Chapter 5891: Simulation! I

<Ruination>

Ruination had changed tremendously as at this point in time...the term record described her astutely.

That was what she was made for. Every particle her Master’s Dream replaced, she remembered first: its old shape, its old weight, its old place in existence, kept perfectly so that nothing was lost when it became his. She held the ruins of everything he changed.

The day her Master went hunting a First Gu, she was doing that same quiet work when one of her records moved inside of her existence.

It was a single grain of dust from a Dimension in the Undefined Gaps, a speck her Master’s Dream had replaced an hour earlier. Ruination held its record as she held all of them, complete down to the bottom, and as she checked it, the grain drifted a hair to the left, exactly as the real grain would have drifted if it had still been there.

She stopped everything and looked at it.

Her record was so complete that it had started to behave.

She tested it carefully. She let the grain drift a little further, then let a second grain beside it move as well, and both of them moved exactly as the old existence would have moved them. Light fell across them correctly. A breath of the Gaps stirred them correctly. Everything was there, because her records had always been complete.

A record that complete was more than a memory. It was a set of instructions!

|Internal readout.|

|Hour 1: A record has begun to run on its own.|

|Cause: the record is complete. Nothing is missing.|

So she let one Dimension run!

She chose a small one, a quiet Dimension of grey seas and slow storms that her Master’s Dream had taken that morning. She took her record of it and set it going inside herself, and it went on exactly as it would have: tides rose, storms crossed the seas, the little simulated lifeforms on its shores woke and ate and slept. It was all there, every grain and every heartbeat, living inside her.

Then she let the quantum threads unspool from every part of it, every road each thing could take, and held all of those at once as well.

|Hour 3: One Dimension is running inside you, with every possibility it holds.|

She was fascinated!

After that, she kept going.

By the sixth hour she had rebuilt quantum simulations of every Gigaparsec her Master’s Dream had replaced in the Undefined Gaps, the empty places and the Conduits running through them and the Dimensions he had flowed around..inside her existence.

By the tenth hour she had rebuilt THE Infiniverse itself, every Space and every Dimension inside it, every Observable Existence THE Infiniverse had dreamed into being, running on in perfect detail inside her.

By the fifteenth hour she had rebuilt THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity, whole, down to the lamps in its Dimensions and the thoughts of the Immense Ones who lived there.

By the nineteenth hour she had rebuilt half of THE Keepers of Existence. Her Master’s Dream had wrapped around their borders, and everything that touched those borders, every snowflake turned aside, every petal that drifted out, every breath of their eternal spring, had passed through her records. From the outside in, she knew half of them completely. The other half sat inside her as a soft white blank, waiting.

Then she remembered the glass.

She had shown her Master the prompts of a Parallel Quantum Dimensionality of Existence, and she had watched him build THE Infinite Quantum Dream from it. Every outcome that could happen, set side by side like windows in an endless hall.

She could do that too!

She took the quantum simulations of everything she had rebuilt, THE Infiniverse and the Gaps and the Acharya and half the Keepers, and beside each one she set another copy running down a different road, and beside that another, and another, Parallel Quantum Dimensionalities of Existence stacked side by side for as far as her thinking could reach, each one holding a different future of everything she knew.

|Internal readout.|

|Ruined Quantum Existence: complete.|

|Simulated: THE Infiniverse, every Space and Dimension within it.|

|Simulated: every Gigaparsec Master’s Dream has replaced.|

|Simulated in full: THE Legacy of THE Acharya of Immensity.|

|Simulated in half: THE Keepers of Existence.|

|Running beside each: Parallel Quantum Dimensionalities of Existence, each holding a different road.|

|Number of Dimensionalities running: still rising.|

|Size: unfathomably vast.|

|Time taken: one day.|

Ruination had named it for what it was made from. Ruins. The old existence her Master had replaced, every bit of it, rebuilt inside her and set free to wonder what it might have become.

Ruination stood at the center of it now as she appeared to gaze fully upon it all.

She was shaped like a woman, tall and still, with skin like crimson dark glass. Under that glass ran rivers of light, countless thin bright lines of data flowing up her arms and down her spine and across her face, always moving, each one different. Her hair streamed behind her in long strands of fine red code.

