A Thinker's Sandbox

“You still have that old simulation?”

Kenan tore his gaze off the computer-generated model of a “universe”, the black expanse sparse except for a few lights and a solar system, planets shooting around the fake sun. Currently, it was zoomed in on one particular planet – a blue sphere with white clouds whipping across its surface.

“I got attached,” he shrugged. “It’s a bit silly, I know, since I can do so much better now – all I did was model it off how our world developed – but I suppose you never forget your first.”

Inon laughed, walking over to crouch with him by the simulation. “I know what you mean. Some things just can’t be thrown away. Well, we’re sentimental beings. How long has it been?”

“Since I first made this? Let’s see…this was my fourth science fair project, so it’s been a good twenty hundred years, I think.”

“How’s the time scaled now?” Inon asked curiously. “You were doing ten thousand years there to a second in the real world for a time, I remember.”

“It took that long for life to start getting interesting,” Kenan replied defensively. “Besides, I was a kid. Did you expect me to care about unicellular organisms? I was dreaming of civilizations!”

They both laughed reminiscently. “I change it a bit now and then, but I’ve slowed it down considerably since then – a year takes a minute to pass, now.”

“A year to a minute?” Inon said. “What, don’t want to miss anything? I’m sure it’s simply riveting.”

“Well, my eyes aren’t exactly glued to it, and – would you believe it? – if I didn’t I’d miss something important. It’s rather incredible how much faster everything started progressing after they civilized.”

“The whole thing’s rather incredible, I think,” Inon said. “All you did was make some laws and patterns of development, throw some elements in, and it just self-perpetuated to – well, what it is now.”

“It’s still a far cry from us,” he pointed out.

“But you did it for your fourth science fair project.”

He nodded. “True. You know, they’re starting to be advanced enough scientifically that they’re discovering some of what makes the world tick. I wonder when they’ll realize the truth – if ever. The current civilized species tends to be a bit short-sighted about things.”

“Like you, you mean.”

He narrowed her eyes at her, receiving an unrepentant smile. “Makes sense, I suppose,” she continued blithely. “After all, they are in your simulation. So it really can’t be helped.”

“Inon! I’m nothing as bad as them!”

Her calm dissolved into laughter, laughter he did not echo. “Didn’t you have an error – well, not an error, just a limitation – where you only had so fast a processing speed? Have they discovered that?”

“Oh, that,” Kenan accepted the subject change. “Funny thing – I made light the fastest thing that can move, so now they say that nothing can move faster than the speed of light. They have a whole formula for it, too. I’m actually really glad that happened, though. You know how I only bothered to make a single solar system and then just sort of faked stars and planets? Well, they want to travel to those stars. Fortunately, with the speed limitation, that won’t be a problem. Oh, and I love the explanation they’ve come up for stuff – they talk about the ‘space-time fabric of the universe’, when everyone knows that time is independent. But I suppose it’s hard for them, since they only have three dimensions, to imagine that the universe is simply four-dimensional, full stop.”

“What would you do if they ever realized they were a simulation?” Inon asked seriously.

Kenan shrugged. “Nothing, I guess. It might be amusing, because I bet they’d try to get out.” A sudden idea lit his face. “Maybe I could talk to them. They’d probably hate me, but it’s not like they could do anything.”

“And then get terribly bored and destroy the whole thing in a fit of temper?” Inon retorted drily.

“I would not. I’m past twenty five hundred years old; I don’t throw temper tantrums.”

“I don’t think age has anything to do with it. Inin’s older, and she – well, I shouldn’t speak ill of my elders.”

“You? Speak ill of your elders? Perish the thought,” Kenan snorted. “Besides, that’s your sister.”

“I’m just going to sit back and let that argument defeat itself.”

Kenan stared at her and Inon stared back, one corner of her mouth traveling up her face until Kenan blinked. “Damn. Why are you so good at that?”

Her response was a triumphant smile flashing across her face. “I wonder, do the things in your simulation ever do anything like that?”

He frowned. “I didn’t really notice, to be honest. Possibly? They have eyes, and they need to blink, so maybe. I don’t exactly follow one of the things through its life, watching for what it does. Not even the smart – relatively, of course – ones. I’m more interested in larger conflicts, such as the exchange of countries. Currently, the ‘world power’ is this new place that calls itself –” he frowned as he tried to remember the pronunciation “– Ah-mer-i-ca.”

Inon cracked up at his way of saying the strange word. “Are you quite sure that’s right?”

“Oh, be quiet,” Kenan grumbled. “They have strange methods of vocalization. I can’t be expected to recreate all their sounds perfectly. Though, when I say the country’s new, I mean its government is new. Of course, I think most of the countries are new because of that, but they haven’t changed names, even though pretty much everything else has except maybe location.”

“Well, we do that too, a bit,” Inon pointed out thoughtfully. At his frown, she said, “Oh, come on, don’t get all ruffled at the comparison just because they only have three dimensions. Look at rice, for example. We’ve modified it so much, both in ancient times when we domesticated it and through genetic modifications, that it doesn’t really resemble wild rice at all, but we still call it rice.”

“That’s not the same,” Kenan protested.

“In some ways,” Inon said, not bothering to press her point. “It’s interesting how many similarities there are, even in such a simple simulation. Did you go in and affect anything?”

“Mostly in the beginning, to make it more like our world,” Kenan admitted. “And also just whenever I felt like it. For example, there was this long period of time where there were a bunch of relatively big reptiles, and they were cool at first, but then there wasn’t really anything interesting, so I made an ‘asteroid’ hit. That stuff happened. And now and then I introduce a disease, just for fun.”

Inon tilted her head in confusion. “‘Disease’? What’s that?”

“Oh, that’s right, you never liked history. I still think that’s weird – you seem like the person who would. Anyways, there was this one guy, back when manipulating genes was a new idea. So he basically just took some nucleic acids, stuck them inside a membrane, and added a few proteins, and that was it. He made a bunch of those and then left them out. There wasn’t anything to copy the nucleic acids, so nobody thought anything of it. So what happened was – get this – the things went into cells and hijacked their reproducing mechanism. So they just went around reproducing themselves and killing cells. People’s cells. It was crazy. To this day, nobody knows if the guy meant it or not. The stuff was eventually quashed, but not before the population was decimated. Anyways, I thought it was pretty cool so I decided to put some in the simulation.”

“Things that hijack cells and use them to reproduce themselves and then kill cells,” Inon mused. “I could see how that would be appealing. I suppose they mutate?”

“Crazy mutate,” Kenan confirmed enthusiastically. “That’s the fun of it – every year’s a new strain. For the ones that mutate a lot. Some of them are more stable.”

Inon’s gaze was blank, and Kenan sighed. “Read about the First and Only Viral Panic and you’ll understand better. It’s a really weird concept, so I’m not even going to try to explain it. Just think of it like a variable population limiter.”

“Like famine?”

“Except even better,” Kenan replied. “Because manipulating weather and stuff isn’t, you know, the easiest thing to do. And it’s easy to mess stuff up. But if I just introduce a new disease, it takes the edge off population numbers, they can do work containing it for me, and if worse comes to worst, I can just stop it pretty easily.”

“You said it decimated our population,” Inon reminded him. “That’s not really ‘taking the edge off’.”

“They have defenses,” Kenan replied easily. “Since I introduced these early, they evolved defenses against them.”

“You took that risk?”

He grinned. “Yeah, it was pretty reckless, but to be fair, they’re really cool. And it was in the beginning, so I could have started over easily.”

“Ah, the days back before we could just reverse time on simulations…”

Their laughter rang.