This post inspired by final obsessive pruning on part of a story called God Complex:
“I like you, Tenloew. You’re
a true believer. No, it isn’t real. I haven’t whisked you off to some real
other place. We’re just inside what you’d call the world’s most powerful
information processor.
“The surface you saw outside
is about three feet deep, composed of mesoscopic diodes except for
Bose-Einstein helium canals of microscopic size. They cool the diodes not so
much by their temperature itself but by the virtual elimination of electron
resistance. There’s a thin layer in the middle of that layer where the
superpositioners are.”
“How many?”
“That’s a question with too
many answers for any of them to be wrong or right. Only way to know would be to
use the machine and that would be like asking you to climb up your ass and
count the stars. The technically correct answer would be ‘infinitely
indefinite’, which is the sort of paradox that made me the man I am today.”
We had both laid down by
then, breathing the starlight in deeply.
“ ‘Infinitely indefinite’:
that sounds like a description of the mind of god.”
“Only if you think that
forever eluding a finite resolution is an attribute of the divine. To me that
doesn’t sound like the mind of God but rather the mind of a man trying to
imagine what God might be like.”
He whistled a melody. He
whistled well with a strong vibrato over a firm pitch. The tune was some
yearning thing that triggered childhood memories.
“What song is that?”
“ ‘Star Trek’, son. Just a
bit before your time. The franchise finally burnt itself out around 2030.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“Yes.” He whistled some more,
then asked, “Do you really understand what I’m asking of you?”
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