“So what is it that was worth bundling me onto a plane at oh-God-thirty?” He sounded crankier than he actually was, and she smiled, pleased that he was feeling good enough to play. Recently when she’d gone to visit him, he’d been too sick to pretend to be cranky, which worried her.
“It’s an intact mid-twentieth-century data facility.” She led him into the portable, temporary, climate-controlled structure erected over what had, until the last week, been an active construction site, right in the middle of the campus at UC Stanford. They went down a small flight of stairs and into a half-demolished elevator lobby.
The cars had been removed from the elevator shafts, but a temporary cage transport had been fitted into one of them, powered and secured by modern field technologies rather than the old cable-and-brake system. The ride down several levels was smooth and safe, but in no way disguised the frighteningly analog nature of the structure they were moving through; old trackways, crumbling and rotten ferroconcrete, and copious graffiti from generations of elevator surfers were visible along the way.
The old man didn’t comment on any of it; she got the idea that he wasn’t quite awake yet. Or possibly his eyes just weren’t up to the lighting. In any case, they rode mostly in silence.
“So,” he said, as the elevator doors opened, “When you say ‘intact’...” He peered around in the gloom of what was clearly some sort of storage area for the rest of the building.
She led him along a well-marked path, long strips of LED lighting stuck in place marking the boundaries of a path that’d been declared more-or-less safe by the structural engineer they’d called in.
“Intact,” she said. “As in, someone closed the door in what looks like the early nineteen-seventies, and someone else forced the door again three days ago, and in between it just sat there humming away.”
“Humming!” He glanced up at her. “Do you mean to tell me that it’s running? Like, actually powered all this time and still functional?”
“I’ve got a terminal displaying a prompt on one of the peripheral systems. The core system looks like it started its life as a DEC PDP-11, but...”
“But?”
“Well, it’s been heavily modified. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you, some of the equipment... well, it’s not exactly... I don’t think I understand what they were doing, down here.”
“So how’s it been powered, all this time? Wasn’t power cut to the building?” He used his cane to knock some rubble off the path. “For that matter, wasn’t this whole campus converted to wireless power transmission in... God, was it thirty years ago?”
“Yes. In fact, figuring out the power situation has been one of the major puzzles. When we traced out the power circuits using an old-fashioned toner, they appear to plug into themselves. And yet, it all...” She waved her hands up ahead of them, where he was beginning to hear a distinct white-noise hum.
“Hmm,” he said. “Interesting.”
There was a turn in the hallway, and then the lighted path made a sharp left through what had clearly recently been a wall; she helped him over the lip of the former wall and into the well-preserved hallway beyond.
The room itself was a nasty shade of creamy light yellow. The lighting was provided by tiny battery powered array-lighting stuck to various points on the walls and ceiling wherever someone had needed light. The original lighting, wire-caged fluorescent tubes, might have worked, but the switch remained in the ‘off’ position. He nodded approvingly; who knew what the power variation of turning on the lights might have done to this old gear.
He looked around the room. There was the PDP-11, various panels carefully removed to expose some of the inner workings. A desk along one wall supported what almost looked like an early desktop PC, but which, on closer examination, proved to be a one-piece terminal, keyboard and tiny monitor combined in a space-age looking platic case with a big C on the vast expanse of black plastic on to the right of the cathode ray tube.
A single ‘@‘ character was displayed on the screen.
Other equipment crowded around the walls of the smallish room; there was what looked like a mass spectrometer hulking in a corner. He nodded, humming quietly to himself.
“Take a look in here,” she said, guiding him over to a box mounted in one of the PDP-11’s racks. “Does that look like...”
“Ion capture device, yes.” He moved his head back and forth, following the interconnections of the various components inside the sheet metal box. “Yes, indeed.” He looked up at her. “I assume you’ve got some sort of map of all this?”
“Yes, of course,” she said. “We got a multi-spectrum imaging system in here first thing, but I thought...”
“That I’d want to see it for myself, yes, thank you for that.” He made his way slowly, painfully back out of the room, pausing in the doorway to look around again. “Hmm,” he said, then turned and made his way back down the hallway.
“What the hell is it?” She was easily keeping pace, but something about their relative postures as they walked made it seem like she was hurrying to keep up with him.
“The secret heart of the Universe,” he said. He stepped carefully back through the hole in the wall at the end of the short, hidden hallway. “Don’t let them shut it off, by the way.”
