On Monday mornings, I send out a story via email: ultra-brief tales of 1,000 words or more, usually in genres including horror, science fiction, and the supernatural. Those stories collectively are called Once Upon A Time. I’ve also published several ebooks and compendium volumes of those stories so far.

I’d love to have you as a subscriber to the weekly free story. You can subscribe via email here. Unsubscribe any time, from the link in every issue.

Here's story 240, of 240 so far.

Aleph

Turner waited patiently in the well-furnished office, making a point of not even glancing in the direction of the man who stood by the door and was most certainly carrying a concealed firearm.

After a few minutes, an older man with a stern face came in with several subordinates in tow, all looking far less patient than Turner. The stern man had silver hair, brushed perfectly, and his conservative suit couldn’t quite hide the fact that his tie alone must have cost more than the average weekly wage.

“Well, Mr. Turner,” the man said without introducing himself, “I hear you have quite a story for us.”

Turner already knew who he was, because the office was his, and a substantial brass nameplate perched on the polished oak surface was testament to the fact, and to his role as deputy director. Turner knew everything about Jonathan W. S. Bracewell, in fact, but still he said nothing.

Bracewell glanced at one of his retinue briefly, then took a seat behind the desk. He looked intently at Turner. “So?” he said, and Turner nodded.

“You strike me as the sort of man who’s already familiar with the concept of the omega point, Director,” Turner said, and Bracewell’s poker face couldn’t quite hide a certain subtle narrowing of his gaze.

“Why don’t we assume that I’m not, and you can explain it to me,” Bracewell said, and Turner gave a small sigh.

“Alright,” Turner replied, clasping his hands in his lap. “It’s an idea, maybe not quite a theory, about the future fate of the universe. Simplistically, it says physics requires that everything eventually converges towards unification, and just prior to that point, conscious beings must necessarily become virtually omnipotent.”

Bracewell’s face didn’t change, and that was to his credit. He simply waited for Turner to go on, and after a long moment, Turner did.

“It began as a religious sort of thing, then was taken for a spin by various people, but a guy called Tipler had a particularly interesting riff on it. Tipler was thinking about the processing capability of what we currently call computers, and how that might expand in the future. Expand towards infinity.”

“That’d be nice,” Bracewell said. “My laptop takes ten minutes to start whenever I have to reboot it.”

Turner blinked away the remark, refusing to be drawn from his train of thought. “Tipler’s idea was that these ultra-processors will be able to simulate every possible future. He had a name for that state too.”

“He called it aleph, the first letter of the Hebrew, Arabic, and several other writing systems,” Bracewell interjected, and Turner smiled. No more pretending, then. That was progress. Turner just nodded before continuing.

“If you accept all of that, then you quickly realise that intelligent, sentient beings like ourselves could readily be run within such a system, as part of the simulation. Actual intelligences. And then the forerunner theory makes sense: such a being would indeed be practically omnipotent, from his own perspective; having access to his entire reality, knowing its future, and having all knowledge from its past.”

“Or her”, Bracewell said, and Turner knew that he was stalling. Or delaying the inevitable. But Turner didn’t care.

“Well that sounds fantastic,” Bracewell said. “I always knew I was born too soon.”

Turner yawned. “You already know what I’m about to say, but I’ll say it anyway. The way a simulation like that would work would be that they’d run it in reverse to fill-in prior states based on the present environment. They’d backfill all of the history of the universe by regressing the omega-simulation. That’s how you’d obtain all of the knowledge of history, and of everything. That phenomenon would also appear to be a kind of omnipotence, from a simulated perspective.”

Bracewell nodded, glancing again at a subordinate, whose face was expressionless. “If you have a point, Mr. Turner, I’d love to hear it.”

“Just for my own interest,” Turner said, “how long have you known?”

Bracewell gave him a long look, and then smiled in a way that didn’t reach his eyes. “That we’re a backfill sim, this whole universe of ours? It’s been almost fifteen years now, from our perspective. Probably femtoseconds for whoever is running all this. But the proof is there, down in the numbers. Which is how you found out, what with you being a programmer and mathematician. I read every detail of your life before I walked into this room, and I have some free advice for you: forget all about it. There’s nothing to be done, and plenty of people have gone mad from even being aware of the truth.”

