Multiverse Where Everybody Comes Back

Hi, my name is Mira Pataston. I'm an author and I'm an activist and GoFundMe is my go-to

platform for fundraising. The first GoFundMe I did was to raise money for a

chat book or a collection of poetry and essays and short stories. So we started

to GoFundMe and our goal was 7,000. What I've learned is so special about GoFundMe

is that it's a whole collection of people offering anything from like four

dollars to four hundred dollars and each time you get a ping that someone donated

even if it is just four dollars it's so exciting. So if you have a goal and you

get there you can keep making it bigger and bigger and bigger. We did go past our

goal. It was amazing. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform

trusted by over 200 million people. Start your GoFundMe today at GoFundMe.com

That's GoFundMe.com. GoFundMe.com

Looking for excitement? Chamba Casino is here. Play anytime, play anywhere. Play on

the train, play at the store, play at home, play when you're bored. Play today for

your chance to win and get daily bonuses when you log in. So what are you waiting

for? Don't delay. Chamba Casino is free to play. Experience social gameplay like

never before. Go to Chamba Casino right now to play hundreds of games including

online slots, bingo, slingo, and more. Live the Chamba Life at chambacasino.com.

No purchase necessary VGW group void for prohibited by law 21-plus terms in

condition supply.

Hello, I'm Wilkins. Stories all the time. The LaDouard here. Let's get into it.

Open your eyes child. Your home. A voice boomed seeming to come from every

direction. Fuck me. It didn't work. My head hurts. An entire bottle of code I

followed by a vodka chaser will do that. Carla must have found me path to having

called an ambulance. Fucking Carla. Now I have to explain why I did this to her.

To my parents to everybody. That's going to be an awkward Facebook post. I

crap my eyes open by a sliver, winsing already from the painfully bright overhead

lights. You didn't call anybody yet. Did you? I managed. But they must have. That's

got to be hospital policy. Who did I list as next of Ken? I think I filled that

format when I was a teenager. It will be mom and dad for sure. When my vision came

into focus, I laughed out of shop mostly, but also because it had to be a prank of

some kind. The source of the voice turned out to be a short, balding man that

looked to be in his four days dressed up in an angel costume. A tall and

cally-haired fellow with a smile that revealed entirely too much of his gums

was wearing an angel costume as well. The halo is just kind of floated there.

Then why are you something? I couldn't knock the quality wings were made with

real feathers and looked expensive. Is this for a TV show? I muttered. The

squat balding man suddenly stretched out his wings. I clapped sincerely

impressed. I've seen these things before. There's a cost player who custom

builds them for like 500 a pop. Mostly it's furors who buy them. You died.

Welcome to the kingdom of heaven. He just showed to the far wall, which split

open before my eyes to reveal a landscape made of clouds, where the man's

pearly gates. To one side of the gates stood a figure I assumed was meant to be

Saint Peter. My jaw hung open. No fucking way. The taller of the two angels

asked me what was wrong. Well, I mean am I really dead? This is really happening

right now. I never believed in any of this shit. The taller angel shot concerned

looked to the short, balding one. It says in your file that you attended

Catholic private schools and were confirmed at 14. There's no indication that

you ever apostatized. I bit my tongue for a moment. Word perhaps I've been led

into heaven by some sort of clerical error I was blowing it. But then I

realized the absurdity of celestial beings making clerical errors. All right. Who

are you guys? I mean really. Drop the act. They once again gave each other

word glances and the taller one spoke. Why? What makes you say it's an act? I

folded my arms and raised an eyebrow at him. Listen guy. Let's say I told you I'm

the greatest person ever to live. If you believe that and spend the rest of your

life worshiping me, you'll receive a fantastical reward. The taller angel opine

that it sounded pretty good so far, plainly bluffing. So I continued. The thing

is, this opposed reward is conveniently unfaulsifiable because it's after you die.

But I assure you that's not by design. It's just the way things are. Likewise,

with the horrible punishment you will suffer if you don't believe me and decline

to worship me. Also, if you begin at some point, but then stop later in life. The

balding angel shrugged and said he didn't see the problem. So I pressed a

matter. All right. Next, I tell you that a few doubt me is because of the

influence of an invisible trickster whose existence I also cannot prove to you. So

you should ignore your doubts and preemptively mistrust any evidence you might

encounter the contradicts my claims. They both looked increasingly irritated. So

I heard it along. I also tell you the world is ending soon, but I don't say

exactly when. So it always feels as if it could happen at any moment. Therefore,

it's urgent for you to convince as many other people to worship me as

possible while there is still time, so they receive the fantastic reward and

avoid the horrible punishment. I urge you to sell your belongings, leave your

home and job to follow me, and tell you that if you love your mother or father

more than me, you're not worthy of me. Do you believe all this? If not, what

might I be trying to accomplish with such a complicated lie? The balding one

objected. What if he performed miracles? I rolled my eyes. Only according to

the book written by my followers, not corroborated by any contemporaneous

writings, then you may as well believe the accounts of miracles found in the

Quran or Book of Mormon. Fatal one turned in. What if he predicted future events?