“Okay,” she said, “We don’t intend to turn it off, at least until there’s a conservation plan and somewhere to re-create the environment...”
“No,” he said. He stopped suddenly, turning to face her. “Don’t let them turn it off, period. Possibly ever. They can build around it if they need to.” He turned again, laboriously, and began walking again. “The continued existence of the Universe may depend on it.”
“What?” She matched pace with him again, still looking like she was being hurried along despite the glacial pace. “What does that mean? What is... what is that?”
“It’s a quantum computer,” he said. “And it’s powering itself. What does that tell you?”
“Well, quantum computing’s impossible,” she said. “It ate a whole generation of computer scientists and they never managed to do a damned thing with it.”
“No,” he said, “They never managed to do anything above seven or eight qubits. Which isn’t the same as not working; it works to a point, and then stops. Which is infinitely more frustrating. And that thing in there...” He jabbed a finger back over his shoulder, “That thing is probably why.”
“What does that mean? That PDP-11 is... is somehow blocking quantum computers from...?”
She was brighter than this, he thought with an internal sigh, but she didn’t want to think about it. Nobody did.
“Somewhere,” he said, “Somewhere is a universe where quantum computing works just fine. And they built one, in 1973 or whatever, and they ran a simulation on it; and because it’s a quantum computer, it’s not really just one simulation, it’s... infinite simulations, really, all going at the same time. I imagine they did something really naive, and it just... worked, because they had more or less infinite computing capacity...”
“Wait, are you saying that that thing in there is running a simulation of...?”
“The Universe,” he said. “Yes. I imagine it is.”
“That would... I mean, even granted infinite computing power, it would require... I don’t know, just writing the software...”
“You aren’t getting it. As soon as they plugged that thing in, they had infinite software developers. Themselves, spread across infinite universes. All they had to do was guess blindly at the answer to every problem, and then select which of infinite blind guesses produced the correct results.”
“Even that, I mean...”
“Would probably take years, yes, but clearly...”
“Nothing about this seems clear. So now we’re in one of the universes that...?”
“God no,” he said. He stepped angrily into the elevator cage. “Nothing so straightforward.” He glared at her, him in the elevator, her outside it. “They built a simulator, with all that computing power. A universe simulator. And that is where we are.”
She reached out and took hold of the door of the elevator. He couldn’t tell if she was holding the door open or holding herself up.
He smiled grimly to himself, and hummed a little tune.
“It’s an intact mid-twentieth-century data facility.” She led him into the portable, temporary, climate-controlled structure erected over what had, until the last week, been an active construction site, right in the middle of the campus at UC Stanford. They went down a small flight of stairs and into a half-demolished elevator lobby.
The cars had been removed from the elevator shafts, but a temporary cage transport had been fitted into one of them, powered and secured by modern field technologies rather than the old cable-and-brake system. The ride down several levels was smooth and safe, but in no way disguised the frighteningly analog nature of the structure they were moving through; old trackways, crumbling and rotten ferroconcrete, and copious graffiti from generations of elevator surfers were visible along the way.
The old man didn’t comment on any of it; she got the idea that he wasn’t quite awake yet. Or possibly his eyes just weren’t up to the lighting. In any case, they rode mostly in silence.
“So,” he said, as the elevator doors opened, “When you say ‘intact’...” He peered around in the gloom of what was clearly some sort of storage area for the rest of the building.
She led him along a well-marked path, long strips of LED lighting stuck in place marking the boundaries of a path that’d been declared more-or-less safe by the structural engineer they’d called in.
“Intact,” she said. “As in, someone closed the door in what looks like the early nineteen-seventies, and someone else forced the door again three days ago, and in between it just sat there humming away.”
“Humming!” He glanced up at her. “Do you mean to tell me that it’s running? Like, actually powered all this time and still functional?”
“I’ve got a terminal displaying a prompt on one of the peripheral systems. The core system looks like it started its life as a DEC PDP-11, but...”
“But?”
“Well, it’s been heavily modified. That’s one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you, some of the equipment... well, it’s not exactly... I don’t think I understand what they were doing, down here.”
“So how’s it been powered, all this time? Wasn’t power cut to the building?” He used his cane to knock some rubble off the path. “For that matter, wasn’t this whole campus converted to wireless power transmission in... God, was it thirty years ago?”
“Yes. In fact, figuring out the power situation has been one of the major puzzles. When we traced out the power circuits using an old-fashioned toner, they appear to plug into themselves. And yet, it all...” She waved her hands up ahead of them, where he was beginning to hear a distinct white-noise hum.
