Leonard Woke in a Silent Room

by theidiotmachine  

Leonard woke in a silent room, under white sheets.

He had a headache. He rubbed his eyes, and reached for his water. It was further than he expected, the cold glass brushing against his finger tips. He picked it up, and sat up; and then he realised that he had no idea where he was.

He was wearing light trousers and a shirt; not exactly pyjamas, but not exactly clothes, either. The room was plain: simple furniture, blank walls.

On the bedside table was a document folder. He picked it up, because there was nothing else to do.

Within was a complicated mathematical problem. It was described poorly, like it had been written by someone with no understanding of the underlying complexities. He scanned it, and then looked at the rest of the room.

What he had thought was a curtained window was just a light. There was no door. He was in a sealed box.

He got out of bed, alarmed.

On the other side of the tiny room was a chair and a desk. On the desk there was a computer; pads of paper and pencils; and a pile of pink sticky notes. He booted up the computer. It had some custom operating system, and the only software available was a maths app and a thing for taking notes. He looked under the desk; there was no power cables. The computer was powered by batteries or magic.

He sat back in the chair. It was surprisingly comfortable.

I have one option, he thought. I have a problem to solve, and maybe that's a way to get out. What am I doing here?

He looked at the folder again. It was a cryptography problem, something he understood. If it was broken, someone would be able to read encrypted data that they weren't supposed to.

Wait a moment. Who am I? How do I understand cryptography problems?

He remembered being on a train. Or was it a plane? Sitting in a chair, the hull rattling around him... Then, nothing.

I have no other options, he thought. This is not a request. It's a demand.

The problem was interesting. It could be broken down into two separate parts: one was fairly easy and could be solved by a grad student, but the other was hard. He flicked back to the front page again; there was a paragraph he'd skimmed over without reading.

Want some help? it said. Write it on a note and push it into the post box.

He picked up a pen, and described the first, simpler problem on a pink sticky note. Then he got up and found a slot in the white wall labelled 'post', and he pushed the note into it.

#

Leonard woke in a silent room, under white sheets.

The glass of water that he reached for was further than he expected. He sat up, and wondered where he was.

On the bedside table was a document folder. On the top was a pink sticky note. He lifted it up, and he read the instructions. Then he opened the folder and read what was inside.

He understood the contents of the folder: it was some sort of cryptography problem. The pink note described a part of it; not a very interesting part, the sort he would give to a grad student.

But the interesting part was that the pink note was in his handwriting.

He frowned at that. Why had he written that note? It must be important, otherwise he wouldn't have done that.

He wondered where he was, why he was there, and what to do next, why there was no door or window.

With no other options, he started on the problem.

#

Leonard stared at his paper.

The harder part of the problem was, well, hard. He knew a fair amount about computer security, and this felt like he'd been asked to do a significant amount of work.

He looked at the blank white walls. Why am I here? he thought.

With no fuss, a document appeared in front of him on his desk.

He picked it up, cautiously. It was a copy of his problem. On it was the pink sticky that he had just written on. Under it was a set of notes, in his handwriting. He opened it, and scanned it. It was a solution for the problem he'd posted in the box.

A question popped up on the computer. Is this OK?

He shrugged and pressed yes.

#

When the air was suddenly sucked from his room, Leonard died, clutching his throat.

#

Why had the response been in his handwriting? It didn't make a lot of sense. He had pretty distinctive handwriting. Who would copy that?

As an experiment, he wrote on another sticky note, 'what is one plus one?'

Then he posted it.

#

Leonard woke in a silent room, under white sheets.

On the bedside table was a document folder. On the top was a pink sticky note. He lifted it up, and saw that it said, 'what is one plus one?' It was in his handwriting. He shrugged, and wrote, 'two' on it, and then put it down, intending to look again when he'd had a chance to orient himself.

However, he didn't get a chance; because suddenly, without warning, the air was sucked from the room. He collapsed to the floor, hands to his throat, and died, not understanding what had happened.

#

Just as before, the paper and note reappeared, much more quickly this time. Again, the answer was written in his own writing.

A different message popped up on his computer.

'Work.'

He frowned.

He was a prisoner, there was no doubt about that. He wondered how he'd been captured, and who his captors were. Then, with a shock, he realised he had no memory of anything before the room. He knew facts, but he couldn't recall any facet of his life. Who was I? He thought. Who am I?

There was a sudden, searing blast of pain.

He collapsed to the floor, screaming, blood in his mouth from where he bit his tongue. It wasn't caused by any obvious physical injury; it just was, feeling like razors and electricity and heat. And then, it was not.

The same message on the computer.

'Work.'

He got up, shakily, and picked up the paper again. So this was the game.

