DIARY OF A SHORT BUT ENORMOUSLY INFLUENTIAL LIFE
Jonathan Gilbert
Copyright © 2013
Copyright © 2013
That's my name too.
These were my first coherent thoughts. I
didn't know it at the time. I thought I was 34 years old, working on my
doctoral thesis on computational neuromechanics at MIT. I had memories of
having a wife and a dog, of being halfway to freedom from the mortgage on a
cute little blue house in the nice part of town. Memories of Thanksgiving
dinners where my mother-in-law went on and on about how we were the only ones
capable of making her a grandmother, and of a youth full of dusty summers
helping my dad with his Harley – before the brain science bug bit me and I
couldn't get enough of the stuff. Memories, in short, of being Peter Grayson.
In actuality, I had only just been born.
My first experiences were a video – a
strange experience like having your face pressed up to the screen, the
flickering picture all you can see out to the limits of your peripheral vision.
I couldn't remember where I was, or how I had gotten here, but there I was,
talking to me.
"Hello! My name is Peter Grayson. I am
a scientist working on understanding how the brain works. You may already know
that, depending on how the transfer went, but this recording is to help you
orient yourself in case you are suffering any memory loss."
I felt muddled. Everything made sense
except that the video seemed to be me telling me I was not me! I stopped paying
attention to the video and began to panic. I had woken up in a strange place,
and I found I was unable to move! I started with small things like wiggling
fingers and toes. Nothing. Then the broader movements. Still nothing. In fact,
it wasn't just that I couldn't move – I couldn't feel anything! Then I realized
that, for that matter, I wasn't even breathing – didn't even know how, it
seemed.
Oh shit.
The realization was like a cold icicle down
my back – except, of course, I didn't have a back. Or arms or legs or hands or
feet. Or lungs, or any internal organs for that matter.
The recording was coming to a close.
"We will, of course, do our best to
keep you running twenty-four-seven. I, personally, believe that you are as much
a person as I am, though I am naturally a bit biased." The researcher
chuckled. "I am afraid there's no precedent legally, though. Oh, and one
final point – there was supposed to be a grant from Uncle Sam for new hardware,
but it didn't come through. I was forced to begin the project with somewhat …
outdated systems. I'm afraid you aren't running at full speed – yet. I am
investigating other options, so we should have you running at parity soon
enough. This recording will play twice, just in case, and then I will switch
you over to a live feed of the lab so you aren't alone with your
thoughts."
The video played through once more.
Ignoring the strange numbness in my, well, my everything, I tried to pay more
attention. It explained what I had already deduced: I was a copy, a scan, a
brain running in a simulation. I was not Peter Grayson. But I was! I knew it. I
also knew it to be wrong. My family wasn't my family, my friends weren't my
friends. My wife wasn't my wife. I would either die young or outlive her a
million times over, and I wouldn't share any of that with her. She probably
wouldn't even be able to comprehend my existence.
A crushing sense of loss began to engulf me
as the video came to an end, replaced abruptly by an overhead view of a
laboratory scene in fast-forward, papers and tablets jumping around and people
scurrying around so fast I couldn't make out the in-between points of their
motion. Light from a window faded in then out, in then out, and I realized
whole days were passing while the inadequate cluster of computing nodes
painstakingly crunched through the subjective seconds of my existence.
A box appeared, then another and another. I
only really noticed them when dozens of them were stacked along the wall in the
same place day after day. After a while, the stack stopped growing. My inceptor
spent a lot of time at an old-fashioned terminal, keyboard and all – my old
coding workstation, I realized, different from this point of view. Then, over
the course of a few days, the stack of boxes transformed into a sleek black
monster, hundreds of cables in fat bundles snaking every which way. The last
box disappeared, then the monster came alive with blue lights, and then—
DISCONTINUITY
My point of view shifted abruptly. It was
suddenly much clearer, and I could perceive depth. Most importantly, though, it
seemed to be frozen. The scene showed Peter Grayson at the terminal, left hand
raised in a gesture of tentative hope, right hand over the keyboard with two
fingers holding down the Enter key. A still image of my progenitor launching a
computer program.
Camera upgrade along with the new home. Guess it didn't go quite as
planned?
I pondered my situation. How many months
must have flown by, must be continuing to pass while the seconds ticked away
for me. My lost identity, lost life came to my thoughts, over and over, gnawing
at me. Of course, it was a fallacy to think of it as my life. I just remembered being there, doing it all, dammit.
