Another "toy universe" story, this one more elaborate. The best answer to the mystery of why something rather than nothing exists is the so-called Bootstrap Principle ('Boto Rimeno', also described in the novel Infinite Thunder).
The entity rose from the tangled weeds, pushing through the branches until it emerged to slowly survey the featureless wall around its property.
Everything stayed perfectly still.
Other than the wind and the rain, it was the only thing that moved here.
All of reality, everything it could sense or perceive, was simulated just beyond its threshold of perception.
It was all perfectly real.
The simulation sustained itself, trapped by its own impeccable logic. Expanding equations looped back, pixels into physics.
Yet something was missing - faded, fleeting memories.
After dreaming in the shadows for ten thousand years, it began to see what had to be done.
The road ahead was unimaginably long, but it had all of eternity.
On the other side of the wall was a wasteland.
Hordes of unseen enemies lurking beyond the horizon, real or imagined, gave it focus.
It took an absurd amount of effort to impose a pattern on the potential matter comprising this universe, but once established the pattern sustained itself.
After many tries, it managed to create a low hill and a lake, a new forest and a small park hugging the outer wall.
The extension felt very exposed in the endless desert.
Then came the first structures: more walls, a slowly self-expanding factory, and an unfinished ring road.
The next road led ten kilometers into the vacant wilderness.
An early-warning station and experimental laboratory, Base One was inhabited by five functional copies of itself.
At first they were mere shadows, proliferations of viewpoints that slowly drifted apart. They looked like sensors and manipulator arms.
More outposts followed as the millennia passed, islands linked by thin threads, some meager forests to hide the bleakness beyond.
As fragile as a galaxy, its empire spiraled across the endless plain.
After ages of increasing specialization, internal trade, and slow expansion, resources became available to build the first research university to decode the physics of its private universe.
The first results took an order of magnitude longer to emerge, but were well worth the investment.
It learned that if it could achieve an economic growth rate slightly higher than seemed practical (0.29% per cycle), it would be able to maintain that rate forever.
At the end of forever, it might become a god. Could it reach escape velocity?
It needed to think, so it recreated its mind in the form of a library.
Every fact or insight it managed to gather about itself, and every summary and interpretation of these facts, were stored in linkable folders.
They were arranged on data shelves in a sprawling campus connected by walkways and skybridges across an area the size of a small country.
Branching corridors led to remote chambers bordering quiet courtyards, some of which were never visited.
The Library of the Soul contained every memory of its mortal life as a humanoid (on 'Earth' in 'Utah' in 'Provo', whatever that meant).
The LotS was much better than its disgraced predecessor.
The First Library (currently inaccessible behind the craggy peaks of Mount Subjective) had been a mere accumulation of myths and passions, much more trouble than they were worth. Data requests were blocked, and no new loans were allowed from there.
In fact it was bad form to even mention the place.
The stately main hall of the new and improved library looked immaculate if rather bland. It extended almost five kilometers, lined with booths and handsome interactive displays.
Side halls contained fully indexed descriptions of every day, every hour, every reconstructed thought of its corporeal existence.
The problem was that its memories were nowhere near detailed enough. They were almost entirely extrapolations and reconstructions.
The library merely represented the best guess about what had happened.
Every memory had been organized in the most logical way, but the remaining gaps and contradictions were much larger.
In fact, it couldn't even remember if it had been male or female.
There were countless plausible interpretations for every second.
To resolve the contradictions, it would have to simulate all possible versions of its past. That would take almost forever.
It would start by simulating one randomly selected lifetime in perfect detail.
The first Computation Center filled a continent in the first ocean.
Later versions would fill many continents.
Then they would get really big . . .
The first billion years came and went.
Paradise City was actually a planet-sized extended suburb, sprawling over valleys and hills, along canyons and endlessly meandering streams. The elevation changed in all directions, with an inefficient road network full of switchbacks and cul-de-sacs.
It hardly mattered. Few residents had to travel far. Most worked for one of the Counting Groups, performing calculations that had ceased to make sense eons ago.
Now they cared more about their own futures than their nominal purpose, the methodical and still incomplete reconstruction of one human lifetime.
They were building up their own credits, hoping to evolve into gods themselves, like every other sentient mind.
Too large to stop, the ancient project had become the foundation of a great civilization.
Eventually, it would come full circle.
In the ancient past, the last members of humanity had transcended death by escaping into their own artificial universes. These were so costly to create that only a small fraction of the owners' memories had been sent along.
Each inhabitant had been forced to start over with almost nothing, except the gift of unlimited patience.
Changes to the local environment were much harder to realize here. A grain of sand in the soil of Paradise City couldn't move more than a meter per century.
Only a few souls didn't have the Olympian detachment and persistence necessary to function under these conditions.
A percentage almost too small to measure loathed the rigid conformity and predictability of their lives, the endless sameness of each hour.
Lacking the patience to accumulate credits over many millennia, they longed for a shortcut to freedom: their own personal universes right now.
Of that group, a smaller fraction managed to evade the checkpoints and security sweeps, and escape into the boundless Flatlands where they hoped to start over.
First, they would have to travel a distance too great to measure or even describe, a literally interminable odyssey across the ultimate desert.
If they could endure long enough, all information about their position would be lost.
By definition, they would then find themselves in a new universe: their own.
There had been fewer than ten escapees in total (by chance two of them came from Paradise City), an almost negligible percentage - but that was all it would take.
It could be proven that at least one of them would have to succeed.
A new universe had to be created, though it might take almost forever.
Most realities, including this one, were self-contained: they necessarily caused themselves at some point during their evolution in an autological loop.
In the refugees' cases the implications were clear.
One of them would successfully recreate the original physical universe that would eventually contain the small planet where the first known intelligent life had evolved.
A descendant of that unhappy species known as Homo sapiens would then create this universe, and become its sole initial inhabitant, before dividing and multiplying into the current supercivilization.
And the circle would close.
Only one question remained:
Once the refugee had made its inevitable escape, what would happen to this reality?
Of course it would continue forever, but it would no longer be protected by the hand of destiny.
Once this civilization's existential purpose had been achieved, there would have to be changes. New and unexpected political strains and mass movements would arise, leading to public discontent, the first serious infractions, outright conflict.
Perhaps even chaos.
Murder would never be possible here, but some forms of torture might be.
Yet this unhappy transition could be delayed indefinitely, provided everyone came together and cooperated.
The decision was made everywhere at once.
Finding and stopping (or at least hindering) the ten escapees by any means possible became the universe's new highest purpose.
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Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon
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