Testing to Destruction

“Darling do you have a moment? We may have a problem.”

Iforigin_trueAndmessage_trueThen<open_response_cause_analysis>Iforigin_falseAndmessage_trueThen<open_source_motivation_analysis>Iforigin_trueAndmessage_falseThen<open_deception_aims_analysis> you think to yourself, running through 800 million billion billion possible permutations on the truthfulness, sources and aims of the statement.

Is it Savathun; is it someone pretending to be Savathun and if so, is it an Ascendent Hive pretending to be Savathun, another being such as a bootstrapped Eliksni or rogue Vex pretending to be Savathun, or is it Savathun pretending not to be Savathun pretending to be Savathun…

Each scenario is carefully modeled and allowed to play out to verify the consequences, including the consequences of your interlocutor being able to see your simulations.

Such considerations take you less than a zeptosecond.

Nothing is discarded or overlooked, every possibility is considered. Of course, even you are not infinite and there are limits to your thoughts, but as some possibilities asymptoticly approach zero, those lines of inquiry can be discarded.

You can be wrong, you’ve been wrong before, blindsided by events that had close to zero chance of ever happening. The unsimulatable is to you unthinkable. (All things are possible, but that is not always relevant: You might be the only thing that actually exists in all of creation, or conversely, you might not exist at all but yourself be a simulation. However, the universe about you behaves to an almost infinite degree of precision as though neither were true, so it is a wasteful and inefficient line of thought)

You decide to treat the invitation to speak as genuine.

“So kind of you my sweet. Such an endearing conversation partner.”

Yours is a long and, at least on your part, silent relationship. You have never had much need for words; she has been happy to fill the void for both of you. She is a quantum being in her own way, only existing as long as she is observed. And you observe all things equally.

“When I was young, I wanted to be a Mother, you know. To find a mate and raise a little brood of my own. Now look at me. Wed to a silent heap of metal and ruminating gelfluid.”

This, you almost instantly discard as false. after modeling a mere few trillion times.

“We are an odd couple, are we not? Me, the subtle scalpel, you, the battering ram, the juggernaut. Still, like matter and antimatter, positive and negative charges, opposites attract, eh? Cancelling each other out. That was always Auryx’s failure of imagination: He saw the world evolving, and assumed the universe was mean to evolve. He was wrong, though. The universe desires not change, but stasis: Matter and heat evenly distributed, all energy spent, all motion stopped. It evolves towards endless nothing.”

This is a question you’ve devoted most of your long, long existence to considering, and the problem you’ve been trying to solve. She may be right, she may be wrong, she may think she is right, she might know it is wrong. Together, you have been seeking an answer, a way out. The only proof you will accept is immortality, and since you haven’t lived forever yet, the question remains open.

“That’s what I like about you, your ability to consider all questions equally.”

Another lie. She hates that both lies and truth mean nothing to you, for you consider all things equally and test them all to destruction.

“The Sword Logic, hah. You were born as a blade. We both know that existence is a blade, and like all blades it is one thing that has two edges, and those edges are the purpose and the method. The purpose of existence is to exist; the method is to do anything necessary to continue existing. These new playthings the old maid has birthed understand that, maybe even better than Auryx ever did.”

These Guardians would have confounded you, the old you, when you were young. You’ve learned to simulate what they do so there is less mystery now, more data. More simulations. 800 million billion billion Guardians leap from 800 million billion billion platforms through as many walls of killing light, evading more starlit shadows than there are stars in the universe, falling to their deaths, crumpling under hails of slap fire, dying in blazes of violet light unleashed corrupted Minds. Dying and dying and dying, endlessly and forever, in less time than it takes for a photon of light to move a Planck length.

Sometimes, a statistically insignificant number of times really, something crashes the simulation. The Guardian does not fall, evades the slap fire, kills the Mind, breaks their chains, takes the path, eats the path.

“They have a theory, a kind of thought experiment really—that’s something you and they have in common—about quantum suicide and immortality. It says that if one tries to commit suicide with a 50 percent chance of instantly killing yourself, then quantum physics demands there is always a version of yourself that survives. Do it enough times and you, in effect, become immortal.”

You know what she means, without putting it into words. The fact that a statistical impossibility keeps happening again and again forces you to think the unthinkable. Just as some probabilities approach zero, some climb the slope towards 100.

“Do you see? Together, we and the Guardians, are sifting reality until we find one that can never die.”

Ifreality_objectiveAndsubject_immortalThen<open_endstate_routine>

“Study it, as you studied Oryx, and see how it is done.”

You have only one way to consider this, and that is the way you consider everything:

Test it to destruction.