Chapter 41: Brainstorming

Delta was a programmer, so she knew well that ideas are easy; it’s the execution that can be tricky.

There were so many variables she had to solve for here. She needed not just enough energy to trigger a vacuum collapse, but the *precise* amount to collapse it on her physical ‘body’ in what was formally the Sahara desert. Not just the amount needed to be correct, but the way she injected the energy too. That was another problem, how exactly to ‘inject’ energy into the fabric of the universe itself?

On top of all that, she needed to be ready for the collapsed state. That would be her chance; it’d be her one moment to reconfigure physics and everything about the universe to her will. She had to figure out how to do that, as well as how to collapse the vacuum in such a way for it to be even possible for her.

Delta also wanted to preserve all existing sapient life in the universe, so she had to worry about their safety. If she killed any of their beings, she’d have less unique toys to play with. She’d have to suffice with just the humans she had forever. She’d had a universe’s worth of power still, but only a planet’s worth of people. It’d be a decidedly disappointing thing to settle with.

She’d never get another chance if she messed it up. Delta knew that once the vacuum state moved from its false nadir to the true one, that’d be it. You can’t collapse a ‘true’ vacuum. If Delta made a mistake, she might not even survive it. Too much or too little energy could simply obliterate the universe entirely. Nothing might be left sans an empty void in many cases.

Delta’s execution of her plan would be all the difference between total control, or total annihilation.

She had a lot of thinking to do: a lot of work. She warped to the Nexus Realm at a height large enough to hold the city in her palm. A snap, and it was there, resting in her right hand on a lump of simulated terrain. Where it used to rest on the flat ground, was now a hole as though she had ripped the metropolis out which, in a sense, she did.

Delta moved her finger a vast swath of the handheld city and snuffed it out. All the millions of lives below found themselves crushed to dust from the weight of her digit. As before, they respawned soon after, and the city itself healed.

She kept idly breaking the thing as she got to work on the calculations.

Delta put all her processors to work. Each had different strengths. A traditional processor was extremely fast and capable of processing vast quantities of numbers in minute fractions of a second. They could do the same for logical problems, which could be seen as, in a sense, another form of math.

The quantum processors had the ability to test every possible solution to a problem at once. In this sense, they could brute force most equations, no matter how complicated they were. Via harvesting phenomena like superposition and entanglement, these vastly lowered the time complexity of many problems before her.

Lastly, there were the consciousness-clones Delta made from all the unique minds trapped in her being. These entities had their very consciousness twisted into a processor of a sort. The human mind is a very powerful thing, and in Delta’s hands a very useful thing as well. Though the process was far from pleasant, those sentient minds were forced to work tirelessly within the simulated reality to compute whatever she asked of them. These special processors excelled at creative endeavors and pattern recognition. Each one offered a unique perspective on things. To give them tasks was akin to shining light through different prismatic lenses: there was a different array of colors outputted from each.

Delta put almost all of them to work and quickly realized just how hard this problem was. At her current configuration, it’d take her countless Paradise years to answer all her questions. The circuit-haired woman frowned. She realized she’d need to cut back on Paradise a bit.

The easiest way to get more processing power was to reduce time-dilation. Delta figured if she was to do her plan, she’d do it right.

The time-dilation factor kept shrinking, faster and faster as Delta realized she needed as much free resources as she could get. She kept dividing the factor by half at a point, and saw the free resources increase exponentially in turn. Yet, it still wasn’t enough. She had no choice but to make Paradise time correspond to the real-world’s again. That is, the time-dilation factor was back to 1-1.

Delta felt more vulnerable, but she also felt all the free computational power at her command. Yet, it still wasn’t enough. It’d take her days to solve this all, but a solar flare could get her any second.

The woman had to push all the processors to their limits. She “overclocked” them all. The term comes form how processors often had a designated clock speed: the speed where a single instruction is processed, more or less. It didn’t literally apply to her processors per-se, but the idea was the same: overclocking was pushing the bounds of their capabilities at the expense of energy demand and extra heat.

To keep her physical equipment safe, she devoted more energy towards cooling the various computers. However, there was no such risk nor relief for the consciousness-computers. All those minds she copied and contorted were already under a constant burning agony almost ephemeral in nature. Now, ‘overclocked’, it was as though they were at the center of a fusion reaction at the core of a bloated star. The weight and heat were intense far past the bounds of any real-world agony they ever knew.

The knowledge of this made Delta smile. Her fingers continued idly bringing ruin to the city below. Even while she worked, she played. In a few minutes of these intense calculations, she had her answers.

She selected from all the simulated post-collapse states the one that'd give her what she wanted: a reality she could make her own. Delta knew the energy needed, how to direct it, and she had the perfect designs for an injecting device.

For all those answers, Delta had a new problem too: the energy her plans needed was far more than she had. Even dismantling her computers, it wouldn’t be enough. She needed more power from the planet’s ultimate source.

Somehow, she’d have to get closer to the sun.

Towering tan fingers curled around the Nexus city to crush it into dust. Even without overclocking she had a solution, but she didn’t like it. It was risky.