Minor spoiler alert: A later excerpt from TSG
The universe might be ending, but at least we have cheese.
This first button leads you to what I was listening to when I wrote this.
So, THE STEPHANIE GLITCH looks like it’s getting queried. This is not a process that appeals to me, at all, but I feel Stephanie needs the representation. WBTH was such a weird thing that selfpub was the only way to create it, but Stephanie feels more malleable. That said, I won’t stick with an agreement if it damages the story, so don’t worry, she will remain weird.
In this new chapter, the crew of the Artifice discuss Long Play’s adventures and their existential implications. Toumai inhabits a new body, and Long Play is unconscious as she travels through the membrane between realities.
I’m sharing it ahead of time because it works okay as a scene on its own. There aren’t any spoilers. And it’s a first draft, so it definitely needs work.
This is a critical point in the book. It reiterates and solidifes the points made vaguely earlier, hopefully making the reader’s suspicions concrete. Both Stephanie’s and Toumai’s realities are simulated. But what does this imply about other realities, and other humans that live inside them???
Toumai loomed above his own designated chair in the crew quarters of the Artifice. This body was a similar shape to his previous one, but was painted orange and dark grey, and was adorned with graffiti from the crew. The image caster set into the round table was spitting out reports on the printing of weaponry for the Artifice. Tomek was leaning sleepily over soup, Elspeth was yawning and stretching in one corner, and Argon was not doing much at all. Once Elspeth was done cracking her joints, she nodded at Argon and smiled.
“Good morning,” Tomek said to the pair of them.
“It is mid-afternoon,” Toumai corrected.
“Morning for us.”
The machine did not reply. Instead, he changed the subject, replacing the printing diagnostics with the last recorded scan of the space behind the Artifice. Seven Virtualist spikeships were still in pursuit. Their top speed was slightly faster, so they would catch up soon enough. He changed the image again, this time casting the live feed from his other body, the white eyestalk. This one was idly watching over Long Play.
“You ever find it weird seeing through his eyes when you’re asleep, then waking up and it feels less real because you’re looking at a screen?” Elspeth asked. She sniffed at a lock of her blonde hair and frowned.
“I find it weirder that I’m not exhausted after having my mind routinely invaded with stats and updates. These coldbed drugs really knock you out.” Argon scratched at his greying stubble. Tomek was still staring into his soup.
“We live in a simulation,” he said, “And you’re talking about the dreamscreen.”
“You’ve been in it, trying to penetrate her universe,” Elspeth added. “We all suspected.”
Tomek pushed his soup away, his mouth half open, his eyelids heavy.
“This has countless implications for new physics, potentially violations of physics. The conservation of energy. Time paradoxes. It’s all gonna fall apart. It started with Stephanie, this teenager beaming us scans of our ship from a hole in the intersects. But it’s gonna end with this LP character. She teleported on board. She can read Toumai’s mind without an implant. She can manifest advanced tech from memory and use it to plug herself into the reality hole. And you’re both talking about the dreamscreen.”
“We can talk about something else if you like,” Argon was now adjusting the beginnings of a moustache, trying to curve too-short hairs into a handlebar.
“The existential implications of the discovery are indeed interesting,” Toumai interjected. Tomek burst out laughing, almost blowing his soup over the table. Elspeth joined in, with Argon raising both eyebrows at the orange machine.
“It’s okay Toumai. You don’t have to be involved, keep your mind on those spikeships,” he said. Toumai nodded and went silent, the green light on the side of his angular head slowly dimming.
“So, we live in a simulation,” Elspeth said, “Does this mean I never graduated, and am thus woefully unprepared to deal with work on this research vessel?”
“I presume you are being facetious,” Tomek replied.
“I was. But my point stands. If consciousness is a reaction to information, then we don’t become less ‘real’ by discovering we are simulated. We become more real. It’s not just physics that changes, but religion and spirituality and psychology. This is world-ending stuff.”
“Apocalyptic,” Argon grumbled. Toumai woke up briefly to chime in.
“It will change all the paradigms. All mind and matter.”
“Long Play has climbed down through an unknown number of worlds. Do you suppose there’s a technical limit to how large a simulation can be, and how many simulations can be nestled inside each other?” Tomek asked Toumai. The machine was silent.
“Toumai. Do you suppose there’s a limit to how many simulations you can fit inside one another?”
“The only issue is the size of the computer required. A simulation inside a simulation requires the physics in the first simulation to function in a way that allows beings to create a simulation. That would require enormous processing power unless the universe is tiny. Another way to make room would be for one simulation to be vastly structurally different to the one it is built inside,” the machine said. He paused for effect, something he learned from the humans, and got thinking. His social programming suggested tying the lofty subject to something of ‘human interest’ such as an existential, moral, or emotional argument.