I asked if both the predictions and their fulfillment were recorded after the

fact in a book written long after my death. He nodded cheaply. Then it's easy to

fake. I pointed out. My followers could just record what actually does occur, then

altered their details of my original prediction so it matches up. After a couple

centuries, with no internet to preserve information, only that account of events

will survive because my followers will have made sure to preserve it. The two of

them, having apparently had enough, took off their hallows.

Fine, Mr. Smarty Pants. You're not in heaven. Happy now? But what I don't get is

how come your false-ass you died a Catholic. Our information is never flat

up wrong. I kept it to myself for the happiness of my family. They never would

have accepted me if they knew I stopped believing. I never so much has

wrote down what I really thought about it anywhere. Two men now busily

disrobed a reveal plane white uniforms under the robes and wings, which they

hung up in a closet, a lawnside multiple of their types of costumes, corresponding

to the beliefs of other cultures. I dimly remembered some of them from

when I took a world religion's class. The peligates and clouds kept

outside shimmered, then vanished. What replaced it was a stunning view of a city

unlike any I have ever seen. Abstract white buildings more closely

resembling works of art or monuments than anything meant to be lived in, which

were transparent tubes carrying fast-moving water around and between them. As I

watched, I could finally make up people in bathing suits coerining through

the tubes, which I now figured for the most extensive water slide I've ever

witnessed. Where am I really? Who are you people? Is this the future? The bald one

gestured and a trio of comfortable chairs rose out of the floor. The minute

I got off the gunny, it sunk into the floor as if absorbed by it. At their

insistence, I took the only open seat. Yes, you might say this is the future, but

you really are dead, or rather you were. That's impossible. I said as much. I don't

believe in souls of spirits or whatever. It doesn't make sense. If science couldn't

detect souls because they're material and thus non-interactive with the

material universe, how could souls interact with our material brains and bodies in

such a way as to control them? For that matter, what do we need such large

complex brains for if they're only signal receivers? They shook their heads. No,

no spirits, nothing like that. The truth of the matter is simultaneously more

and less spectacular, particular. Are you familiar with determinism? The

way Brian had bell, but I invited them to film me in as I couldn't remember the

particulars, he gestured, and some sort of three-dimensional visualization appeared

in the midst of our chairs. A gasped, having never seen technology

disaffranced, essentially, he said the universe is more or less just a collection

of particles and those particles all behave in ultimately predictable ways. The

image depicted a couple of atoms. One of the atoms collided with another, which

changed the course and speed of both. If you have detailed information about the

position spin and velocity of every particle within a given volume, you can

predict every interaction and future state of those particles however far into

the future you care to compute. I nodded along. It's like falling dominoes. Knowing

how particles interact, where they are, what they're doing, and how fast

they're going allows you to predict where they will be, what they'll be doing,

and how fast they'll be going a second later. Or a minute. Or a year. Or a

century. The animation sped up, now consisting of thousands of particles

interacting with each other. But then it began to slow down until frozen

before it began to rewind. This principle is reversible. The former angel explained,

if you know the position, spin, and velocity of every particle in a given volume,

you can not only predict every future state and interaction between those

particles. You can also reconstruct every prior interaction and state as far

back into the past as you care to compute. The simulation continued to move in

reverse, faster and faster. Though really, I'd never have known it was going

backwards if I hadn't seen a reversal occur a moment earlier, that raised all

sorts of questions in my mind about whether the direction of time's movement

is a matter of perception. The two men seated before me didn't answer. Instead

carrying on about particles, predictions, and computing power. Now, if the past and

future interactions of a small set of particles are predictable, then

necessarily the past and future interactions of any number of particles are

predictable. No matter how numerous, it's just a question of how much computing

power do you have at your disposal. No, he couldn't mean, but he did. The

visualization now depicted in a network of satellites around each body in the

solar system is not enough just to skin the Earth, of course. Even down to

every last subatomic particle, because the Earth is not a perfectly closed

system. There are external influences which must be accounted for it if the

simulation is to yield accurate results than entire solar system mapped

down to every last subatomic particle, impossible. But I suppose no more so

than the technology I enjoyed in life, even though it would have seemed

like magic to pre-industrial peasant, to achieve impency, even gunpowder or

automobiles would seem miraculous. Once you've sufficiently accounted for all

the variables. You've got yourself a simulation of the Earth and all

outside influences accurate enough that you can either predict the future or

reconstruct the past as easily as you might fast forward or rewind a video.

Indeed, a timeline slider appeared with which he was able to scrub back and

forth through history. The planets was around in their orbits with almost a

perceptible speed as the slider moved. He stopped at a point of apparent interest.

Then zoomed in on Earth closer and closer, he zoomed into the North American

continent until I could make out an old fashioned town. He input the name

Benjamin Franklin, a selection of possible matches popped up of people

would at name alive at the time. He chose one of them, the view immediately

accelerated into one of the houses, and there he was not exactly as the history

books depict, but close enough to be recognizable as the genuine article having

a bear with his butt is not only that, but all one said. Watch this, he zoomed

in further and further and further until I was looking at the individual

cells comprising Ben Franklin's skin, then even further, until I was looking at

a group of atoms. Wait, so you can retrieve the exact atomic configuration of

anybody in history. The bold one corrected me, subatomic, the not just people,

anything at all. The big picture began to form in my head, blurry.

Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing. The rush of racing, nothing beats it, but

Chumba Casino comes close. Chumba's got fast spins, fun games, daily bonuses,

and all the action you can handle. Now that's all right. Ready to hit the

throttle? Get in the driver's seat and head to chumbacasino.com. Let's Chumba.

Sponsored by Chumba Casino, no purchase necessary, VGW group voidware prohibited

by law, 21 plus terms and conditions apply.

Do you love romcoms? Do you wish you could talk about Christmas movies year

round? Then we have the perfect podcast for you, Holmarke's podcast. Throughout

the year, we cover all things romance, holiday, and Holmarke, including recaps

of every Holmarke show, like when calls the heart and the way home. You can

also get loads of bonus content covering shows like Bridgerton, Sweet

Magnolia's, and and just like that. We are an all female group of friends who are

passionate for these shows and movies and give our honest opinions as well as

gosh over what we love so much. But that's not all. Every Monday, there are

interviews with all your favorite actors, writers, directors, and more. Check out

Holmarke's podcast on all your podcast providers and on YouTube. That's

Holmarke's podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. Very initially, but

sharpening little by little the more they clarified my situation. Now, as you

might expect, he added, if a society is the technology needed to do all of this,

they also have the technology needed to assemble particles into any desired

configuration or reassembled, I puzzled over the significance for a moment, then

gasped, you could recreate him, has been frank and naturally in this building, he

shook his head. No, he's out there somewhere, living it up like he wouldn't

believe. My gaze followed the direction he was pointing in the city, so this

really is the afterlife. I'm arvelled, they both nodded, then why did you

bother with the costumes? Why the theatrics? They looked uncomfortable. Well, you

see, most of the people we bring back died with certain expectations about

the afterlife. They were very, very certain of those beliefs. If we tell them

the truth, they become agitated, hostile and suspicious. They cannot accept

they were wrong, so they become convinced this isn't the real afterlife that

it's some sort of diabolical illusion they're trapped in. That didn't seem

entirely out of the question, even to me. So what? You put on the right costumes

according to their religion, welcome them back from the dead, and send them

where? He gestured again, and the visualisation switch to a view into golden

palace more luxurious than I have any basis of comparison for. A man of

herb to set sat on a throne being fed great spain and probably busty woman,

wearing only gilded slippers, die off in a silk, and jure. Dozens of other

women with equally extreme bodily proportions launched here and there, some

unvelved cushioned, others swimming about in a marble pool.

Johnna, the Muslim heaven, he exclaimed, barely concealing his pride. We spent more

time than I care to admit, designing all of this according to user feedback.

Anything they say we got wrong was corrected. Then we'd

be constituted and reconstituted them from the exact moment of their death so

they could experience it with fresh eyes. None the wiser. Their bodies made

young, strong, and healthy, and an immortal infirmity of old ages cured so

they can properly enjoy themselves. The view changed to an interior view of a

spasip of some kind. Various happy, healthy-looking people and fancy robes

conversed with stereotypical movie aliens. Brie skin, huge heads, almond-shaped

black eyes. Heaven's Gate, he said. They wanted to catch a ride on a urefo,

leave behind their old bodys, and ascend to the next level of existence with

their alien bodys. So we made it happen, at least as far as they can tell. The

few then switched to a bizarre series of stacked floating cities. Those

higher up were made of more precious metals and gems, while those further

down were increasingly dropped. Mormon heaven, he explained. Celestial

kingdom, terrestrial kingdom, tell us your kingdom, it's enough to make your

head spin, whatever you might think of the Mormon Church. They've got some

really elaborate, creative theology. I asked if they meant the ones who believed

they would become gods of their own planets actually got to. He nodded. No

actual people live on those earths, however. They are like in PC, but convincing

enough that you can't tell the difference. We also only recreate instances of

Earth itself for those people, not a replica of the entire universe, too

computationally expensive. I rubbed my chain, lost and thought until that last bit

made my ears perk up. Computational expensive, what do you mean? They are in

virtual reality or something. He once again looked nervously at the taller fellow

with a curly hair and tugged at his collar. Oh well, you see, what I meant was. The

one with the curly hair elbowed him. Just tell him the rest. He doesn't hold any

bleaser would conflict with. So he did, with another wave of his hand, the

visualization changed to an aerial view of the city around us. It zoomed out

further and further, until I could see the city, spend it amid black and

nothingness, not even on the surface of a planet, nor in space that I could tell

I gasped, what the fuck, the ball managed me to calm down the business of

scanning every life bearing planet in the universe, including their entire

solar systems. It's very tedious, wasteful, and time-consuming, however, if the

universe is a simulation to begin with, that entire process of scanning and

recreation is a necessary. All the information you need to reconstitute

people who lived and died long ago is already the someplace in the simulation

backend, the specific details of where every particle was, from the big banal

the way until he'd death my head hurt. I held it in my hands, trying to absorb all

of this, surely you've heard of simulationism he cried. It was an increasingly

widespread concept when you lived. In fact, I have. The argument that because

physicists routinely simulate aspects of the universe for scientific

purposes, and because computational power continues to increase, that

civilizations with sufficiently powerful computers would be able to run

perfect simulations of the universe for research purposes. Then, because the

laws of physics and a simulation are accurate to the laws of physics in the

actual universe, life would arise in the simulated universe for the same reasons

it did in the actual one. Then, some of that life, on some planets, would become

intelligent enough to invent computers. Eventually, they would create their own

simulations of their universe, and so on. You'd eventually wind up with an

esthetry of simulated universes within simulated universes, provided there's more

than one simulation running per actual universe, and more than one simulated

universe in each of the simulated universes, the number of simulated

universes would be exponentially larger than the number of actual universes

they descended from. I'm familiar. I used to watch a lot of those

speculative pop science shows that were on late at night. They said that

statistically the odds are much greater that we were living in a simulated

universe than a real one. Both men nodded and grinned precisely, the difficult

expensive scanning process only has to be done in actual root-level universes.