“Hmm,” he said. “Interesting.”
There was a turn in the hallway, and then the lighted path made a sharp left through what had clearly recently been a wall; she helped him over the lip of the former wall and into the well-preserved hallway beyond.
The room itself was a nasty shade of creamy light yellow. The lighting was provided by tiny battery powered array-lighting stuck to various points on the walls and ceiling wherever someone had needed light. The original lighting, wire-caged fluorescent tubes, might have worked, but the switch remained in the ‘off’ position. He nodded approvingly; who knew what the power variation of turning on the lights might have done to this old gear.
He looked around the room. There was the PDP-11, various panels carefully removed to expose some of the inner workings. A desk along one wall supported what almost looked like an early desktop PC, but which, on closer examination, proved to be a one-piece terminal, keyboard and tiny monitor combined in a space-age looking platic case with a big C on the vast expanse of black plastic on to the right of the cathode ray tube.
A single ‘@‘ character was displayed on the screen.
Other equipment crowded around the walls of the smallish room; there was what looked like a mass spectrometer hulking in a corner. He nodded, humming quietly to himself.
“Take a look in here,” she said, guiding him over to a box mounted in one of the PDP-11’s racks. “Does that look like...”
“Ion capture device, yes.” He moved his head back and forth, following the interconnections of the various components inside the sheet metal box. “Yes, indeed.” He looked up at her. “I assume you’ve got some sort of map of all this?”
“Yes, of course,” she said. “We got a multi-spectrum imaging system in here first thing, but I thought...”
“That I’d want to see it for myself, yes, thank you for that.” He made his way slowly, painfully back out of the room, pausing in the doorway to look around again. “Hmm,” he said, then turned and made his way back down the hallway.
“What the hell is it?” She was easily keeping pace, but something about their relative postures as they walked made it seem like she was hurrying to keep up with him.
“The secret heart of the Universe,” he said. He stepped carefully back through the hole in the wall at the end of the short, hidden hallway. “Don’t let them shut it off, by the way.”
“Okay,” she said, “We don’t intend to turn it off, at least until there’s a conservation plan and somewhere to re-create the environment...”
“No,” he said. He stopped suddenly, turning to face her. “Don’t let them turn it off, period. Possibly ever. They can build around it if they need to.” He turned again, laboriously, and began walking again. “The continued existence of the Universe may depend on it.”
“What?” She matched pace with him again, still looking like she was being hurried along despite the glacial pace. “What does that mean? What is... what is that?”
“It’s a quantum computer,” he said. “And it’s powering itself. What does that tell you?”
“Well, quantum computing’s impossible,” she said. “It ate a whole generation of computer scientists and they never managed to do a damned thing with it.”
“No,” he said, “They never managed to do anything above seven or eight qubits. Which isn’t the same as not working; it works to a point, and then stops. Which is infinitely more frustrating. And that thing in there...” He jabbed a finger back over his shoulder, “That thing is probably why.”
“What does that mean? That PDP-11 is... is somehow blocking quantum computers from...?”
She was brighter than this, he thought with an internal sigh, but she didn’t want to think about it. Nobody did.
“Somewhere,” he said, “Somewhere is a universe where quantum computing works just fine. And they built one, in 1973 or whatever, and they ran a simulation on it; and because it’s a quantum computer, it’s not really just one simulation, it’s... infinite simulations, really, all going at the same time. I imagine they did something really naive, and it just... worked, because they had more or less infinite computing capacity...”
“Wait, are you saying that that thing in there is running a simulation of...?”
“The Universe,” he said. “Yes. I imagine it is.”
“That would... I mean, even granted infinite computing power, it would require... I don’t know, just writing the software...”
“You aren’t getting it. As soon as they plugged that thing in, they had infinite software developers. Themselves, spread across infinite universes. All they had to do was guess blindly at the answer to every problem, and then select which of infinite blind guesses produced the correct results.”
“Even that, I mean...”
“Would probably take years, yes, but clearly...”
“Nothing about this seems clear. So now we’re in one of the universes that...?”
“God no,” he said. He stepped angrily into the elevator cage. “Nothing so straightforward.” He glared at her, him in the elevator, her outside it. “They built a simulator, with all that computing power. A universe simulator. And that is where we are.”
She reached out and took hold of the door of the elevator. He couldn’t tell if she was holding the door open or holding herself up.
He smiled grimly to himself, and hummed a little tune.
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