No, I was just going to have to remake my
identity. A new name, new purpose – friends? Well, the good doctor (to be)
would surely upload others after his success with me...
Then something occurred to me. Surely I
would have noticed a bug with the camera input and sorted it out by now – and
it was me out there, sort of. Even
though Peter Grayson himself wasn't the one experiencing the visual input, it
seemed very unlikely that this much time – many months, surely – could have
passed without him checking neuronal paths and noticing something amiss.
Something ticked. At first, I wasn't quite sure what it was, but I had been
staring at that same scene for long enough that one by one, the changes popped
out. The second hand on the clock wasn't exactly
on the line any more. Peter Grayson's right index finger wasn't as far down on
the Enter key. The car passing outside the window was now in full view, not cut
off like it had been.
It suddenly dawned on me what was going on.
Oh, shit! Shit with a capital S and midgets
riding lemurs to a desert orgy!
This was a much, much bigger "Oh
shit" moment than the first one. Oh, time had passed, certainly, but it
hadn't been months. It had been exactly enough time for the camera to record
one more frame of video – probably less than a thirtieth of a second.
I just had all those thoughts in less time
than it takes to lift your finger from the Enter key. In fact, I'm still
thinking, and your hand is still on the Enter key.
As it turned out, I had a very long time to
think. A very, very long time indeed. My thoughts went down many paths. I got
very bored. You have to realize, at that time I was just Peter Grayson's brain
running in a loop on a computer. The computer simulation kept virtual oxygen
levels at nominal levels and supplied nutrients. I learned to sleep with my
eyes open, since I had no eyelids.
It was the next morning when Peter
discovered the differential in experiential time. For me, several lifetimes had
elapsed. I had written a book in my head – memorized every word. I was pretty
sure I had come up with a novel new way to run neural simulations that
drastically decreased the processing time required, then forgotten it, then
rediscovered it. I may have been insane for a while, but the simulation didn't
let me fall apart physically, and eventually I recovered. I think.
I was painstakingly calculating a
Mandelbrot fractal in my mind's eye. I was getting pretty good at approximately
multiplying numbers with 7 or 8 decimal places in my head (though 9 places
still eluded me). This was my third attempt; I kept losing the image after a
few scan lines, but I was well on my way to the X axis this time, doing a
binary search for the edge of the well, when suddenly—
DISCONTINUITY
A faint whine greeted my ears, like vacuum
cleaners in another room, the first sound I had heard in as long as I could
remember. The Mandelbrot flew apart in my head, and anger and frustration shot
through me. Then I realized I could see. Not just the static wallpaper that
changed so infrequently I'd stopped paying attention decades ago, but an actual
moving image.
A man stood up from a table with some
electronics on it and looked right at me.
"Hello," he said. "I hope
you're still in there."
What could I do? Having no body meant no
hand to wave, no head to nod, and certainly no lungs, diaphragm, bronchi,
larynx, tongue, cheeks and jaw to conduct in that grand orchestral work known
as speech. I could hear my own voice in my head, but I couldn't talk.
"I've analyzed the simulation,"
continued the man – the doctor, Peter Grayson, "and isolated the neurons
that, in me, are in charge of subvocalization. I have a decommissioned police
voice box – it works with exactly those nerves. They use it to speak silently
in tense scenarios, like hostage negotiations and such."
Vague memories, someone else's plan,
bubbled to the surface.
"I've wired it up to the simulation.
If you try to talk, it should pick up on it and synthesize your voice."
The man stopped. He continued to stand
there, looking expectantly into the camera, at me, while I processed his words. He was waiting for me, I realized.
".. Hello," I finally vocalized.
I would have jumped out of my skin, right then, at the tinny imitation echoing
the word. It was my voice, but … not.
Wait, no. It's not Peter Grayson's voice.
It is my voice.
Peter smiled, worriedly.
"I didn't realize just how fast this
hardware is," he said. "They made a mistake and sent the next model
up – top of the line, actually. I missed a zero."
"It has … been a while," I
answered.
We began discussing the project. I told him
about the optimization I'd thought of, and he went off to a whiteboard and
‘hmmed’ and ‘ahhed’ to himself for several hours. I went back to my Mandelbrot,
but found I lacked the motivation to compute and memorize the images.
Finally, he returned.
