Iterations and other stories (collection)

She sat down next to me and began brushing her hair. “What are you talking about?”

“You. Me. This bed. This house. This planet. It’s all faked. It’s all a computer-based simulation.”

Mary shook her head slightly. She hated it when I talked like this.

“It’s true,” I said. “It’s true—and I can prove it.”

She pressed her lips tightly together, and blew air out of her nose. She didn’t say “How?” She didn’t say anything.

I wished there were a more obvious way. I wished I could grab hold of—of that wall there, say, and pull it aside, revealing the machinery beyond, but, of course, I couldn’t. The wall was simulated perfectly; the rest of Toronto was simulated perfectly, too. So was all of Canada, of North America, the entire planet. There was no place I could take her where she would see that corners had been cut, see scaffolding propping up a false front to a non-existent building. This Earth—at least all of its surface, and its atmosphere thinning out to almost nothing a few hundred kilometers up, and its rocky crust, and maybe even some portion of its mantle—were flawlessly reproduced.

But even they had limits. Yes, they could reproduce Earth, or as much of it as humans could ever access, but—

“Look,” I said. “Imagine a space probe that could travel at one-tenth the speed of light.”

She was staring at me as though I wasn’t even speaking English anymore.

I pressed on. “Imagine that space probe, taking decades to get to the next star. And imagine it finding raw materials there to build ten duplicates of itself, and then sending those duplicates, at the same speed, to ten other nearby stars. Even if it took fifty years to find the raw materials and make the duplicates, and fifty more years for those duplicates to travel to their target stars, if the process continued, how long do you think it would take for such probes to colonize the entire galaxy?”

“What are you talking about?” said Mary again.

“Sixty thousand years,” I said, triumphandy. “Give or take. One single probe, launched into space by any civilization anywhere in the Milky Way, could colonize this whole giant galaxy in just sixty thousand years.”

Our little publishing company had been called CanScience Books; I’d been editorial director. Mary didn’t know much about science, but she was a wiz at accounting. “So?”

“So,” I said, “the universe is maybe twelve billion years old.” I grabbed her shoulders. “Don’t you see? Someone somewhere must have launched self-replicating probes like the ones I described. This planet should have been visited by them… but it hasn’t.”

“Maybe there aren’t any other civilizations.”

“Of course there are. There must be.” It drove me nuts that she never read the books we’d published. “Everything we know about physics and chemistry and biology says the universe should be overrun with life. But none of it has come here.” I shifted my weight; maybe I shook her slightly. I so much wanted her to see. “And what about SETI? The search for extraterrestrial intelligence? We’ve been listening for half a century now and haven’t picked up a thing. We shouldn’t need to do anything more than point a radio dish up at the night sky to pick up thousands—millions—of alien signals. But there’s nothing.

“And think about the moon. Do you know how many people have gone to the moon? Twelve! That’s all, in the total history of our race—twelve people have stood on its surface. And no one has gone back; no one even has plans to go back. And what about Mars? We should have landed on it within a few years of going to the moon, but no one’s made it there—and, again, no one is planning to go. And the space probes we send there keep failing. The Mars Climate Orbiter, the Mars Polar Lander—complete write-offs! I mean, let’s be real: an important mission to Mars junked because some engineer couldn’t convert between imperial and metric measurements? It’s unbelievable.”

“I still don’t see—” began Mary.

“Let me spell it out, then: it’s one thing to simulate the Earth. That’s a big computing problem, sure, but it’s doable.”

“Not on any computer I’ve ever seen,” said Mary.

“Well, no, of course it’s not doable yet. But it will be. Eventually, the Earth and everyone who ever lived on it will be simulateable on sufficiently advanced computers.”

“When?” said Mary.

“Who knows? A million years from now? A billion? Ten billion? Or maybe—Frank Tipler wrote about this—maybe at the very end of time, as the universe is collapsing back down in a big crunch. Eventually there will be sufficient computing power to simulate the entire planet and everyone who ever lived on it.”

“How would they know anything about us?” asked Mary. “How could they possibly simulate you and me without records of what we were like?”