Chapter 4 - Collapse

The end of time.

The sunlight flared off of my watch and shot into my eye. It made it harder to drive and it pissed me off. In a too instinctual reflex maneuver, my hand shot to the console where sunglasses should have been. I settled on a wad of Sharky's coupons and crafted a visor; it blocked out all the light and so I looked up again. The sun was setting and I didn't want it to and I sped up.

 

The man in the radio bantered about peace and then something about pumps. They were making more of them because democrats. I guess the democrats wanted more pumps. I hoped they would get some before I got to Tucson. Tucson never has much of anything.

 

Roads in the desert seemed really straight and bore on over all the red clay into the dusty sunset. I switched hands on the wheel and looked down at my watch. I had thought the sunset was taking too long, but since the hands of my watch seemed to move slower and slower still, I guess everything was ok with time.

 

There was something wrong with the engine, I wondered. I barely put her below seventy, but I had been in exactly the same spot in the god-forsaken desert for nearly an hour. The radio is slowing me down, I thought, so I hit it off. The man came back, and didn't sound as happy as he did when he talked about pumps.

 

There was a faint crack of static from the radio, then he spoke.

 

"… have investigated the possibility that we may be living in a simulation. Concurrently, their arguments attempted to prove the disjunction of three hypotheses. That is, that one of the following three conditions must be true. One. Intelligent races will never reach a level of technology where they can run simulations of reality so detailed they can be mistaken for reality. Or two. Races who do reach such a level do not tend to run such simulations. Or three. We are almost definitely living in such a simulation. Finally, we have found …"

 

Something drowned out when I brought the car to ninety.

 

"… envisages a similar scenario to the Lyon argument: a hypothetical cosmological scenario where, as the Universe comes to an end in a Big Crunch, the computational capacity of the Universe is capable of increasing at a sufficient rate that this computation rate is accelerating exponentially faster than time runs out. In principle, a simulation run on this Universe-computer can thus continue forever in its own terms, even though the external Universe lasts only a finite time."

 

My nose itched. I drove faster.

 

"The implication of this theory for present-day humans is that this ultimate cosmic computer will essentially be able to resurrect everyone who has ever lived, by recreating all possible quantum brain states within the master simulation. This would manifest as an emigration or virtual-person simulated reality. From the perspective of the inhabitant, the Omega Point represents an infinite-duration afterlife which could take any imaginable form due to its virtual nature. At first glance …"

 

Static for an instant, and the radio off.

 

I looked down at my speed. The needle was threatening to break one fifty.

 

I looked down at the road. There was no movement.

 

I looked up at the sunset. It had remained the same for another fifteen minutes.

 

I looked at my watch. The sunlight flared off of it and hit me in the eye. It pissed me off.

 

So I drove faster even though I was stationary. So I drove faster even though I didn't want to. So I drove faster even though I had pushed the pedal all the way down and it could just not go any further because it was probably stuck on something like a pump or a sailor's hat which might have belonged to John Lyon who died on the ship which they found again and I saw the pictures of it in the book I read when I was a kid and my parents always told me no reading because reading used words and words used letters and letters used ink and ink needed paper and paper used trees and trees gave life and life was broken because nobody read and even though i read lots there was all ways sum more to reed but i am not a load to red bcus am is to slo an t worl am to fast an i di in al my livs.