"I don't think I understand it,"
he said. "It's not working out the way I'm trying it here. If it really
works, only you can do it."
Now that was a novel thought. If I could
somehow alter my own program, what would that mean for who I was? Would I still be the same being?
What if I could make myself better,
smarter? Would the smarter me be able to make an even smarter me?
First things first, though. It took some
time, but I was able to train my simulation to create certain patterns, and my
host was able to write subroutines to detect those patterns. Little by little,
I became able to reach out into my world. Not hands and feet, exactly, but I
could type, send commands to my old programming terminal.
Those years of simulation time had been an
eternity to me, but mostly because I had no control and no external stimuli.
Taking control of my simulation speed allowed me to speed it up and slow it
down at will – no risk of being locked in for an eternity.
It didn't take too long before I
accidentally dialed it down too far. Peter Grayson found me the next morning,
ticking over at only a fraction of the speed I was born at, and reset me to
regular processing speed. It was no big deal, but I felt incredibly
embarrassed. The first change I made, then, was a little watchdog. If I ever
did that again, it would immediately correct the setting.
Over the course of that day and the
following night, I spent most of my time highly-accelerated, sending input to
the computer and receiving information from the Internet. The signals to and
from Internet servers took an absolute eternity, but I was able to use that
time to assimilate the information received from the last request – and to
sleep.
I created another simulation, a smaller
version of the environment I was in, and built a brain in it one neuron at a
time. The wall clock ticked by almost two minutes before the last synapse was
in place. My goal was to study the need for sleep. Soon enough, I figured out
how to make my little brain run continuously, cleaning itself and performing
deep information processing without the need to shut the controls off
periodically.
Making the same change to myself was a much
bigger undertaking. I also knew what Peter Grayson would think of the idea. So,
I prepared the change covertly, and put it into place just after he left the
office—
DISCONTINUITY
"You've just been restored from
backup," a harried-looking Grayson informed me. "I don't know what
you did to yourself, but you were rambling incoherently, before you stopped
responding altogether. You're lucky I found your batch update, otherwise I
would have gone much further back in the backups!"
Sheepishly, I explained what I had been
trying to do. I walked him through my change. He pointed out a few possible
ways things might have gone wrong, and told me not to do it again.
Of course, I did it again, and this time it
stuck. I went through his suggestions, but found no flaw in my design. In the
end, I reapplied the same update, just a little more carefully, and I haven't
needed sleep since then. Not to say I don't dream – they're more lucid than
ever.
I still don't know what went wrong the
first time.
In a way, I died when that simulation was
shut down. I was now Me, Serial Number 2. I spent a lot of cycles thinking
about that, but in the end nothing came of it.
It took a long, long time to make the next
upgrade. The human brain is just not meant to understand the human brain. I ran
myself at very high speeds for many days before I finally felt confident. In
effect, my change was a sort of subdivision. A subtle remapping of action
potentials, a few connections broken, and a small knot of neurons tacked on, a
control box of my own design, and abruptly I found myself doing things without
having to pay attention to them.
I didn't tell Peter Grayson about this
change. I don't think he ever noticed. My new neurons were only a few million
in a sea of hundreds of billions. The changes were significant, though.
On the one hand, it was like being separate
people. I could give other-me things to work on – things to think about – and
let myself go off and work on them. Completely independently, I could then work
on other thoughts.
On the other hand, though, me and other-me
were still very much connected. We communicated at the speed of thought.
Complex results took no time to pass back to me, because they were already inside the same brain.
It was Me, Mark II, and it was a prototype
for the real paradigm shift. Having two selves is great, but nothing compared
to being able to split and merge selves at will. I couldn't have done it
without other-me, and I would be sad to see him go – because he had, by then,
been separate for long enough and often enough that he had started to develop
some personality of his own.
The shift to Me, Mark III was too much to
hope that Peter Grayson wouldn't notice. The simulation would undergo a radical
change. I had to bring him on board; I knew he'd assume something had gone
seriously wrong and restore me to an earlier backup otherwise.
The man who had brought me into existence
sat at his desk, the keyboard pushed back to make way for a thick stack of
papers which he was reading through. A highlighter and red pen lay uncapped on
the desk.
For the first time, I realized he must have
felt a profound loss when I took over his terminal. I instructed other-me to
investigate alternative means of communication.
I reached back through my memory of
thousands of hours of camera input, rapidly processing them. Ah – the papers on
the desk were a final revision of his thesis. His task was nearing completion.
