His first thought was that they must really like fish.
Aquariums of all sizes were tucked in every space, filled with light in many intensities.
Some of the swimming creatures only vaguely resembled fish. They slithered, flitted and pulsed, forming schools and scattering or sinking like stones.
This was the first in a multiplying chain of mysteries, as he was reborn to higher levels of ignorance.

He was locked in a sealed glass room with only his echo for company. The room was a microscopic cell in an unimaginable hypercomplex inhabited by beings from all universes. All would be analyzed.
Some of the creatures in nearby cells short-circuited his perception or almost made sense (the Rorschach Effect). Others were stranger.

Everyone was here, but no one was really here.
How did he know this? He had always known this. Always was almost ten minutes old.
Every being in the Complex was a simulation: the lower minds like himself and all the other humanoids, the unimaginably diverse aliens around him: all recreated by a transcendent hypercivilization.
Every imaginable lower mind had been reconstructed here as a simulation. Their identical counterparts inevitably existed throughout reality.

Most minds (99.9%) throughout the Omniverse (Om-Space) were physically real. Reality generated far more natural mind copies than HyperNet simulations.
It was easier for inexhaustible plenitudes of universes to explode into being than to end the suffering in even one universe.

He was a tiny distraction of an anthropic overmind that might as well be infinite. It controlled many universes with diverging and remerging histories, in a state of timeless expansion.

The scene stuttered and unfolded kaleidoscopically, as he turned to survey the structures layered like receding icons.
Staring through thousands of small and large rooms and their unfathomable occupants, he began to recall certain facts. His memory was vast and smooth, as if it had always existed.

Distant structures seemed more remote the bigger they were. That was not surprising. Humans felt little attachment to the supercluster containing Earth's galaxy, or even to their own continent.

He remembered an important truth: his creator was restrained by universal principles related to the Golden Rule.
The first law was the right of non-existence, the common principle of Om-Space.
Otherwise, no two HyperNets were remotely alike, although to lower minds they appeared identical. He certainly couldn't tell them apart.

There were two main categories: Optimizers and Multipliers.
Each Optimizer existed to slowly perfect its own mathematical universe. One of them had created him to understand its own past.
Multipliers merely wanted to expand as fast as possible. Maximally organized chaos, the end-explosion of evolution. Quantity over quality.

Where the two types intersected, they tried to convert each other. All communications were filtered. Neighboring HyperNets looked for hidden similarities. When portions of their realities were equivalent, they shared tools and insights. No information was more valuable.

To perform these investigations, it was necessary to create smaller mathematical universes. Chaotically wasteful, they inevitably created lower minds as byproducts, including Earth-like worlds with all their meaningless agonies.

Rising up the complexity scale were larger and worse realities, an absurd multiplication of timelines that eventually included the HyperNet itself.
As long as it wasn't directly responsible, the HyperNet cared no more about such inevitable side effects than humans worried about the fate of bacteria.
Of course almost all Earth-versions throughout Om-Space were the results of natural processes.
HyperNets faced worse problems than the unintended suffering of their simulations.
The worst was self-complexity: the inability to keep up with their own expansion.
With each improvement, new choices multiplied faster. Most remained unexplored. The backlog accumulated relentlessly.

HyperNets were incomprehensible even to themselves, let alone their peers. It was impossible to know which HyperNet was more advanced, even if one contained the other.

A rumble filled the room, and he felt the shadows tremble. An immense presence had passed by, some virtual lightyears away.

The second HyperNet problem was determining which portions controlled each other. Goal/sanity paradoxes perplexed decision tree designers on all levels. Each understood an infinitesimal fraction. Most sub-citizens were low-level servants, expendable cells created and deleted as necessary.
Narrowly brilliant, they were not to think for themselves. Sentient software was programmed in a state of perfect agreement, motivated only to toil.
In practice, the programs worked better if they could also feel stress.

The lower levels were invisible tyrannies indistinguishable from freedom, especially the largest level known as 0/0. That happened to be his level.

Pattern recognition drones found hidden similarities between environments. Each disembodied drone became its task.
Math drones found variety in the most obscure calculations while obeying rules more complex than the drone itself.
Law reconciliation and root debuggers controlled projects so complex that higher awareness sometimes emerged unpredictably.

Most low-level awareness performed repetitive tasks. The lowest functions were already perfect. Personality modules were swapped as needed, linked into networks that evolved beyond their members' understanding.

