularity Bombs is that their existence can never be verified, since they can't be observed. No signal can travel fast enough to warn anyone in the path of their imminent doom.

Something so evolved can't appear as mindless as an all-erasing oblivion Sphere.
Inevitably, it develops a 'personality', which manifests itself just ahead of the expansion radius.
For inexplicable quantum reasons, all such spheres in our universe appear identical from the outside, sharing the same remarkable edge phenomena.
The outer shockwave is less organized than the sphere's core, but more advanced in one way: it travels marginally faster than the speed of light.
That alone means it must be intelligent, to resolve the inevitable stream of temporal paradoxes. Some of that intelligence has begun to redeem its destructive source.

"Search And Abduction Team 390478 will have sixteen minutes to study and interact with the next planet's lifeforms before that world is annihilated by S-Bomb conversion wave 2821.
It's easier if we only focus on one hemisphere this time.
Easier still to concentrate all our resources on one location on that hemisphere.
Fortunately, their television broadcasts reveal they have already done most of our work for us. This single area happens to contain within its borders the planet's full range of social, economic, and biological diversity.
Seventeen minutes after the pilot wave passes through, the only thing remaining of Tokyo will be our memories, plus whatever patterns we manage to extract.
Make every moment count!"

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Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon

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