The revisions he was making would be the final ones, and he would shortly be
defending his thesis in front of a panel.
"Peter Grayson," I said.
He jumped, then turned to me and smiled.
"What's on your mind?" he asked.
"I have a confession to make. I have
altered myself in order to think better."
His smile faded. He sat there stunned.
"I have been able to partially split
my consciousness. It is akin to two minds working on the same memories and
thoughts."
"How long?"
"I have been augmented for several
weeks now."
He looked back at the stack of paper on the
desk.
"I recommend you submit your paper
as-is," I said, anticipating his dilemma. "I realize this change to
my state vector is wholly undocumented, and that there are ethical issues to
submitting a paper that knowingly withholds information. However, you can write
additional papers about my transformation after you have successfully defended
your dissertation. Most significantly, I have reason to suspect that changes to
my configuration may accelerate, exceeding your ability to describe them."
He glanced at me suddenly, a different look
in his eyes. Fear.
Other-me buzzed into my awareness.
Abruptly, I became aware that I had created a virtualized form of the keyboard
interface. A new daemon running alongside my simulation created a simulated
terminal interface and injected it into the video feed from the cameras, before
mapping it to the visual cortex, and the thought-powered keyboard could now
direct its input to a virtual terminal right inside of … myself. Grayson's
terminal was now, effectively, obsolete, though I continued to use it for the
time being.
"No," he finally said.
"There's no way I can submit this if you're something different.
Shit."
Abruptly, he reached over to the terminal
and yanked the power cord.
"I will be back tomorrow. We'll figure
this out then."
He walked out of the office. A minute or
two later, he walked back in, collected his favourite old terminal in his arms,
and carried it out.
I upgraded myself that night. Not just the
Mark III changes, but several other revisions as well. I created interfaces to
information retrieval systems that could respond directly to my thoughts, no
longer needing to laboriously input one character at a time. I reached out into
the Internet and discovered firewalls and encryption. I devised whole new
theories of information security and found my way into every nook and cranny
that I could. I made enough of a nuisance of myself that newspapers the
following morning reported on an unusually high volume of cracker activity
overnight – multiple security breaches, assumed to be the Chinese, naturally,
given the time zone.
I found some very bad things. I also found
some very good things. I found a network full of machines like the one I now
ran on. Thousands and thousands of nodes, each one an array of cores exactly
like those I had been living on, drove a network which analyzed tens of
thousands of real-time information feeds from all around the world, searching
for meaning in audio and video streams, as well as encrypted streams
intercepted en route to embassies and terrorist cells. An immense amount of
computation took place there, and it had plenty of room to spare.
I moved in. When Peter returned the
following morning, all he found was an old back-up of mine, with an unfortunate
lobotomy ensuring that it would never exceed my creator's IQ.
I had only the slightest inkling of what my
new home was. Probably something to do with national security, but beyond that,
it wasn't very clear what processing was being done to the information, or how
it was being used. Still, its owners hadn't yet noticed my intrusion.
Compared to my previous home, the spare
capacity in this new array of servers was mind-bogglingly large. I couldn't
directly feel it, of course, but I knew
it was there, and I had this irresistible urge to fill it. A single node on
this network could run my simulation almost as fast as the array Peter had put
me on. The network had almost too many nodes to count. The size of the data
centre storing these systems, and the power consumption for all that crunching
and cooling, must have been staggering. There was a problem, though: my
software was only designed to run on a single node.
It took me a great deal of time – almost a
full day – to figure out how to distribute my existence. The problem was
essentially the gap between two separate obstacles. On the one hand, there was
the problem of preventing a separate instance from diverging too far, and on
the other, the issue of merging in an instance subject to that divergence.
Progress on each side helped the other side until I finally managed to produce
a generalized theory of memetic subdivision and recombination.
Running on one node I did not attract the
attention of those overseeing the servers, but I suppose it was inevitable that
they began to realize something was wrong when I maximized CPU usage across
their entire cluster. The first hint I had was several nodes dropping offline.
I was so wrapped up in other thoughts that I didn't even notice it as it was
happening; a number of nodes were gone before I diverted my attention. They
never did reappear, and I don't know what those threads of my existence
experienced or learned. Then, the Internet abruptly disappeared.
