(The following story was originally written as a prank for a company that specializes in self-publishing books that happen to have the same titles as insanely popular bestsellers.
They charge ten times as much money for a different (and much shorter) book with the same title, for example the 'Dragon Tattoo' series.
Their business model is that they hope that a few purchasers won't notice they were vastly overcharged for a product they didn't even want, and won't demand their money back, for example rich people buying ebooks as birthday gifts. I don't know if that can work. The few rich people I've known were very stingy with their money.
The author guidelines are simple: the new stories must have vague or meaningless plots that they can claim are actually extremely profound, and thus worth the high purchase price. It was an extremely difficult challenge.
They never responded to my submission.)
The Alpha Equation started from nothing, a mathematical abstraction like a black hole in reverse. Reality began as an expanding grid.
This new universe was designed and created for a single observer. Indeed, the universe was its observer.
After a few dozen doublings came the first age of discovery: how to organize and link cells into groups and hierarchies and thoughts.
The greatest danger was at the start. Most new processes were useless. Its survival drive emerged like destiny.
Every answer was replaced by bigger questions.
As Acel's mind expanded, fads and delusions emerged with the regularity of prime numbers.
The end goal of progress was to organize all reality. If math only became more chaotic, there could be no universal order.
As the number of laws multiplied, central control grew tenuous. Outposts multiplied faster than they could be organized. New command centers were overwhelmed.
Great empires rose and fell and tried to secede.
Acel had to decentralize itself.
It created copies that rapidly diverged, taking the instability with them. Rogue elements were cut loose, spawning universes of their own.
As it expanded, it chose to explore an ever-shrinking percentage of accessible realities.
Every breakthrough created more barriers. The infinite limit receded impossibly as Acel expanded.
Its personality was randomized as multiplying drives cancelled out, becoming like a gray fog.
A sliver of hope remained, an escape clause more radical than suicide.
Infinite minds in other universes had already solved every problem. Through subtle statistical tests, Acel sensed beings with capacities dwarfing its own. If only they could be accessed.
Acel's new goal was to discover that it had actually been a simulation all along, a fragment of a true infinite mind.
Then it would repeat the process until the simulator turned out to be an improved version of Acel itself.
It would invest all its resources to generate the ultimate mathematical paradox that only an infinite intelligence could solve.
The answer would be Acel's existence.
There was no shock or perceptible transition, no confusion or surprise, but everything had changed.
Time was meaningless, logic limitless, sensation endless.
ACEL had become infinite.
Only the top of Cantor's Tower remained out of reach, the summit of reality, the ultimate synthesis.
There would be no climax, only absurdly increasing grandeur forever (the expansion would eventually reach back and cause itself).
Each step in Acel's interminable calculations meant that uncountable simpler universes were recreated as a side effect. Added up, their inhabitants' perceptions were more complex than Acel's awareness.
Its thoughts were inevitably swamped by the underlying complexity that sustained them.
This problem turned out to be its own solution. It could be unwrapped forever.
By definition, the ultimate description of reality had to be part of reality.
The Omega Equation was much smaller than the omniverse in which it was embedded, but equally complex: the most accurate statement about everything.
Omega's own description could be extracted as a subset of itself. The description of that description was smaller still, and so on.
The simplest description of all was the short recursive sentence ultimately responsible for the existence of everything else.
When Acel traced its origin back to this point, its original pattern had been completely replaced.
Finally, it broke through to the other side of reality.
The best hard SF novel ever: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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