“My primary question would be the ‘why’ of the simulation. That is, why would humans go to the effort of creating a simulation in the first place? And then, why would the simulated humans, if they are simulated, go to the very same effort in their universe?”
He moved his orange body around the table, turning in subtle movements that reminded the human crew of the curiosity of a cat.
“Who said humans made the simulations?” Elspeth smiled wryly. The question lingered in the air for a few moments, looming uncomfortably in Tomek’s mind.
“The universe is fine-tuned for us,” he finally replied, “And to answer your question Toumai, we went to great effort to produce machines like you. Why not entire universes?”
“The easier answer is archaeology,” Argon interjected. “In the future some distant descendant of humans wants to know how its species came into being. It creates a simulation using all the knowledge it has of its home reality and sets it off. That simulation becomes the second highest world in the chain, just below the organic one. But that doesn’t explain the other universes. Especially since we haven’t created Stephanie’s.”
Elspeth nodded. She said something quickly in sign language to Toumai, who zipped away and returned with a block of cheese, some chutney, some crackers, and a sharp knife.
“Cryosleep cheese,” Elspeth said proudly. She got off her stool and moved to the teal sofa that curved around one half of the roundtable. She gestured toward the image caster at the centre of the table and brought up her notes.
“The physics would need to be slightly different in each reality, in the model I am working on. The child universe would be a lower resolution image of the first, ad infinitum.”
She cut into the cheese.
“That is unless each universe is not a true ‘simulation’ but a projection made on the inner surface of a black hole. As information cannot be destroyed, the information encoded on the surface of a black hole is manifest as actual matter on the other side. That could explain why we can see Stephanie’s viewpoint despite not creating a universe in the dreamscreen yet. The tech is in its infancy, but one day in the future it won’t be, and her universe will expand inside itself.”
“In time as well as space,” Toumai interrupted, finishing Elspeth’s sentence.
“Precisely.”
“It still does not explain the motivation behind it,” Argon said. He turned his chair to look back at the crew quarters. Everyone else was in deep sleep and would remain so until they were absolutely needed. No use waking them up now. They hadn’t even joined the dreamscreen network.
“I think I have an idea,” Tomek said. His voice carried more confidence than his words, and it was clear to Elspeth and perhaps to Toumai that he was unflinchingly confident about whatever theory he was about to announce.
“Their universe was dying, so they created one inside a black hole and cast their greatest minds into it. After a while, those minds had the same issue.”
“It works on the surface,” Argon interrupted, “But it has one crucial flaw. It does not explain the neurotransmitter crown she magicked out of nowhere.”
As you can see, an early draft, but some of the central ideas for the novel are more concrete in the story now. It brings up LP’s ability to manipulate matter again, as well as framing black hole cosmogeny and simulation theory as two opposing methods of world-creation.
This is about 11,000 words in, and it is no infodump. This information has already been fed to the reader beforehand, but as LP is unconscious and Stephanie is going to college, seemed like a perfect time to re-add this important conversation. It presents theories, but it doesn’t settle on one.
Anyway, I’d love to know what you think of this out of context. Sharing scenes out of context is a practice I invented at university as a means to get more honest feedback for Stephanie from my workshop group. By skipping thousands of words ahead, I got more genuine reactions to the scene itself, rather than the scene as part of a larger whole. That’s also why I’ve posted such an early draft. Most of the novel around this is nearly finished, but this scene appeared recently.
What to expect from me in the future
You can expect more excerpts from Stephanie, in the right order next time.
I will be posting Earthloop things as and when I write them, same goes for short stories.
I’ve been getting back into writing comedy. So I’ll be making a satirical newsletter here eventually, perhaps as a second newsletter, so if you’re not interested, you simply won’t see it. If you’ve read WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? the writing style will be reminiscent of the funnier stuff in there. It will have a ‘nothing is sacred’ attitude, so it won’t be ‘leaning’ any which way. It will just be about making you laugh. It will do political stuff, simply because being topical is a good way to get noticed. Think HARD DRIVE NEWS or THE ONION.
I have converted my old Patreon to be for the STRANGE STORIES talk show. The endgoal of this is that I’d be able to hire editors and marketing people to push the show forward. I want it to be a TV show. We will be expanding our guestlist soon to include people who aren’t novelists, but producers, comedians, singers, and other things.
I am working with a real author called Rod Grasper to publish his short stories and novellas, which will be increasingly ridiculous.
I am writing a one man sci-fi comedy stage play that I intend to take to the Edinburgh Fringe next year. It is weird and involves me becoming romantically entangled with a spaceship.
I am moving more into comedy on my social media. Being a serious author in the #writingcommunity and other online spaces was boring. Whilst I can write serious stories, I am realising more and more each day that I have neglected the funny side of my brain for too long.
I am writing a book about my experiences with synaesthesia.
I will evolve into a crab.
Thanks for being here
Phillip