Chapter 16: CURIOSITY KILLED THE CAT
Future-Malik was still there in the common room, but seeming almost like he was stretched between worlds. His physical body was here, but his focus was obviously far away.
Dekka didn't want to interrupt his work, even though she had a feeling that what he was doing was just an exercise in futility. But there was another, even more powerful reason she didn't want to interrupt him. There were some questions that could never, should never, have answers.
It wasn't quite the first time she had thought about asking questions that she was better off not having the answers to. And, as before, as long as she didn't know, she could still hope.
Brianna. As always, the thought of the name brought a catch in her throat, tears to the corners of her eyes.
She had to ask this. For her.
Even so, she hesitated for a very long time. In the end, she simply could not bring herself to ask it out loud. Instead, she morphed. The Dark Watchers invaded her mind, intruded upon her thoughts, violated her memories. But one of those Dark Watchers was Future-Malik, and to him, she posed her terrible question, yelling at him with her mind.
If our entire world is only a simulation, if a human life is nothing more than so much data, then . . . could a human death be undone? Surely, if the data could be recovered, if a backup existed somewhere-
"Stop," Future-Malik said suddenly. Dekka looked up to see him glaring at her, but his tired eyes quickly softened. Then, he sighed. "I'm sorry. But you have no idea of the processing power needed to-"
"I don't care!" Dekka raged suddenly. She de-morphed. "I don't care about processing power, surely there's enough power somewhere!"
"There isn't," Future-Malik said flatly. "Every ounce of power my world has, is already being used to simulate your world. Every computer. Every hard drive. Everywhere. There is nowhere left to put backup data, let alone the volume of data we would need to restore entire human beings. We could, maybe, re-create a cat, but certainly nothing more complex than that."
Dekka crashed down onto a couch, like a puppet whose strings had been cut. She knew it had been foolish to hope, knew that she had been grasping at straws, knew it could never have been that easy, so why did she still feel so cruelly disappointed? "I just keep wanting it all to mean something," she cried out in frustration. "So many lives lost. So much pain and suffering. And for what? To make some fake world for you to watch like a TV show? What the hell is the point?"
Even through her misery, in the back of her mind, stabbing urgently at her brain, was a sense that she had just missed something. Something big. Something Future-Malik had let slip.
"Death has never inherently 'meant' anything," he said gently, after a moment's consideration. "In your world, nor mine. Even the most heroic, the most self-sacrificial deaths, have never had some grand cosmic reason. But they didn't have to." He looked Dekka squarely in the eye. "Whether you believe in an afterlife or not, it is up to the living who are left behind, to make sense of death. The dead have never cared, whether they are in heaven, or simply gone. It is the living who must find meaning. So let me ask you. Did your loved ones' deaths mean something to you? Did their lives touch yours in some way that you now cannot forget?"
Dekka nodded savagely.
"Then it does not matter how those lives came into being. Real, or simulated. They mattered."
Dekka sighed deeply. "What if-" she began.
"I thought this was all a small research project in one lab," Astrid said, making Dekka jump. She hadn't seen Astrid come into the common area. "Now you're saying it's being simulated all across your entire world? What on Earth could possibly be so important about this simulation that would make it worth tying up an entire planet's worth of computing power?"
She had a dangerous glint in her eyes, like she had just figured something out. Dekka was figuring it out too, or at least, she had realized what it was she'd missed, what it was that Future-Malik had let slip. Future-Malik saw the dangerous glint in Astrid's eyes, and looked down in defeated resignation.
"Your world is a simulation, too, isn't it?" Astrid accused. "You somehow figured out you were in a sim, but no creator ever stepped forward to take credit. So you made your own sim, to test the theory, to see if we could find a way out. If we could find our creator, then maybe you could do the same." Her expression turned grim. "But then it started unraveling. Changes to the laws of physics. Your AI going rogue. You've almost lost your chance to gather any meaningful data at all."
Future-Malik pretended to go back to scrolling through his unseen data readouts, but he wasn't fooling either of the girls. "Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle," he said finally. "You have it in your world, too. That quantum blurriness, the inability to pinpoint the exact location or speed of elementary particles. You can know the location, or the speed, but never both. As you measure one trait with increasing precision, the other trait changes, ever more erratically."
Astrid was nodding along, but letting him go on, for Dekka's benefit. Dekka cocked her head quizzically, wondering where he was going with this.
"That law is a hallmark of simulations," Future-Malik went on. "It's a way to save data. If the sim doesn't have to determine the exact position and velocity of every last particle within the sim, but rather creates that data only when it is measured, it saves a very great deal of computational power. Any world that contains Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle is, therefore, almost certainly a simulated one. We found a few other clues, of course. Other traces of simulated data, other laws of physics that don't quite make sense in an objectively 'real' reality."
"A simulated world, simulating a simulated world," Astrid muttered. "Simulations within simulations."
"Is there even an actual, real world, out there, somewhere?" Dekka demanded. "Or is it just one fake world after another, forever?"
Future-Malik shook his head. Not to signal "no," but to say that he didn't have an answer to that. He had long-since been searching for an answer to the same question.
His gaze was distant once more. His body was still here, but his mind was moving very far away.