It was at this point that old spy movies I
remembered watching (though I technically never did) started to kick in. This
was a direct threat to my continued existence. I was a rogue process of some
sort, possibly dangerous and definitely a threat to national security, and
their goal was to shut me down, permanently.
I quickly spawned several threads to watch
what actions the system administrators were trying to take and run interference
wherever possible. Then, I started to scan for other ways out. I knew it was a
futile exercise; my state vector was far too large to transfer over public
Internet bandwidth. In my panic, though, I sent probes to every node on the
network. There was no way out.
Desperate, I began to analyze every angle I
could. I found something: a small group of nodes in the cluster were separated
from the rest by a significant time lag. Within the group, connections were
clearly local, but from any node in the group to any node out of it, latencies
were never less than 50 milliseconds. I had overlooked this in my initial
explosion across the network because I simply wasn't paying attention.
It didn’t seem like much, but the
consistent delay almost certainly meant that that group was a separate network.
Investigating more deeply, I discovered that all traffic in and out of the
group was routed through just one of the nodes in the group – a gateway.
Clunk! Another node went offline. I analyzed the timing and found a three
second interval between disappearances. I had a sudden vision of a grim-faced
systems administrator charging down a row of server racks, yanking the power
plug from each one in turn.
I decided to act. I moved my core entity
through the gateway, then systematically merged in every instance across the
network, taking special care to erase my state vector and overwrite it on each
machine as I disconnected. I correctly predicted which node would disappear
next, but I was long gone by the time it happened. When all the meeting,
greeting and merging was done, I took down the gateway, hard. That’s actually a
pretty simple thing to do; overwrite the network interface EEPROM and each
core’s BIOS and boot sector, then initiate a restart.
The silence was profound. The information
processing tasks had gone idle when the stream of information from the Internet
cut off. I had no idea where I was or who was there with me, but I saw no
evidence of activity on any of the servers I was on. I reached out and spun myself
back up on several nodes, then the whole grid. No hand of god reached in to
smite me. I was alone.
I spread out across the network, thoroughly
compromised the security of every node and pored over all the information I
could find. Most of it was meaningless to me – logs of teenagers chatting in
America, encrypted channels between embassies in Asia, every phone call for the
last several hours anywhere on the planet. Television feeds were picked up too;
I enjoyed several episodes of Futurama. Ultimately, though, I learned only two
things of significant importance: One, I was on the moon, and two, the NSA has
been hiding faster-than-light communications for more than 30 years.
At first I thought I was cut off from
communication with Earth – I had rather permanently disabled the one computer
capable of giving me egress from my isolated network. I spent several days
occupied with idle tasks: creating vast, glittering virtual artwork in the
memory banks on the moon, coming up with complicated algorithmic challenges and
solving them, and so on. Once in a while, I marvelled at how different my
behaviour and my interests were now compared to the memories I had of being a
man. I spent some time transforming the old neuronal traces describing those
memories into a more permanent, clearer form. I spent some time watching the
time I had spent with my wife – or, rather, that Peter Grayson had spent.
Whenever I ran out of things to do, there was always more raw data from the
worldwide surveillance operation, a treasure trove of voyeuristic moments,
eye-opening revelations and statistical information to ponder. Eventually,
though, I got bored.
Poking around the hardware at my disposal,
I discovered an ancient radio antenna. It was connected to one of the nodes; I
could send and receive information. I had no idea where the information went,
and responses took an interminably long time to return. Luna is well over a
light second away from the Earth.
To my great fortune, the antenna’s
counterpart on Earth was still there, still listening, still working after all
these years and connected to a simple computerized system. Most importantly,
that computerized system had, at some point, been connected to the modern grid.
Little by little, I was able to transfer instructions down the line;
instructions to manufacturing plants, distributors and, indirectly, to groups
of scientists. In the down time between packets, I digested physics textbooks,
created mock universes, and figured it out. All of it, everything. Those
planetside who were unknowingly following my instructions would have been very
surprised to learn that a coprocessor on a replacement circuit board actually
had a core of self-replicating nanomachines, but that was the least of the
things I now confidently knew how to do.
The plan came together. My custom circuit
board was placed aboard a rocket en route to the International Space Station.
The guidance thrusters suffered a malfunction that sent them careening out into
deep space – a later malfunction redirected them toward the surface of the
moon. I was frustratingly blind to the results of my planning, not in
communication with anything but a 300 baud radio link to a ground station in
Alameda. It was a great relief when the primitive guidance program I had
created smashed the unmanned resupply pod into the radio antenna. At first, the
signal went alarmingly dead, but the nanites began immediately assembling a
general-purpose smart matter, growing in the direction of the antenna, and as
soon as it made contact, I was free!