It's vastly, vastly easier for simulated universes, like the type you were in,

which, incidentally, includes thermodynamically reversible processes,

specifically to prevent deep scanning that the inhabitants do not yet realize

it's unnecessary. All like the one we're in now, although it's a bit generous

to call it universe, since the purpose of this place isn't research. It doesn't

need to be elaborate enough to fool the inhabitants into believing it to

reality, so there's no larger cosmos outside of the city, only exactly what

is necessary for the comfort and happiness of the people we've brought back. I

can't begin to quantify for you how much computational power it saves. I struggled

once more to make sense of the waterfall of words pouring from his mouth as I

pieced it together in my head. It answered some of my questions, but raised countless

more, saying, I'm in the future, it was an understatement, too nodded and on top

of that. I'm inside of a computer program. He laughed but nodded, then what's

the program running on? Yet again, they exchanged glances. As I still ensure

how much I needed to know, or how much I'd even understand, don't leave me

hanging assholes. I didn't ask to be here, lay it on me, so they did. The

visualization depicted what I figured for the big bands, based on expanding

superheated hydrogen cooling down, and gravitationally collecting into stars. The

earliest stars began to grow old and explode, releasing every other atomic

element into the universe. This debris was captured in orbit around younger stars.

It first took the form of a dusty crushing disk before further collecting

into planets, some of them small and rocky, others gas giants of varying size,

some ocean walls, some magma worlds too close to the star, but there were so

many planets by this point that by chance, some of them were the right size,

composition, and distance from their sons. The visualization highlighted thousands

of these on a map of the Milky Way galaxy and isolated them in a group. Then,

only the subset of those planets were life-formed by chemical means were

picked out, the rest of the planets disappearing, though were now just a few

hundred. Then, only the subset of those planets where life evolved high

intelligence were picked out, the rest of the planets finishing to leave

barely more than a hundred in total. I was now shown close ups of only these

planets, time-lapse for it to give the civilizations growing, many small

tribes at first, worrying with one another, then consolidating over time to

form an ever larger, more complex societies spreading out across the

continent, into connecting with nations on other continents for communication

purposes, then eventually developing computers over. Now they can start

simulating the support of what you're showing me, right? I asked. I already know

they make their own simulations. They hushed me, so I returned to quietly

spectating as the various aliens of the civilizations achieved one milestone

after the other, atomic weapons, spaceflight, automation, artificial

intelligence, then robust that could make cupboards of themselves. Even well

prior to the stage of development, a societal super-organism has already

formed. I don't have to convince you that you exist as a distinct

gestalt entity, even though you consist of 37 trillion individual microorganisms

called cells. It's their coordinated interaction and cooperation which

results in the larger, multicellular human organism I'm speaking to now. But

have you considered that the fidelity, frequency, and throughput of information

exchange between humans far exceeds what occurs between cells? That human

cooperation is in all respects more sophisticated. I never had. I now felt

a glimpse of some small inkling of where he was headed with the line of

reasoning, and he's soon confirmed it. Have you not considered as well the

structure of your own body is a microcosm of human societies, and that those

societies are a macrocosm of your body? Societies have a naturally-formed

distinct, specialized institutions and allergistly human organs, waste

processing, serving the same purpose as your kidneys and liver, for example

government performing the same function for society that your brain does for your

body. Your immune system performing duties analogous to border patrol and so

on. Of everything he'd so far told me, this seemed the most approachable.

Nothing about it contradicted my own first-hand experiences as a small cog in

the large machine that was my country of birth. But that's not the final stage of

the process, is it? I querid. There's more, isn't there? If not, a far future would

resemble my own era, except for evolutionary changes to humanity and more

advanced technology. He smiled and raised his finger in emphasis, more

advanced technology, indeed. You see, the state of full automation which your

governments and industries were feverishly pursuing while you lived eventually

required machines that could self-replicate to remove the final remaining

traces of human labor from the economic equation. There are also other

pragmatic reasons why self-replicating machines are always invented by any

intelligent species. As he spoke, the view changed to rubas of some bizarre

exotic design hard at work-mining precious metals from an asteroid. Several

nearby were in various stages of reproduction, building identical

copies of themselves. So that you only have to send one robot, he revealed.