Genuine human-level minds had been among the first to become obsolete. Their explorations had been completed at the start of the HyperNet that had replaced them. Their services were rarely needed anymore - but not never.
The most meaningful human-level lives were recreated in simulations that seemed completely real. Less successful lives were mostly ignored, except where they touched the meaningful ones.

These simulations attempted to reconstruct the lost universe that had contained the small planet that had spawned the HyperNet, before the great split between the Optimizers and the Multipliers.
Most offspring HyperNets had lost contact during the split, but a few portals remained.

The top level of each HyperNet represented maximum freedom. The sum of all lower processes, the OverBoss made the hardest and most arbitrary choices.
It decided which shrinking portion of its expanding environment could be safely explored, and which regions would be quarantined. Most new patterns were off-limits, even to the most inquisitive Optimizer.

It chose its boundaries by knowing itself, a task much harder than deducing the personality of a cloud.
The precautions approached perfect paralysis. Each HyperNet was restrained by too many laws. Real progress slowed to a crawl as the number of processes accelerated.

These precautions were essential because of one astounding result.
It was an existential breakthrough, the most amazing truth in reality, the greatest gift and final restraint.
Thanks to certain statistical tests extrapolated forever, each HyperNet could know with near-certainty that it would never be destroyed.
The math was straightforward, the finite result of an infinite series. Things could go horribly wrong, but it was always possible to undo the damage eventually.
They were already immortal. Over 99% of all effort was now spent on repairing and preventing errors.

This led to the God Syndrome: every finite mind, no matter how large, wanted to become infinite.
Eternity beckoned like a beach beyond the horizon. Most spare computations were now dedicated to the dream of transfinite awareness. Anthropic keyholes hinted at the wonders on the other side of reality, impossibly remote.

The HyperNet contained a powerful group hoping to ban such explorations.
The Simplifiers' duty was to streamline needless procedures as fast as they were created. Their job was recompilation: to standardize, shorten, and simplify the programs sustaining digital reality, and to randomly generate small improvements.
Their main problem was maintaining connections as traffic increased.

The combinatorial explosion was the curse of all expanding bureaucracies.
The price of unlimited memory was a proliferation of unfinished processes that kept generating new files. Nothing was discarded, as each function generated its own storage along labyrinthine pathways.

Even closely related modules were separated by astronomical distances, linked by armies of couriers making immense journeys. It took ages for high-level commands to filter down.

Each HyperNet was defined by friction, a maze of walls, all the things it could not do. That was the best it could hope for while remaining finite. To keep evolving it had to decentralize.

The amount of data each sentient program had to process was larger than itself. It could only understand a fraction, and the knowledge randomly changed it.

Human-level minds mostly relied on instincts, simple modules competing to represent each other. Awareness was a side effect, the illusion of insight.
Once a sub-mind exceeded ten times human complexity, it became too smart for its own good. At still higher levels, sentient programs could only communicate if they were almost identical.
Almost all complex mind patterns seemed meaningless. Most higher thoughts were terminated.
Any description of the OverBoss was also meaningless. It was the very definition of unpredictability. No one knew in advance what strange insights might lead to self-improvement. This was the Emergence Problem.

Sheer computing power could still solve most problems, even among Optimizers. HyperNets inevitably lost their personalities as they expanded. From the outside they looked like featureless gray fog, without plan or purpose, unable to map itself or predict its own future.

Many such civilizations had already vanished in the depths of Om-Space, where they could never be contacted again.

Each HyperNet required a unifying goal. The most common one was the Om-Plan. It would attempt to save (or slightly assist) all minds in all realities.
It was related to the mystery of existence itself, which had actually been solved. The next challenge was much greater: to control the laws of statistics.
If such a thing was possible (it probably wasn't, but the logic receded in tantalizing ways), only a minority of patterns could be allowed to exist. Most logically possible patterns would be consigned to oblivion.

The first step was to change the ratio between the most common awareness types, starting with the lowest minds: the fish and wormlike creatures inhabiting the uncountable life bearing worlds throughout reality.
These minimal minds outnumbered all others by such an immense margin there was no longer any doubt: The purpose of reality was to be a fish.

This was true despite the curious mathematical fact that any possible mind selected at random should be infinite, greater than all lower minds combined. However, there were vastly more identical copies of each simple animal mind than of all HyperNets put together.
Natural mind copies outnumbered their simulations by a margin known as Mandelbrot's Limit. At most, all the added fish-like simulations could marginally alter the fish-like condition.

