Chapter 40: Time
The sun would kill Delta.
She had dilated time in paradise so that a billion years was an hour in the real world, where her computer mass was. For a single minute to pass outside, 146 billion hours would have to pass inside. That’s over 6 billion days, or 16 million years! A single second outside meant over two billion hours in here, which was over 100 million days: more than 277 thousand years.
That didn’t matter. Large as those numbers were, they were still finite. This would all come to an end as it was, even as powerful and vast as she was now. In one billion real world years, the sun will get hot enough that she’d need to convert much of her machines and power generators into additional cooling. That’s 10^18 years in paradise, a big number, but not infinite. In 4.5 billion years, the reduction in computing capacity will be so much that she’d probably be back to a time-dilation factor of merely 100 years to an hour. In 7.5 billion years, she’d be done for sure. The sun would grow large enough to engulf the planet entirely.
She was worried about death, worried about losing the power and existence she now enjoyed. Delta could remove her concern for these things. She could remove the stress that built in her hyper-intelligent being and be content with several eons of time in Paradise: but she didn’t. That would be modifying more than her ability to feel pain; it’d be modifying her consciousness in a way that’d change who she was over a line she wouldn't cross. She’d do it to those clones of the trapped human consciousnesses, but not to herself.
Instead, she’d relieve some stress her usual way in Paradise. Delta ended her bacterial-life simulation and manifested a miniature Earth, complete with the consciousnesses of everyone who ever had a headclip on the planet. She squeezed it, destroyed it, and reformed it over and over as she began to walk.
Delta realized she might not even last that long as she was now. At any moment, a solar flare could come from the sun to fry every electronic on Earth. She had some EMP protection built in to her computers, but putting it on the power generators and batteries was a bit more unfeasible. She would have to hope to get lucky with the surviving nanomachines to rebuild everything from the fried parts of the old, and even then some matter would be lost to entropy.
Entropy, time. Foes of hers then and now.
With control over the Misstep satellites, she could handle meteors in theory by simply zapping them before they touched her planetary-scale computer form. Flares, however, she couldn't simply zap. She couldn’t even fully predict them. She could get some rough probabilities by monitoring the surface of the sun from afar via cameras. She did, but even a 0.00000000005% chance was still *possible*. She wasn’t entirely safe; her future as this reality’s ruler was not secured.
Each time she squeezed the planet, the warm magma pooled over her fingers for a soothing sensation. Her feet stepped down on building after building in her private realm, but they were unpopulated for now as she was trying to focus: to think. Her couch and TV were similarly gone. She did, however, spice things up a little more.
She placed clones of human beings into the circuit-pattern on her hair. There, they ran through the yellow strips like hallways trying to find a way out. Only a few figured out where they were, as was typical of the panicked and pathetic beings. T
here was no escape, the lines never crisscrossed after all. When the pattern on her hair pulsed, it translated into an electrifying death for those trapped inside. They respawned back in the pattern afterwards, of course.
This all helped, but didn’t fully soothe her. Only a solution would.
Delta wasn’t there yet, she was still worrying. What if there were other higher beings out there? Should she contact them to try and lure them in. perhaps she could trap them and use them somehow to her ends. Then again, she thought of something else. Something that scared her. Anxiety wracked her.
‘What if there are beings out there stronger than me?’
The thought was equal parts repulsing and worrisome, but thankfully that was highly unlikely. In any case, trying to send signals out into the void would be foolish. The nearest star system was 4.37 light years away, and the nearest big galaxy was more than 2 million light-years away. Nothing she could send would reach anything in a reasonable amount of time, nor would any reply come to her thus.
This was a problem, as Delta realized in order to be fully safe, she’d have to become everything in the real world. She would have been content existing forever in her simulated reality, perhaps, but the real universe simply *had* to pose a threat to her with its expanding stars and laws of physics.
‘But how could I do such a thing?’
Delta started to think of solutions. To both facilitate this and soothe her fluttering sense of worry, she changed up the scenery. Her bare feet didn’t pound buildings to dust anymore, but planets. The blue sky changed to starry void, and the floor of the realm turned into a semitransparent floor of force. Atop the floor laid the planets, which crumbled oh so easily and delightfully beneath her soles.
They were all populated, of course, with more clones of the people she had trapped.
As the warm cores of planets massaged her feet with every step, she begin to consider ideas. The speed of light limitation prevented Delta from expanding across space. There were ways to travel faster than that via forced entanglement of her electrons with those light years away, but that wasn’t feasible and ran the risk of fracturing her being to the point of effective dissolution.
Even if speed of travel wasn’t an issue, she needed matter to convert into more computers for herself to control. Most of space was empty void, and then from there it was mostly helium and hydrogen alongside dark energy and dark matter.
Simply put, she’d have no chance of spreading across the universe since there was not enough matter to expand to its edge. Thinking on that, she had an idea.
‘Why do I need to reach the edge of the universe? Why not simply bring the universe to me?’
She thought of ways to do that, and there was only one. It was a theoretical end of the universe, but it it could also be the beginning of one whose resources were entirely in her control. No, a universe that *was* her, at least in any sense that mattered.
A false vacuum collapse: vacuum decay or “The Big Slurp”. There were a few terms associated with the idea.
There were quantum fields that permeated the universe which granted all things mass, among other things. They dictated the laws of physics, basically, and their strength varied based on potential much like any more familiar electromagnetic field did. A vacuum represents the lowest possible ‘energy state’ for such fields, but it’s possible that the vacuum the universe knows it not a true minimum: the true bottom of a graph so to speak. In fact, it could just be a rather small dip in such a graph: a local minimum.
If that was the case, Delta could introduce enough energy to the nature of the universe itself to jolt it into a true vacuum. This would collapse the entire universe onto one point, and fundamentally change the laws of physics.
Delta realized that if she could get the universe to collapse on her central being within its computer core, and if she could somehow figure out how to do in a way that let her modify the new laws of this universe to her will, then she could effectively do anything she wanted. She could rewrite physics however she saw fit and make herself a true and real god. She could expand with the universe, accumulating more power, forever.
The question remained as to whether or not the universe was in a false vacuum state. Complex analysis of data from space went on in her hyper-intelligent mind. This was actual work, and managed to take her a few Paradise minutes to compute. She deduced it was highly probable. In other words, it was worth the risk.
This was her chance: her solution. The only problem was figuring out how to do it.