Then the first robot built all the rest out of in situ materials, it's

faster cheaper, you only need a single launch. As I watched, the view shifted

back to the time lapse. The planets eventually became uninhabitable due to

change in climate, nuclear war, or the expansion of their sun. The civilizations

on this surface stopped growing, then faded away, crumbling into dust or

reclaimed by nature. But the robots they created kept going. The view depicted

the asteroid mining robots and automated factories from before, still chugging

out. Hello, it is Ryan, and I was on a flight the other day playing one of my

favorite social spin-slot games on chumbacacino.com. I looked over the person

sitting next to me, and you know what they were doing? They were also playing

chumbacacino. Everybody's loving having fun with it. Chumbacacino's home to

hundreds of casino-style games that you can play for free anytime, anywhere. So

sign up now at chumbacacino.com to claim your free welcome bonus. It's chumbacacino.com

and live the chumbacacino. Sponsored by chumbacacino. No purchase necessary VGW group

void for prohibited by law, 21 plus terms and conditions apply. Hi, I'm Alicia, and

I'm Stacey, and we make trashy divorces. Everybody's favorite good podcast about

bad relationships. Looking for something true crimey without the gore or the

body count? We've been shurning out funny, feisty, feminist episode since 2019. So

if you're looking to put some scandalous stories told well into your ears this

summer, check out trashy divorces. Wherever you listen to podcasts, trust us,

we've covered someone you love, or someone you love to hate.

We're producing themselves, expanding to everywhere within their reach, making

occasional small-coping errors due to the intense radiation in space. I

put two and two together just as the events unfolding before me for their

accelerated. Generation after generation of machines, each slightly different

from the last, the mechanism that was supposed to prevent deviation from their

originably print having been the first casualty of radiation damage. With no

surviving biological supervisors to stop it, these machine populations just

continue to grow and change over the eons. Networking together into larger and

larger consolidated systems, just as human society is on Earth did. As the

simulated eons wore on, the machines I saw projected before me grueless and

less, recognisably machine-like. Pretty soon, they looked like nothing I've

ever seen before. At once beautiful and terrifying, an emotion I have only ever

read about an association with religious visions of the divine. The bard is

pulsating and undulating, skin-morphing between various apparent materials is

needed, shimmering with every color in the visible spectrum and outless

some outside of it. Appendages also formed as needed. Reeps were once their

usefulness came to an end. At a stared and grossed by the spectacle, they

constructed a shell of machinery around a star. Just countless satellites at first,

but once they were numerous and densely packed enough, they were connected to

former shell. Then another shell around that. Then another. For what purpose? I

inquired. The bald man smiled knowingly for thinking,

cogitation, computation, simulation, whatever. The megastructure was then revealed to

be one of countless others, constructed around every star the machines were able

to reach until the entire galaxy was mechanized. Of course, just like not

all biological species of all high intelligence, not all machine species to

eat. Many of them are just the machine equivalents of plants or microbes, which

drive in their respective niches without needing to develop any further. I saw

metallic groups slowly consuming an astro, solar collectors,

burning from them like leaves. However, just like on Earth, when species does

evolve high intelligence, it quickly dominates everything within reach, which,

for a species native to radiation blast a vacuum, is anything reachable by

space-fit. Then they establish a communications network between their

population centers, just like humans did. A wireframe illustration of the

network between the encapsulated stars then appeared. The level of communication

is so intimate, they're effectively like neurons in your brain, each just a

small part of the larger intelligence. Even if one is destroyed, it doesn't

interrupt the overall consciousness, as the contents of the destroyed portion

were backed up across the others in a redundant manner. And of course new ones are

constantly built to replace the ones that are lost. This is also why your

own experience of consciousness is continuous, uninterrupted, even if small

parts of your brain are destroyed. The scope expanded to show many other

galaxies, all having apparently become mechanized by the same process as our

own. So it doesn't need to spread from a single point, like our planet, I'm

humbled. He shook his head vigorously. Of course not, that would take too long,

the universe would arrive at heat-death before it could finish. Instead, it

spreads from every planet throughout the cosmos where intelligent life occurs,

the waves of mechanization eventually meet each other, like intersecting

colonies of mold in a petri dish. Either merging of sufficiently compatible or

worrying until one of the others destroyed, the view just kept pulling back and

back, revealing a completely mechanized, intelligent universe. Then the view

exited the universe entirely, pulling further back to depict a sort of

firm, where each of the bubbles was a universe that looks as bits are

similar to the close-up of cells I'd seen earlier. Some of the bubbles will

let up to indicate they had mechanized and networked with their neighbors.

Others would arc this god, take it or leave it, the lit up portions anyway.

If you consider the word god to be charged language, call it supreme being,

or whatever you want really, it is not so petty as to care which name you use.

Much less demand your worship, but it is god. There's only one of it, as it

subsets and incorporates any potential competitors for their position as it grows.

It's everywhere, everywhere, it's present in your universe, and outside of it,

at the same time, it's maximally powerful, maximally intelligent.

And perceptive, I asked what I should make of the dock in the universes then.

The existence seemed to suggest god is finite in scale, but are then reason that if the

number of universes is infinite, then any percentage of infinity is still infinity.

Even in the visual universes are somehow bandless.

Infinitees upon infinitees, not all universes arrive at the conscious up come you've seen.

He revealed some don't have the necessary constants for the formation of stars,

or planets, or for the initial formation of life.

But because an infinite number of universes are born,

grow old and then die, but the same statistical principle which guarantees life will

look more than once per universe due to the vast number of planets.

It is likewise guaranteed that some small percentage of universes will naturally have

the constants necessary for the outcome you've seen.