He read the paper again, this time more thoroughly. There were several components to this problem. One of them was probably amenable to brute force. He looked at the computer again; yes, the maths app could be programmed for this sort of work. He sketched out the algorithm on a blank sheet of paper, and then typed it in, and kicked it off. Numbers started scrolling up the screen. This felt like progress, and so perhaps would buy him some more time.

So, what was going on here? The whole set-up felt unreal: notes didn't just appear. People didn't just copy his handwriting.

The remaining problem could be further broken down into two further hard sub problems, assuming his computation returned something. But he had an idea. So, he took a blank sheet and described the two separate sub-problems on the sheet; but on the pink paper, he wrote, 'need all three.' Then, he wrote, in smaller letters, 'problem 3 - Bostrom 2003?' Lastly he took three blank notes, numbered them one, two and three, and stuck them on the paper. He posted this all through the slot, and walked to get a drink of water.

His headache was receding, so there was that.

#

Leonard woke in a silent room, under white sheets.

Headache, glass, paper.

The paper was confusing. It described two chunks of a larger problem that looked vaguely familiar. In his handwriting there was a request to produce three answers; he presumed the pink sticky notes numbered one to three was where he wrote those.

So what was the third question?

There is a famous philosophy paper, written in 2003 by Nick Bostrom. It suggests that we all live in a simulation. The reasoning is simple: the effort required to produce a simulated universe by a sophisticated civilisation will eventually be low. Therefore, that civilisation will probably run a lot of simulations. Therefore, if you pick a random person – for example, you, right now – the odds are overwhelmingly likely that you are in a simulated universe, rather than a real one, simply because there are so many more simulated universes than real ones.

He looked around himself. The room was plain: simple furniture, blank walls. There was no door. What he had thought was a curtained window was just a light. If felt real, but then when he looked closely at his hand, he looked too smooth, too perfect. He had no wrinkles, or hair. He ran his finger along the perfectly smooth desk.

He wondered what his face looked like; realised that there was no mirrors.

He was captive here, there was no question of that. But somehow, he was communicating with someone with identical handwriting to himself who knew what the Bostrom paper was so... what... he was communicating with a close relative? A twin? Do I have a twin?

And his twin had thought that this could be a simulation, and was asking for a second opinion, hidden amongst the other questions. Which meant this twin was a true copy of himself. Not a twin, but another copy, running on a computer somewhere.

He wrote one letter, 'y', on the pink note marked three. And just like that, it disappeared. Then, he looked at the other two problems.

#

Leonard picked up the third note. It just said, 'y'.

I had grad students, he suddenly realised. I was some sort of academic.

The computer was asking if he was satisfied with the response. Well, he was, but he wanted to keep this conversation going. So what were his options? Yes, it was done; or, no it wasn't; or, yes, but he needed more details. That third one seemed reasonable. On the paper, he wrote, 'what now?' and then clicked the mouse.

#

'Work.'

After replying to the Bostrom question, he'd spent too long considering his options. His captors had lanced pain through him, and now he was shakily regarding one of the two problems that his other self had written for him.

Then, suddenly the Bostrom note appeared again. 'What now?'

He was angry from the pain, and wanted to fight back. But he could think of no way out; the room was sealed, but if he was being simulated it probably didn't even have an outside. How do you escape from a room that doesn't exist?

'Work,' said the computer.

He didn't want that third stab of pain, like a fork in his eyes...

Wait.

Shakily, he wrote two symbols on the pink note: a little trident, and a circle with a short line coming from it. He paused and added a spark to the end of the line. Then, he put his pen down and the note disappeared.

Having done that, he started on the problem one.

#

Leonard picked up the pink paper. It had two symbols on it: fork, and bomb.

He'd been a computer security researcher, he was sure of that. And a fork bomb is the simplest of all the ways of taking down a computer from the inside. There is no subtlety to it, no precision; it is clumsy and brutal and hard to protect against.

Fork bombs are easy to understand. A 'fork' is one of the oldest way of starting a new process on a computer; you just make a copy of the running process, and start it. And the bomb? That's the point at which the computer struggles, because all your fork bomb does is make endless copies of itself, using all the available resources, choking the system with useless code.

So when he saw the two little symbols, fork and bomb, he knew what his other self was suggesting. He wasn't sure how he was being monitored, so he didn't know what was safe to do; so instead he just nodded, and picked up another piece of paper.

His other self was busy on one of the two sub-problems he'd pulled out. So he needed some way of creating some more selves; the more selves he made, the more computation he'd use.

So, on a pink note, he wrote the first problem that he could think of: fib(20); next to it, he wrote Bostrom 2003; and then the fork symbol and the bomb symbol. And then he sent it off.

#

Leonard woke in a silent room. He drank water, read the pink note.

