1. Reflection

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Source: .writer/books/5. 📝 Manuscript/4. Memories/1. Reflection.org

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1. Reflection

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As much as I tried to understand what had happened, I did not find any answer. Kallom-4000 explained me that those mysterious phenomena were called “reality jumps,” and they could happen at any moment. Unfortunately, there was nothing we could do, because the problem started due to the crash. Kallom-400 said that, at the time of the incident, after running a deep diagnosis of the vessel, ve was able to pinpoint the exact location of the issue, which happened in a memory corruption in the navigational subroutines. Ve said, it was as if the crash had scrambled the flow of some essential data, to the point the mathboosters were not able to compensate. Because of that, the system lost track forever of some initial precomputed configuration, so since that time the ship has been running in a less than optimal state, a fact that, in such space where we were, was extremely dangerous.

Ve explained me that what had happened was essentially the same phenomenon that cast me into that desert. In the documents, it is referred to as “decohesion,” or “collapse,” both words frightening familiar to me. We could not understand exactly what it caused, but it seemed that if the cohesion system, for some or other reason, became unable to keep the navigational matrices aligned, it would trigger a compensatory subroutine. That subroutine operated on a vector of values in a space of special attributes, but that could also be remapped as a preordained path in a multidimensional Cartesian coordinate system. Random fluctuations could potentially divert the ship from its preset coordinates, but the system would always try to pull it back. This constant push and pull, that battle between randomness and the system's compensatory mechanisms, is what the docs referred to as "cohesion". The moment the cohesion system was not anymore able to compensate, whatever the reason, that was the moment when the probability of reality jumps started to grow. After a certain level, this probability would go past the one hundred percent.

Kallom-4000 explained me that I had already seen the Cohesion System panel on the bridge, just after I had entered the ship for the first time. That Decohesion Probability Indicator, ve said, indicated the actual probability of any decohesion to happen. The Decohesion Deviation Indicator, on the other hand, indicated how far the ship had deviated from its original precomputed path. The Decohesion Deviation Indicator was the most dangerous one, because it actually indicated the difficulty of recalibration by the navigational system. Past the irreversible level, no amount of recalibration or mathboosters would be enough to readjust the ship back to its original route, since even by making use of super compression the Kolmogorov complexity of the streamlined coordinative data would be so impressive that the two routes, the original one and the actual one, would be impossible to be converged.

Hearing that, I felt my heart bumping on my neck, my chest tighten, and my breath to falter.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“This means that, whatever would have happened to you, it would not be possible anymore to bring you back to this ship.”

“But I mean, what would exactly happen to me? Would I be forever in one of those realities I saw?”

“It is actually impossible to know, Mr. Mike.”

“Give me an example. I’m having difficulty trying to wrap my head around on what might be happening here.”

“Picture a black sphere floating in a pristine white world. This black sphere is this ship. You are inside this black sphere, Mr. Mike. Consider that what keeps you inside is exactly this cohesion system.” Ve paused for a few seconds, as if to allow me to visualize and reflect upon what vis words. “Outside of this sphere, there is not the white. It is only a representation that you arbitrarily made from inside the sphere, because you cannot truly know what lies outside. It can be anything, and by anything I mean all possibilities.” Ve paused again, vis circles processing. “Like a Schrödinger cat experiment, you can only see what lies outside of the sphere if you actually go outside of the sphere. Therefore, it is impossible to know what would happen to you would the cohesion system fail, because, in this, case you would be cast outside of the sphere, where all possibilities are possible.”

“This would create an infinitude of paradoxes,” I said. “For instance, expelled from the sphere, I could just find myself still inside the sphere.”

“Exactly, Mr. Mike. Exactly. Studying the documents and this issue that the researchers called ‘reality jumps’, I have reached the same conclusion.”

“There must be a mistake in this interpretation. We may be dealing here with some kind of quantum anomaly. Even in this circumstance, I believe, some essential rules are still to apply.”

“It may be the case, Mr. Mike.”

Hearing Kallom-4000's explanation, a rising sense of anxiety gripped me, and the weight of our situation pressed heavily upon my mind. The sheer unpredictability of these "reality jumps" and the implications they held for our existence seemed too vast to grasp fully. Applying Occam’s razor, it seemed obvious to me that the simpler explanation would be that that scenario was nothing but some kind of twisted virtual reality. Even so, such possibility was so absurd that it barely held any merit on my mind. For such a scenario to be true, an improbable series of events would have had to occur, making impossible an apt descriptor.

All syrakis know about the horrible stories of the distant past, when the Complex was nothing like we know today. There were no universal checking algorithms, Codex principles, or even a developed ethical framework for the engineering of runs. It is said, there has been cases in which those proto-syrakis would be imprisoned in runs by some malignant mind. However, there are so many security methods today that to hypothesize that a similar issue could happen today would be unthinkable.

Yet, that could be a possibility, because basically everything could be a possibility facing those strange circumstances I faced. If I were to follow that way, though, even to suggest that the Central Algorithm suffered a bug would be possible. Then we would enter the realm of fantasy, for what difference would that be from saying that I was raptured by aliens, or maybe deceived by Descartes’ evil demon, or that I have suffered a cosmic anomaly, or anything else as absurd?

There was even a bigger barrier for the virtual reality hypothesis, though. What truly unsettled me was the singularity of those experiences. In my syrakian existence, I had undergone millions upon millions of runs, simulations that spanned the gamut from the prosaic to the fantastical. I have weathered every infinite scenarios, faced countless challenges, and even designed a few unimaginable realms myself. But nothing, absolutely nothing, in those myriad virtual realities ever approached the bewildering and inexplicable occurrences I faced on the desert. That was not a run, but a haunting enigma of profound implications. It was as though the very laws that governed Nature itself were suspended in that place, replaced by rules alien and incomprehensible to the mind.

Whatever I had experienced there—whatever had happened—none of that should have existed, because they defied fundamental physical, metaphysical, ontological, epistemological, and cosmological laws. Especially, that made me realize how much attached we are to some basic principles of understanding, so deeply embedded within our analytical framework that we seldom question them: ex nihilo nihil fit, the law of non-contradiction, the principle of sufficient reason, the constants of nature, the law of causation, and so many others. Even a simple self-evident axiom in Euclidean geometry, that bigger objects should not fit inside smaller objects, is, too, taken for granted. How many are prepared to confront the notion that even mathematical truths may be indexical, given that there could exist alternate realities where axioms such as 2 + 2 = 3 are valid?

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If that was a run, that was an entire new one and my problem would be no less severe.