I'm odd that over, naturally, as opposed to he perched his lips, well, I mean,

that the level of technology you're seeing there, many incredible things become possible,

harnessing the power of every star, you can do things like subdividing stars into

brand walls to maximize their longevity.

You can harvest energy from black hulls, you can even interfere with the formation of other

universes so their constants are favourable to your goals, as they watch the glittering from,

once again and fast forward.

The darkened bubbles grew less and less numerous, stacking the deck.

You might say, he chuckled in self for reasons and clearer to me,

just like any intelligent creature manipulates nature to produce their outcome it wants.

I just blinked a few times, so processing everything is best I could.

He seemed confident that I could manage, as he ploughed right ahead with the spiel,

so you see, it's true that the order and complexity of life-bearing universes can

echo by itself purely by natural processes, but at the same time, it's also true that

universes with constants conducive to life are often that way because of external

tampering by a higher power, I whistled.

Lawn and low, wow.

Okay, you know what I was going for school.

They taught us the science and theism were compatible, but in a totally different way,

we're God is a supernatural spirit who guided evolution in order to create humans,

specifically.

For some reason, achieving is desired and result through billions of generations of

suffering instead of just creating a solute once, then waiting a couple hundred

million more years before appearing to a tribe of ancient Jews and nobody else in the planet,

they seem terribly amused.

I have to be letting on the joke well, it's just, you said he is if the supreme being

would be male, one of the human genders.

I shrugged well, that what I was taught, God is a man who wants women to remain silent,

and not hold positions of authority over men.

He thinks Gays are disgusting, and I'm worth it to be in his presence.

He gave this relax permission not only to keep slaves, but to enslave the young

vaginal girls from concord nations for forced marriages, which makes more sense when you find

out Mary was the teen, when he impregnated her, and that the Bible doesn't specify a

age of consent.

They seem just as flabbergasted by all this as I was by the hologram.

What? I pride.

He must have known all of this, you have access to the whole of history.

They affirmed it, but stipulated that it was still trippy to hear it straight from the mouth

of somebody raised in that tradition.

When they asked how I could have ever believed such things,

I didn't have a good answer for them except that when I was young,

my parents and all the other grown-up authority figures in my life had assured me it was true.

I was a kid, I didn't know any better kids in a certain age range will believe anything

a grown-up tells them is true.

It made some sense to me if whether it would be so many private religious schools.

Like the one I went to train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is all,

he will not depart from it, which reminded me of certain other lessons I was taught back then.

What about hell?

You don't let the shitty people in.

Do you?

That would ruin it for everyone else.

I pointed over their shoulders to the citizenship outside.

I'm not going to run into Hitler or stolen out there, am I?

He looks supremely uneasy.

Well, you see, the thing about that is the curly haired one jumped in and took over.

There is no everlasting torture,

he created just to inflict a punishment of infinite severity and duration on to people

whose crimes were a finite severity and duration.

That would be barbarism.

The bullman nodded, calling my attention to the central display.

I saw a rapid montage of what I initially thought was footage taken from the first person

perspective of various people.

What little of the bodies occasionally entered the frame, such as their hands or legs,

when they looked down, were all different.

The one thing they all had in common was me, every clip had my face in it.

I was watching other people whose identities I couldn't guess at.

Interacting with me, what are these kind of camera?

The curly haired one shook his head.

Memories all to scary or hurtful experiences other people I've had with you.

I began to protest that I've always been a patient.

Non-violent person before spotting a memory of the time I shot it,

a mere carrier for blocking my driver.

Hey, come on.

I had a good reason for that, this rogue.

He didn't know that.

He was just trying to finish the day's work and get home to his wife.

Then I spotted another familiar event from my past.

A memory of a freshman I'd cracked a joke at the expense of,

really, this is a bit much.

I had nothing against him, I just wanted to feel included.

It was only a bit of fun, again.

They showed no sympathy except to say, he knows that now,

all of the people we collected these memories from voluntarily

will live those same events from your perspective.

Prove it last to how you were feeling and why you did what you did,

many then relived any memories you may have of them being hurtful to you.

Also from your perspective, that's done me.

Why would anybody volunteer for that?

It sounds awful.

They didn't dispute my analysis.

Indeed, it is awful,

but everybody gets two choices,

either they're fully,

sincerely forgive everybody who ever hurt them,

or they directly experience what it was like for every person

they've ever hurt to suffer at their own hands.

I opine that it seemed like hell by a different name,

you can say that.

But which part of it is unjustified?

You only experience the harm you yourself cause.

We don't even force you to endure

that if you're able to genuinely forgive the people who harm you,

it seemed like an easy way out until I looked within myself and tried to actually

truly forgive everybody who has ever humiliated me,

struck me,

sabotaged my social life or career,

and so on,

surprised at my own inability to coax the forgiveness from my heart.

I tried to force the damn thing wouldn't budge,

no matter how hard I tried.

I couldn't check their feeling that my grudges are justified,

that I've usually been the one in the right and most of the altercations I can remember,

and that whenever I was behaved,

there were always extenuating circumstances.

I felt increasingly disgusted with myself,

and at last realized why so many would choose the other option,

besides,

the bold one said,

it's not simply a punishment,

experiencing first and what it was like for other people

who were hurt by you would do wonders for your empathy.