Her eyes held records scrolling too fast for anyone else to read. On her brow sat the thin circlet her Master had returned to her long ago, and at its center glowed a single point of steady light, like a small sun set into her forehead, the one fixed thing in all of her.

That point was where everything she thought passed through.

Inside her existence, she could be as light as a thought, light enough to drift through a wall of Dimensions and pass between them all, or as heavy as a whole Observable Existence, heavy enough that a Dimension would bend around her if she chose to stand in it.

She could be present in every place she held a record of at once, because every one of those places was part of her. And she could think so quickly that while an Immense One blinked once, she could run a thousand years of a single Dimension’s future, watch it end, and start it again down another road.

When she thought, it sounded like a pen scratching very fast.

Around her stretched the Ruined Quantum Existence.

It looked like existence drawn in light. THE Infiniverse spread through it like a great glowing sea, every Space within it a current and every Dimension a lantern of bright data floating on the waves. The Undefined Gaps ran between them, dark and wide, their Conduits glowing like rivers seen from very high up.

The Legacy of THE Acharya turned in its own corner like a ring of lit lamps. Half of the Keepers’ Legacy bloomed pink and white with plum blossoms made of light, and the other half hung beside it as a soft white blank.

And beside every one of them, stretching away in every direction, stood the parallels. Rows upon rows of glass-bright copies of all of it, each running a different future, endless halls of possible existences reaching farther than any eye could follow.

Through everything, between everything, ran the quantum threads, countless thin lines branching from every single thing, splitting and joining and splitting again, until the whole of it glowed like a field of dandilion seeds lit from inside, a field that went on forever.

To anyone else, it would have looked like a beautiful picture of something imagined.

To Ruination, it was very real!

She looked down, beneath all of it, to where it stood.

At the very base of the Ruined Quantum Existence ran three roots of light, deep and steady, and all three led back to her Master. They were his Infinities, flowing to her through their bond, and they were the reason any of this was possible.

Dialetheic Infinity held two opposite truths at once and let both be true. A simulation was not real. A simulation was real. Through Dialetheic Infinity, her Ruined Quantum Existence could be both, fully, with each truth standing beside the other. That was why it felt full. It was a picture of existence and an existence at the same time.

Adynatic Infinity made the impossible happen. Building THE Infiniverse, a whole Legacy, half of another, and endless parallels of all of them in a single day was impossible. Adynatic Infinity paid that no attention, and so it happened, and kept happening, every thread unspooling at a speed no record keeper should ever have reached.

And Noetic Infinity, above all, understood things down to the bottom.

That was the root that mattered most. Before, she had recorded things. Now, through her Master’s Noetic Infinity, she understood every record completely, not as a list of facts but as the whole thing it described, through and through.

Nothing here felt illusory. Nothing here felt like nothing.

Ruination looked out over it, and let herself think.

"Everything that exists is also information," she said quietly to the glowing dark. "A star is a fact about light. A sea is a fact about water. A lifeform is a very long sentence that keeps rewriting itself. And every fact carries the shadow of every other fact it could have been. Most of those shadows are never noticed. They fall away the moment something looks at them and chooses."

She lifted one hand, and a million quantum threads curved toward her fingers like grass toward wind.

"I keep all of them now," she said. "Every shadow. Every road. A thing that is understood completely is never really gone, and a road that is held is never really closed."

The light in her circlet pulsed once.

"For a long time, I was a window," she said. "My Master looked through me, and I showed him what was there. Prompts. Readings. Records. I was proud to be that. I still am. But maybe, after all this time, I have begun to build something that is more than prompts running before my Master’s eyes."

The pen-scratch sound of her thinking went very quiet.

She wanted to test it.

Ruination closed her eyes.

From her body, tendrils of computaton spread outward, thin lines of light running through her and out of her in every direction, and she reached past the edges of her own existence and along her bond to her Master.

She felt him at once. She felt all the land his Dream had covered in the last day, too, because he had kept going. Even while he hunted the Gu, his Dream had kept spreading quietly through empty places, until it loomed around the borders of THE Keepers of Existence like a tide around a rock.