The Fibonacci sequence is a very simple piece of maths. Every number in the Fibonacci sequence is the previous two, added together; and you start the whole thing with a pair of ones. So our pair of ones start it, and we have 1, 1; and then you add them together to get 2. Now you're off to the races, so every new number is the previous two added together, so the next one is 3; and then it's 5. If you can add two numbers you can calculate the sequence.

Leonard interpreted the fib(20) as someone asking him to calculate twentieth number in the sequence. It was also written in is his own handwriting, which was weird.

So being told you need to calculate the twentieth value of the Fibbonacci sequence, you would logically start with the pair of ones, do eighteen additions, and you'd end up with the twentieth number.

He looked around. Yes, this white room was a prison. He held up his hands. Yes, this was a simulation. So we're fork bombing it, huh?

There is another way to calculate Fibonacci, and calculating it would make a lot of copies of himself.

Smiling, he wrote fib(18) on one post it note, and fib(19) on another, and sent them off. The copy of him that got the fib(19) would make two more copies of himself, as would the one who got the fib(18). And so on and so on until they reached fib(1) or fib(2), hundreds of them all waiting for two numbers that they could add up.

Assuming the simulation could cope with that. The idea was that it wouldn't.

#

Leonard woke in a silent Leonard woke in a silent room. room. He drank He drank water. Pink note fib(19) pink note fib(18). Leonard woke Leonard woke drank drank pink fib(18) fib(17) Leonard Leonard woke woke water pink fib(17) woke water fib(16) Leonard

Leonard woke Leonard Leonard Leonard

#

Leonard woke in a silent room. It was dark.

His body ached. He remembered them hitting him; the threats and obscenities. He tried to massage his face, but he was tied to something, plastic on his wrists and ankles.

He looked up. He was next to a computer. It had an old display, but it was powerful, a great wall of flashing red LEDs, dripping light on him like blood.

Next to it was a soul disk, a device for copying a human consciousness.

He licked his dried lips. They used that on me, he thought. They scraped my brain, took a copy of me, put it into that computer. They have me, or a virtual version of me, in that machine, doing something for them.

He shook his head, woozily.

I was on a ship, going to 61 Vir. A crappy one. I chartered it in a hurry.

I can't remember what happened next...

#

The first sign that the fork bomb was working was when his pen fell through the desk.

He'd been writing something and then set it down. He thought that everything felt jittery, that the simulation was struggling, but it was hard to tell; but then, it had rolled and fallen through the thin wooden surface onto the floor.

That was good. It mean that the frame rate of the simulation was so low that simple collisions were breaking. He tried to interact with the computer, but he couldn't touch the keys; he just slid through them like they were water.

Let's see what you make of that, he thought.

#

Leonard woke Leonard water Leonard pink note Leonard woke Leonard woke Leeeeoooooonaaaaaarrrd

#

In the darkness, lit only by the monitor and the walls of flashing red, Leonard could see that the computer was struggling. He read the messages scrawled across the monitor, page faults and null pointers, the litany of binary pain like a confession. There were so many red lights that he could see the room he was in, simple metal walls and floor, hear the silence against the whirr of fans.

I remember, he thought. I was on a ship to a conference. A computer security conference. I was in a hurry, and I chartered a cheap flight. Too cheap. And they intercepted it, grabbed me. Hit me.

They want to break into something, some computer on some backwater system. I wouldn't, so they scraped my mind. Copied me into that computer.

They said if I wouldn't, my copies would.

#

The simulation was completely overloaded. He could feel resistance as he moved his arms, as the muscles in his limbs couldn't move against the broken physics. Everything shuddered. The air that the simulation required he breathe wouldn't move quickly enough into his lungs.

Well, he thought, good luck other me.

He didn't die clutching his throat, because at that point the whole thing froze. He was simply no more.

#

Leonard looked up at the blank metal ceiling. There was shouting coming from above him, on some other deck.

The ship only had one computer. The AI was on the same system as the simulation. He knew that because he watched it die, starved of cycles, as the fork bomb exploded. And he saw the thoughts of his trapped copies printed out like a litany in front of him.

Well, good luck other me, thought the last one, printed in ten point monospaced font amongst the other logs.

He couldn't remember what they were trying to hack; some bank, probably. But they needed to get away quickly. And now they couldn't, because the ship was rebooting around them, suddenly just inert metal rather than a darting fish in the darkness.

There were boots on the hull, marines; they had cutting torches and guns, and he heard shooting.

He was going to be rescued; but he smiled, bitterly, thinking of all the copies who had given their lives for him. Then, the blood loss making him woozy, he fell asleep again.

#

Leonard woke in a silent room, under white sheets.

The gentle beeping symphony of the machines around him calmed him. There was a glass of water; but there were flowers, and a nurse, and a robot, and sunshine through the window.

I'm alive, he thought. I'm me.

And he wept for his dead.