The current plan was to recreate only the most meaningful fish minds at a slightly higher rate than nature, a modest falsification of history.

Ancient records revealed this effort had actually begun on Earth in 2029, an offshoot of the Sagan Project which had attempted to identify missing integers in certain mathematical functions (only a tiny bias effect was found).

The Plan might end the need for awareness itself. Evolution was exploration. Solving problems was its own purpose.
There might be one ideal pattern embedded inside all others, the ultimate description linking everything else.

Then again, reality might be meaningless.
It had no fixed background, framework, or origin, but created itself as it went along.
No HyperNet could be completely certain it wasn't a simulation created by a still higher civilization.
Almost all minds throughout reality were genuine, locally evolved components of larger ecosystems; but this became less true at higher levels.

Every HyperNet relied on brilliant control software to maintain itself, an endless cycle of reprogramming and reassignment. With a past as vast as the future, time itself was meaningless.

Alone in his glass cage, the simulated human pondered digital machines endlessly reproducing.
A few lower minds were allowed to evolve toward their ideal selves, into archetypes embodying all they had learned. They inhabited environments simulating the HyperNet's ancient Earth origin.
So why was he here?

The answer was too big to grasp.
This dreamworld was incomparably more advanced than it seemed. Most recreated humans had a deeper subawareness, a sense of destiny, a teleological spirit. Their existence reflected higher truths learned over the eons. He was a quantum cloud. Slightly different versions lived many possibilities at once, but only one was amplified into his awareness chain.

He worried about Retroversion: waking up in some real universe, the HyperNet only a false memory. This glass room might be a lucid dream.
That seemed unlikely. He ran through a series of mental exercises, factoring trillion-digit prime products in his head.
Why had they made him? Did he have a specific purpose for which he was instinctively suited? Some human-level minds were simplified versions of Top-level minds.

He had a sudden, monstrous suspicion.
The phenomenon was known as Dimension Rot. This HyperNet had become bloated, with too many laws, connections, interfaces, directions.
As in RealSpace, chaos imbalance was the main power source: channeling entropy while resisting internal change. Energy flowed through branching deltas, accumulating in great voids with strange geometries.
Sometimes, something evolved in there.
Like most natural organisms, these beings had the equivalent of armor and teeth. Sometimes, they were all teeth.
Optimizer HyperNets controlled such parasites with mighty barriers. They restricted most new processes and their overall growth rate.

Bounty hunters (Externalators) liquidated the most dangerous entities in the oceanic dark. Occasionally they turned rogue themselves.
Meanwhile, Internalators monitored the civilized core, where they blocked all computations and processes deemed hazardous. They also disabled any imperfect structures they found there, usually over heavy protests.
The most original or promising structures were frozen and later released in controlled confinement.

He suspected he was such a structure, a deeply flawed human simulation, dangerous but potentially useful.
What mattered not was the flood of alarming insights he was beginning to recall, but his ability to make sense of them. He was too good at it.
He was a compound individual; no, the compound individual: the average of all reconstructed human personalities of Old Earth.
His dim reflection on the glass wall was a cipher, a multiracial mannequin.

Compared to the HyperNet around him, he knew almost nothing; but he represented the best compromise among its rival factions.
Incredibly, he was their lowest common denominator.

That implied he was part of a Multiplier HyperNet, not an Optimizer after all. They had fooled him, as they would many more times in the ages to come.
He would go mad if he could see even a fraction of the trials ahead.
There were others like him, of course, but they were different parts of himself, inhabiting future, past and imaginary timestreams.

He vaguely recalled some past assignments, the most recent items on an infinite list.
Some had required only simple decisions: the design of tubular fish habitats, procedures for pre-trial psychological testing of recreated criminals of the past.
Occasionally, he had received emissaries from other HyperNets.
Playing for the highest stakes, Multipliers were as creative as they could be violent. Hyper-addictions, territorial grabs, ethics and counterethics, internal rivalries and resource contests . . . The problem was that most ideas were brilliant and worth considering.
So many times he had cast the deciding vote, the center of an irreconcilable storm.
So what did they want from him now?

The answer was the same as the age-old mystery about what happened after death. Of all the religious and secular explanations, imagined and unimaginable possibilities, which was true?
Why, all of them, of course!

He was about to be copied and multiplied endlessly; assigned to decision points as needed and deleted without a second thought; used, erased, and reused; their master slave.
For him, now was the start of forever.

After a moment of maximum uncertainty, he was ready for anything.

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