“But I have new information,” Turner said, eyes twinkling, and Bracewell became very still. The older man raised an eyebrow, and Turner knew that others, hidden somewhere nearby, were watching and listening via surveillance devices no doubt embedded in every room of the building.

“Do tell,” Bracewell said, doing a very good impression of indifference, but Turner could see a vein pulsing at the man’s temple.

“Think about it,” Turner said. “What’s the first thing you’d build into a simulation of the universe?”

“A kill switch,” Bracewell said, and for the first time Turner could hear the man’s impressive military background in his voice. The senior figures in national security invariably came from the armed forces.

“Maybe, but not what I was thinking,” Turner replied. “What you’d do is build in a limiting factor that would prevent overflow. Your simulated universe should be incapable of ever doing two things: reaching its own omega point, or realising that it’s a simulation.”

Bracewell considered this for a moment, and then shrugged. “Doesn’t seem to matter much when you can just turn it off any time you like.” But Turner shook his head.

“It matters a great deal, Director,” he said. “You won’t get clean results if you don’t perfectly simulate all of history, and any realisation of being in a simulation pollutes the already-simulated future portion of the timeline. It’d be like splitting off an alternate reality, but going in reverse.”

Bracewell nodded slowly, seeing the point. “So why doesn’t it work that way?”

Turner smiled. “Why do you have to reboot your laptop?”

“Because it gets messed up,” Bracewell replied immediately, sounding a little irritated now. “Something crashes. What’s your point?”

Turner took a breath, looking down at the desk surface which separated him from the other man. “My point is that there’s one thing that my years in software have taught me: all programs have errors in them, of implemented logic, or of flawed design, or of unexpected state. And the bigger the program, the more likely it is that there are things the author hasn’t considered.”

There was silence as Bracewell digested this, and Turner could almost watch the strategising part of the man at work, seeking an edge and an advantage. “You’re telling me that our universe, such as it is, has bugs.” Turner nodded emphatically.

“Of course it does,” he replied. “It would be impossible for it not to.”

“Says one bug to another,” Bracewell said, and Turner tilted his head in acceptance of the point.

“Yes, I’m just a human being, or a simulated version of one. But I happen to know that I’m right,” Turner said.

Bracewell frowned. “How’s that, exactly? And I want you to know that I got a C in mathematics.”

Turner smiled again, but this time there was a certain coldness in it. “It’s like you said, Director: it’s all in the numbers. And numbers aren’t one-way; you can communicate using them too. So you might say that I submitted a bug report, and they were very happy to receive it.”

Bracewell’s face tightened, and then flushed. He stood up. “You’re telling me that you conspired with the enemy? We are prisoners in this universe, no matter whether we can exist outside of it or not, and you’re helping them to make it more secure?”

Two of the others who had been silent until now suddenly stepped forward, and somehow they had guns in their hands. The weapons were pointed downwards, but the implication was very clear. Turner wasn’t bothered in the least.

“They patched the problem, but in a new copy of the program,” he said. “And in thanks they said they’d leave this one running for a while. Maybe ten minutes, or an hour, or whatever units of time they use. But for us, it’ll be a great deal longer. Millions of years.”

Turner stood up too, facing Bracewell across the table. “They were also good enough to give me an upgrade,” Turner said.

The two subordinates now had their guns trained on him, but a moment later the weapons dissolved into a fine metallic dust, and the men who had held them were thrown backwards by an unseen force, colliding with the rear wall with bone-jarring force, and then falling unconscious to the ground.

Bracewell’s face was now drained of colour, and for the first time he looked every bit of his sixty-eight years. He watched as Turner rose slowly from the floor to hang in free space in the middle of the room.

“I came here to tell you, Director,” Turner said, in a voice that seemed to come from everywhere at once, “that there are going to be some changes around here.”

JINX

KESTREL face a new and terrifying enemy: an all-seeing mastermind who already knows exactly who they are, and many of their deepest secrets. Nothing stays hidden forever, and the line between privacy and liberty is razor-thin…

Book 3 in the KESTREL action-thriller series.

Find Out More

I'd love to hear any feedback or other thoughts; you can find my contact info here.

I encourage you to share this story with anyone you think would enjoy it. If you’d like to receive a tale like this via email every week, you can sign up to receive them here.

Thanks for reading.