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Revelation of Life - part two
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Is Life a Zero-Player Game?
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Revelation of Life - part four
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Revelation of Life
part three
Divulgence
After the longest minute of my life I finally regained my senses and rationality back and more importantly ability to speak. Well sort of. At the moment all I came up with was few incoherent words.
"I.. I'm.. Also glad.. To meet you. Phil?"
The initial fear and tremble started to fade out so I went to my desk and sit on the chair. The orb followed and kept the same distance.
"I am sure you have a lot of questions for me?"
"Well.. For starters you could tell me who you really are? And.. What is the meaning of all this? I mean, what happened five years ago.." - I was trying to remember all the questions I had after I woke up that morning and found the orb on the clock table next to my bad. But now all the new ones started to form in my mind and I was pretty confused. The orb definitely saw it on my face.
"It was five years for you but where I came from time is something entirely different. It was just a moment ago for me." - Phil gave me couple of seconds to sink in and then continued. "In my plain of existence, I am a student, just like you." - The orb made a slight position change and proceed. "But let's back to your conversation with your father couple of minutes ago, it would be best for you to understand if we start from there."
"Yes.. You said he was right. You mean two dimensional bubble around the universe is real. We are made of holographic particles reflected by our true selves from the balloon surface?
"Yes and no." - Phil continued to flicker in all colors while speaking. "The bubble exists all right, but it is created in four dimensional reality. The only thing is that dimensions are not all proportional. One of them is larger than the others and one is really tiny, speaking in physics terms. They are designed in that way in order to cast three dimensional objects inside the bubble. Everything here in this universe is actually a three dimensional shadow from the bubble surrounding it. Or to be precise, every four dimensional object in the bubble is actively casting it's own representation inhere."
"But how this casting really work...." - There was so many information for a high school student in just couple of sentences and only now I realized I missed the premise. "Wait. You said designed? Created? By whom?"
"By me, of course."
At this point it occurred to me two more explanations of all this. It's either I finally went 100% crazy and this was my first hallucination or somebody is pranking me with some cool magic trick. I was about to announce to my new friend here that first option is more likely but he promptly continued.
"I am not God or anything like it, if you are thinking about it right now. Look at it this way, you here developed complex computers with ability to render equally complex simulation. This is very similar. Where I came from, we use, sort of analogue computational devices capable to create sub-dimensional environments. We utilized those machines for education. This is one of them and there are many more. Just like I hinted five years ago, this is similar to those zero-player games you are probably familiar with. I created only initial states of the three-dimensional universe and the rest came out from it by evolutionary steps. The best about it is that I can monitor what happens in snapshots. The time in the bubble is set to be very fast comparing to my end."
The voice sounded excited while explaining. I took it as a sign of his character as a student who is still learning exciting things. I know I was no different either.
"But to answer your second question, casting is possible because the energy needed to cast objects from four-dimensional bubble into three-dimensional interior is coming from.."
"Fifth dimension!" - I interrupted way more enthusiastically then him before. "The origin must be one dimension higher! You are fifth dimensional being!"
"Exactly right. Two of two."
"Amazing! I saw once Carl Sagan's interpolation of the tesseract from 4D into its shadow in 3D. This is just like it, except we are talking now about a live universe who gave birth to life!"
"Not exactly."
"What do you mean?"
"It's not live. Actually, not a single universe in any simulations I've heard about ever succeeded with emerging life by their own."
"But.. All the life here on Earth.. How?"
"I created the model to assign sentient driver to every object who's born naturally or artificially within the system."
"Sentient driver?"
"Something similar to the artificial intelligence from your world. Much complicated though."
"So, my conscience as everybody's in the universe is just a software part of your bubble computer.. What about free will?"
"There is no such thing. Biologically or otherwise. Free will is just an illusion coming from vast number of variables. But don't take it inferiorly. In my world, sentient drivers are equal in complexity to the real life, if real life is what I am supposed to be.. Actually nobody believes that even we could not be sentient drivers either. We could also be shadows of upper-dimensions as well. Life as it seems is as much as mystery as it is here."
I found my way back to the chair. I certainly didn't expect anything like it. This really is the game, only we are all non-player characters in Phil's zero-player game that even he cannot deviate from the course of artificial evolution. Or can he? After all he is talking with me from fifth dimension in real time. The orb must be anomaly of some kind. A back door to his own simulation.
"I know what are you thinking right now. And you can relax. I cannot read sentient minds, you are on your own. That's for sure. While I can project objects like this orb inside the simulation I cannot affect evolutionary steps or to interfere with driver's actions. Not that it's forbidden or anything. It's just impossible by it's nature. I can project a dream or two here and there but this is not influencing the system with much significance. If at all..." - Phil made a significant pause here. I could tell by the light and the glowing vanished for a long second. I couldn't describe exactly how but when it came back the feeling it radiated changed. "The thing is that this is my first educational project and I shouldn't interfere in any ways. But overtime I grown attached to this entire space it was created. It is really beautiful in more ways than you can imagine..."
"Why then? Why are you do it? Why talking to me?" - The only question left at that point remained floating in the air and I was little afraid to raise it.
"Why me?"
Phil rotated and the glow transformed into recognizable patterns. Images started to form on the orb's surface and change from one to another in a fast snapshot fashion. Some I recognized from the history lessons, others were unfamiliar and futuristic. Some looked alien but beautiful nevertheless. Then it returned to the regular form.
"Because..."
The orb floated a foot closer.
"...I need your help."
I guess my sentient mind wasn't programmed to reply to this in any ways so I just cluelessly stared at Phil and his three blue shivering nodes and his smooth surface glowing in all colors I was familiar with and some I imagined to see for the first time.
"I want you to help me to save the universe."