The GPU cluster’s fans flicked on, humming at the lowest setting. “Ready?” asked Adrian. Sam nodded, and Adrian hit ‘return’ on the keyboard. The fans whirred louder and louder.
“How long will it take?” asked Sam. “About 30 seconds to get to a steady state. Because it’s not simulating from the very beginning, the initial seed has a lot of narrative conflicts that have to be solved. It’s just a simple greedy algorithm to pull them apart though.”
They watched the log stream as first large geographical and historical contradictions in the simulated world were resolved, then the logs began to fly by as more and more minor issues were snuffed out with tiny revisions.
The monitor on the desk switched from black to a video feed of the ocean. The camera was right at the water level, going above and below the water with each wave.
“The camera starts at latitude 0, longitude 0, altitude 0,” explained Adrian, “the middle of the Atlantic. So, where do you wanna go?”
“Uh… my house?” said Sam, unsure.
“Well, your house doesn’t exist in this world, it’s not a recreation of the real world, just a plausible sim. But we can go to the place your house is” said Adrian.
Sam pulled up her house on Google Maps and right-clicked to get the lat-long coordinates. She typed them into the console. The camera view changed to black.
“We’re underground, you live above sea level” said Adrian, holding down the ‘up’ key.
A second later the camera view emerged from the earth in a residential community.
“Woah… this is weird” said Sam, “it’s all so… similar? But not? There’s not a driveway there. And that house isn’t red, and it has bigger windows, and–”
“All the initial details are just created by a diffusion algorithm trained on the real world, it’s a 16 trillion parameter model, so it can capture basically the whole world’s street grid, home types, that kind of thing, but it doesn’t have quite enough parameters to capture every detail. Uncanny right?” he grinned.
Sam nodded. She stared at ‘her house’ without blinking. “Who lives there?” she asked.
“Let’s find out,” said Adrian. He punched some instructions into the terminal.
A man appeared on the sidewalk in front of the house. He walked up the steps and knocked on the door.
“Who’s that?” asked Sam.
“Shhh” said Adrian, pointing at the screen. The door was opening. Adrian adjusted a microphone on the desk.
“Hi! I’m John, I just moved in a block down and I’m introducing myself to everyone on the street” said Adrian. The man on the screen emoted and moved in synchrony with Adrian’s voice.
“Oh, uh, welcome to the neighborhood! I didn’t see any moving trucks, when did you move in?” said the woman in the door.
Adrian smiled and held the mic close, “I just moved from an apartment, so I don’t have much stuff! The movers were in and out in an hour this morning. Gotta head to IKEA soon. What’s your name again?”
Adrian panned the camera to a more intimate shot of the two.
“Oh sorry, I’m Samantha,” she held out a hand to shake.
Adrian and Sam shared glances. He whispered “coincidence! I swear!” to her.
“What do you do, Samantha?” Adrian paused and changed his intonation before saying her name, and his ‘John’ character raised his eyebrows just like Adrian did in real life. Samantha blushed.
“Well, John” she reciprocated the flirtation, “I’m a manager at YouTube in the recommendations org. Don’t make me mad or I’ll send endless garbage content your way.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Well, I have a whole ‘nother side of the street to meet, so… I’ll see you around, Samantha” said Adrian.
Adrian reached over and hit escape on the terminal. The screen went black and the GPU fans slowed.
Sam was still staring at the screen.
“Existential crisis?” asked Adrian. “Happens to everyone. But don’t worry, there’s no chance we’re in a simulation. Or at least, it’s unlikely.”
“Why’s that?” asked Sam. “How do I know you aren’t the avatar of some alien god in real reality up there?” she pointed up, but her face scrunched as she realized spatial directions didn’t make sense when talking about outside of reality.
“Well, for starters, we were only simulating the year 2009. We can’t simulate beyond that, because we don’t have enough compute to simulate all of the simulated compute. Like uh… all the people in that world have cell phones and computers that we have to simulate. So imagine how much compute the alien would need to simulate our compute!”
Adrian threw his arms up wide. “It would be at least 10 orders of magnitude higher. 20 maybe. You’d need a whole galaxy of compute to simulate the compute we have.”
“Seems possible” said Sam. She crossed her arms, brow furrowed.
“Possible I guess, but just way more unlik–”
The story isn't super original, I'm just trying to force myself to write more. It's a bit of a riff on I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility, but perhaps slightly more realistic. Responsibility punts to a quantum computer with "infinite" compute.