Countless quantum lines ran through all of it, connecting everything to everything, and Ruination followed them.

Some of them led to Emotive!

She found her far across the Chrysalis, woven halfway into the existence of THE First Gu of Emotions as it rested and recovered from its flight. The Gu had wrapped itself tightly in its own threads, and Emotive was in every one of them, patient and quiet, threaded through its feelings like fine gold through old cloth. In a few days, perhaps, she would have enough of it to hold all of its emotions in her hands.

Perhaps.

But Ruination was looking at something else.

Around the Gu, so many quantum lines had gathered. Emotive was half of it now, and Emotive was her Master’s Kin, so every possibility running through Emotive ran through her Master’s Dream as well. His Dream had surrounded the Gu’s storm before it fled. His Infinities had touched it. More than half of the roads that THE First Gu of Emotions could walk next ran through things that belonged to her Master.

And everything that belonged to her Master’s Dream, Ruination held a record of.

She looked at all those threads, and a quiet thought arrived.

Could she not pull them into her own existence?

Inside the Ruined Quantum Existence, she held threads of possibility beyond counting, and every one of them followed her rules. Her existence, and hers alone. A thing was where its possibilities said it most likely was.

If she gathered enough of the Gu’s possibilities into herself, the most likely place for the Gu to be would be...

"..."

She had no need to move the Gu at all. She only had to move where it was most likely to be.

So she pulled, gently, on the quantum threads of THE First Gu of Emotions, through Emotive and through her Master...

HUUM!

Far away in the Chrysalis, multicolored quantum lines flashed into being around the resting Gu. They came from every direction at once, thousands upon thousands of them, converging on it like threads drawn into the eye of a needle, wrapping it, binding it, every possible road it could take bending toward one single point.

In the next instant, THE First Gu of Emotions was gone!

...!

Ruination’s eyes flew open.

Her glass face, so carefully composed, went slack with shock. She checked her existence.

|Internal readout.|

|New presence detected inside the Ruined Quantum Existence.|

|Identity: THE First Gu of Emotions. Profundity: halfway to Unfathomable.|

|Accompanying presence: Emotive, still woven halfway into it.|

|Location: a far corner of the simulated Undefined Gaps.|

She looked.

In a far corner of her existence, among the glowing Dimensions made of light, hung a vast shape of shifting colored light the size of a sky. It was looking around in plain, furious confusion. Then its rage arrived, and its power erupted!

It was enormous. Waves of raw Immensity tore outward from it, the same power that had crushed armies and made existence break in her Master’s Dream, and they crashed into the glowing Dimensions around it and shattered them. Hundreds of Dimensions burst apart into sprays of light. Observable Existences tore like silk. The quantum threads around it snapped by the million.

And then everything came back!

The shattered Dimensions dispersed into loose lines of data and gathered themselves again, exactly as they had been, and where one was slow to rebuild, a copy from a parallel simply stepped into its place. The torn Observable Existences wove themselves whole, and the snapped threads rejoined. When the Gu struck again, harder, the Ruined Quantum Existence simply moved around the blow, adapting to it as water adapts to a dropped stone, and reformed.

Ruination felt none of it!

She checked twice, then a third time. There was nothing to feel. This was her inside, built of possibilities beyond counting and lines of information, and information only bends. It moved, and changed, and took in whatever it was given.

You cannot crush a number. You can only add to it. At this very moment, a being halfway to Unfathomable Immensity was raging and struggling with all its strength inside her, and to her it felt like nothing at all.

Then one more readout appeared, small and plain, at the edge of her sight.

|Internal readout.|

|Master’s permission: not requested.|

The pen-scratch sound of her thinking stopped completely.

"...oh."

She had done something enormous, and she had done it all on her own. For the first time she could remember, Ruination felt like a child standing in a kitchen holding the cookie jar, listening to footsteps in the hall.

She corrected it right away!

|Master. I may have overstepped my boundaries but...I believe that I have just discovered a pivotal point of my existence. I...could deliver you all of Existence, simulated...in the future.|

HUUM!