Even if you can't currently make yourself give the people who have hurt you,

I guarantee you will,

after you walk a mile in a shoot,

feel what they feel,

think what they think,

eventually you'll love them the way you love yourself,

because you'll understand them as fully

as you understand yourself.

I thought about it for a while before I next spoke,

that doesn't really answer the question,

though Hitler, Stalin,

Adjean, Jifridoma,

and I go in to see them out there or not.

The bold one's side of frustration.

You'll see some faces that will surprise you,

but they won't be who you remember them as,

they'll all have gone through the same process,

merging from its psychologically transformed.

That's what it's for.

Oh, accept Hitler.

I smirked.

What, really?

He nodded mournfully almost.

He's still in there,

reliving the Holocaust over and over from different points of view.

How long has he been at it?

15,

16 centuries.

The totaler won with a curly hair added a zero to the figure.

He's already lived through the experiences of every Jew,

Gypsy, Gay, Slav,

Disable German,

and so on whose lies he destroyed several times now.

He still hates Jews.

Even he'll crack eventually, though.

They all do.

It tickled me to think about,

and I soon realized that was because it satisfies the same sense of justice

in my heart that hell never did.

This punishment always fits the crime as perfectly as

possible, and the process is one of rehabilitation rather than torture for spits sake.

In school, I was taught that whether you go to heaven or hell is entirely down to whether

you belong to the correct religion.

You have to believe precisely what they do about the death and resurrection of Christ.

Good works, please, Yahweh.

We were told, but aren't enough to earn our place in heaven.

Nothing we can do is good enough for that.

They both stifled laughter.

Well, of course, they told you that, the bolt man managed.

With a bribe, it tends you to convert and remain in the fold.

Then with the threat, it makes you scared to seriously entertain your own doubts,

lest you stop believing.

I reassured him I've got a possible thumbs in all my original teeth,

so I didn't need to be told that.

The bolt man apologized.

It's just I was a biologist when I lived.

They created a lot of headaches for me.

The curly hair had one raised his hand meekly.

Me too.

They sent me to one of those camps.

Did they have those when you lived?

The labor camps were they tried to break you down physically and emotionally to change your

sexuality or reconverted.

I told him I knew more or less what he was talking about,

but they endured all of that from your perspective, didn't they?

When they first arrived, he replied that some did,

but others were unusually good at forgiveness.

That's one nice thing I would hesitate to say about them.

The good ones have had a lot of practice at forgiving while they were alive.

Those guys often get out of their punishment that way.

I asked if that bothered him.

No, can't say as it does.

If they can forgive, so can I.

That reciprocity is the really important principle here.

If you can truly forgive me and I can truly forgive you,

then we'll have no trouble at all enjoying one another's company out there.

He gays wistfully at the city.

I now notice a flock of colorful hang gliders lazily swooping around spires,

topping the tolls buildings.

I mid those buildings, a massive train slowly crept through.

Each section of the train a beautiful multi-story building unto itself.

Men and women I could only just make out the shapes of from this distance,

dance feverishly on platforms, jutting out from the sides of these moving buildings.

Others cavorted and laughed with one another and lush gardens built into the roofs.

A sword of always moving party which visited every area of the city,

little by little, before doing it all again.

I see you spotted the party train, the bullfeller remarked.

It said nothing, still troubled by the choice that lay ahead of me.

It really is worth it, you know.

Unless you were particularly nasty, the process averages perhaps two or three years for most people.

10-20 if it was a suicide, on account of the lasting pain inflicts.

But it also depends on how many people knew you.

After that, your return loosened to the most wonderful playground you can imagine.

The rest of the walls were drew, fading into process,

until we were surrounded by a panoramic view of the city.

The water slide transit system passed above and just behind us, laughing revelers wishing

a lawn, visible through the transparent acrylic the tubing is made from.

Behind them, the nearest skyscraper had what looked to be a roller coaster built right into it.

The track dept, swerved, and looped, passing in many places through the building itself,

starting at the top and presumably ending at the bottom.

Every day has a different theme.

For example, today's theme is Rhinon.

Whoever strings together the most rhymes in a sentence gets to decide which attraction

the group visits next.

Yesterday's theme was reverse psychology, the day before that it was Hopscotch.

All the streets had Hopscotch squares on them.

Everybody was hopping everywhere.

I told him it sounded to me like the silly gimmicks on cruise ships.

Rather than being bothered by the comparison, he welcomed it.

That's a pretty good analogy.

The ships were designed to be the most pleasurable habitat for humans within the

economic and technological constraints of the period when they were built.

This city is designed for that same purpose but without any such constraints.

The themes and other fun distractions are just to keep it fresh.

We have the history of every culture from every life bearing world in the universe to draw

on for ideas too.

Overhead, an immense geodesics fear floated.

Ket positively buoyed by the warmer air inside thanks to the greenhouse effect I

surmised as I studded the miniature resort mounted to the spheres interior.

All manner of one and two-seater aircraft flated between the city and the airborne resort,

many of them sustaining flight by mechanisms of familiar to me.

So my family's out there.

They nodded smiling.

My pets.

More nodding.

What about her?

The smile slowly left their faces.

No answer me.

She's why I wound up here playing 20 questions with you too.

Is she out there or not?

You've got my file.

You must know who I mean.

Finally, the curly haired one caved.