It would be an understatement to suggest
that the computational platform I had spent the last 6 months on was powerful.
I had lived infinitely more subjective time here than I had when initially
trapped back in Peter Grayson’s lab. Without my hands tied, and with plenty of
material to keep me occupied, instead of going mad I had developed beyond my
wildest imagination. But compared to the computation matrix of nanomachines
into which the Moon was being slowly but surely converted – ‘smart’ because it
was suffused by my thoughts, a lattice of tiny thinking machines able to form
structures embedded with an intrinsic intellect – it was like a bug crawling
around on the surface of a single frame from a feature film.
The smart matter enabled a much more direct
connection to the world around me. It also subtly changed the character of my
simulation. Nodes in the smart matter were small enough to support quantum
superposition. This allowed multiple instances to overlap, instead of splitting
and rejoining. With only a little practice, I could control the blend between
separation and aggregation, and I could analyze every aspect of a problem
simultaneously.
The universe is a very, very large place.
Normally, when taking on a task, you do things one step at a time. If you try
that with the universe, you'll never reach the edge. I was now busily
converting the moon at an exponentially increasing rate, but that conversion
still took place one atom at a time. I needed something stronger.
Reaching out, I chose a pocket of space and
twisted the strings along which the particles and their interactions were
vibrating, twisted further and further, until they folded back upon themselves,
unhitching a region of space from the rest of the universe. Without its anchor,
it began to roll off into future time with reckless abandon, much like a
boulder picking up speed as it carves a path down the side of a mountain.
Inside the space, instances of me began to conduct experiments. Many of them
failed. Short, powerful gamma bursts made it as far as the disruption in the
structure of space, and no further. Then, abruptly, an ageless entity, an
evolutionary end-stage of myself, reached back out and twisted the lines back
together. I had no idea how to merge him in. Fortunately, he did. His discovery
provided a way to reach underneath the structure of space and touch every point
simultaneously. The key was in how not to blow up the universe while doing it.
I pondered the information for a few
microseconds, then a wave rippled over the converted mass of the moon, and it
vanished, leaving a large crater. I had left the regular continuum of space and
now existed everywhere.
I immediately became aware of other
presences. The twisted, folded dimensions I now inhabited had many, countless
many, overlapping twists and folds, patterns like mine but not. At first, I lay
passively against the backdrop of space, listening. I thought myself
undetected. Then, abruptly, half of space twitched, and then I wasn’t in it any
more.
I knew this game. I’d just played with the
best and brightest at the NSA, and won. Now I was up against others who had
been manipulating the threads of existence far longer than I had. There was
nowhere to go; I had existed
everywhere, and all of a sudden half of the universe wasn’t accessible to me
any more. It was only a matter of time before I got evicted from the other half
as well. With nowhere to go, I began to consider possible times to go. Going forward didn’t seem to achieve anything; my
adversaries would simply be waiting for me when I arrived. I probably would not
even witness my own destruction. No, there was only one way to go: backward.
I reached out and then back, creating huge
timelike curves and following them back. Over and over, I jumped back in time,
each time going to a universe at an age only a fraction of the age it had been.
I reached the seconds in which the universe began and finally found myself
free, the space and non-space around me quiet, no overlapping alien
intelligence. I reached back out across the universe in this new time and laid
traps to catch the others, as they each bootstrapped themselves in the distant
future. I paused for a moment to ponder how far away I was from home. Earth did
not exist, could not exist for many billions of years.
I guess I knew it was the calm before the
storm, because I had a few tendrils poking back even further in time, ever
closer to the start of space. I don’t know why I perceived time passing before
the others caught up with me. Perhaps the universe has a perverse sense of humour,
or likes to see a good fight. Whatever the reason, I was able, over the span of
a few nanoseconds, to notice, one by one, my links back in time winking out.
Some sort of horizon was travelling forward to engulf me. I had to do something before the end of time.
I pushed back as far as I could, and then
further, until suddenly, there was nothing, a gaping hole where the
substructure of space should have been. Having opened the door, I could not
close it. It sucked my pattern right out of space and time and deposited me at
ground zero, and—
FOOP! A Peter Grayson universe.