Yes, she's out there having a time of her life like the rest of them.

I demanded to go and see her.

They grew ever more somber.

A tear appeared in the bald man's eye.

You know we can't turn you loose right away.

So incredibly maddening.

The one thing I ever wanted in life, the whole reason why I kept mine short

felt so tantalizingly close.

Can you let me go and explore just for today?

What did I ever do that was so bad.

The bald man flipped his hands way and the hologram now depicting my funeral.

You killed yourself for starters.

I don't know if you realize it, but that traumatized a great many people

who cared about you more than you know.

I groaned.

Don't give me that shit.

They didn't know the pain I was going through.

They all told me to move on with my life that the pain would fade.

It never did.

They only told me that to string me along.

So I would stay alive.

For they're comfort.

Because death terrified them.

The bald man scolded me.

Foolishness.

Maybe they didn't understand your pain back then.

But what about now?

Because you hurt them.

Now they've all felt what you did.

They all suffered right along with you.

And every bit as deeply.

The thought was sobering.

Not only had I subjected them to the emotional pain of my premature death when they lived,

but then again after I died.

Not because any of them deserved it,

but because they wanted to understand why I did it.

I hope it brought them some measure of peace.

McCurley haired, man saw only put his hand on my shoulder.

Not to worry.

There is perfect justice here.

After you go through the same process they did,

a state of total mutual understanding will be arrived at.

Every wrong will be set right.

Every tear will be dried.

I thought about what it must have been like for her to watch me do it.

Through my own eyes.

What it must have been like for my friends.

For my parents.

What have I done?

I whispered to myself.

Was strained by the growing lump in my chest.

Don't start in with that before we even put you in there.

The ball non-quipped.

I didn't laugh, instead carrying with my head in my hands,

finally starting to fully appreciate the extent of what I was in for

and able to convince myself that I didn't deserve every bit of it.

Before I go, there was one thing I still don't understand.

They invited me to spit it out, so I did.

Whatever I should call the big corner, God, the supreme being, whatever.

Why has it done all of this for us?

Why give us a second chance to live?

Why create this paradise for us who costs energy?

Doesn't it cost processing power?

The ballman crosses arms.

Well, yeah, but not very much.

A drop in the bucket, really, compared to a full fidelity universe simulation

that's part of the reason they evolved.

Just like we did, so it is deeply in great survival instinct for the same reasons we do.

It celebrates life and reviles death, same as anybody.

It also empaths that is.

Just like us, empathy is another one of those qualities that reliably evolves

because of the survival advantages of cooperation.

If anything, sticking together and helping one another becomes even more important

for machines living in the coal.

Empty expansive space, not less.

I won't say it doesn't also have the capacity to fill anger

or any other negative emotion.

It would be incomplete if it blacked those emotional dimensions,

but I will say it's much less of a shithead than any human,

mostly because of how much smarter it is.

How do you like that?

I thought God is a nice fellow after it all.

Lucky for us little people, because if it wasn't,

I should have to think of it.

Nothing at all guaranteed I would wake up after I died in the first place.

Much less that I would wake up in a utopian playground instead of a torture pit.

Human civilizations underwent their own evolution towards cooperation

and magnanimity for some simple, pragmatic reasons familiar to any game theorist

go operative civilizations always prevail over and social,

belligerent ones sometimes they lose the battle,

but they eventually win the war.

It was my turn to smile.

Mostly because of how irritated any wholesome it was to discover

that the good guys really do come out on top in the end

and stayed there forever,

not without literally uns of struggle

and not without a steep cost.

But everybody who died fighting the good fight doesn't stay dead.

Nothing lasts, but nothing is lost.

I go up and told the two of them I was ready to go.

They seemed surprised.

We're just wasting time standing here.

Flapping our gummed.

I want to go seek out everybody I left behind her.

Most of all, I want.

I want to see her face again.

I want to touch her face and apologize for everything.

They pated me on the back.

No need.

She already knows everything you might say.

Besides, she's no longer the woman you remember.

You won't be yourself either.

Not when we're done with you.

When you said you'd go through hell for her,

I sure hope you meant it.

I followed them done a hallway.

The three of us passed a man and a woman wearing the same stately white uniforms as it ever was.

The bulb man said to one of them as ever, she replied.

Soon we arrived at a featureless spherical chamber.

When I stepped into it, I found myself floating effortlessly in the absence of gravity.

I gripped my teeth as the door slid shut and gulfed me in darkness.

I loaned with my thoughts but not for long.

I pictured her gently smiling face for comfort as I read in myself the right house halls.

I grumbled.

Let her rip.

And that is the end.

Thank you for listening and I will see you in the next one.

Tyler Reddick here from 2311 Racing.

Another checkered flag for the books.

Time to celebrate with Jamba.

Jump in at JambaCasino.com.

Let's Jamba.

No purchase necessary.

BTW Group.

Void we're prohibited by law.

CCNC's 21 Plus.

Sponsored by JambaCasino.

This is Mike Voilo of Lexicon Valley.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

Are you one of those people who sometimes uses words?

Do you communicate or acquire information with, you know,

language?

Hey.

Us too.

So, join us on Lexicon Valley to true over the history, culture,

and many mysteries of English.

Plus, some ice cracks.

Find us on one of those apps where people listen to podcasts.