The Pillars of Creation

With mixed emotions, Ethan stared at the stagnant pixels of his SimCountry empire, his avatar’s 100% approval rating flashing garishly. Barely three days ago, he would have given his eye teeth for this, but now it felt hollow.

"What's the point of playing when you've already won?" he muttered, clicking absently through statistics screens. The simulated citizens moved through their routines in predictable patterns, oblivious to their digital nature. He'd mastered every disaster scenario, optimized every traffic pattern, balanced every budget, achieved unquestioned global dominance. The game was now a solved equation.

The doorbell rang. Ethan minimized the game window and trudged downstairs, already knowing who he'd find. It was December 23rd, and his mom always had Mrs. Patel over for tea this time of year.

"Arun!" Ethan brightened at the sight of his friend standing awkwardly beside his father on the porch. Surprisingly, Arun’s dad was also in attendance, or at least as much of him as he could manage to bring with him.

Dr. Patel nodded distractedly at Ethan, his earbuds chattering away as usual. He was notorious for always being mostly absent, his mind solely on his equations and eyes fixed somewhere on the heavens. It didn’t matter if he was in his campus office, in the car, at home, at a picnic, or, really, anywhere at all – he was always either scribbling on a scrap of paper or speaking with a colleague. His conversations seemed to exist somewhere halfway between this world and some other, more abstract one. Against character, Dr. Patel seemed rather agitated. Straining to be heard over his side of the conversation, Ethan's mom ushered them all.

"Yes, I know, I know. I know that we joke about the whole simulation thing, but, really, the more I look at quanta and run the numbers, the more they look like, well, just numbers, not any kind of thing. And so I lie awake at night and wonder…"

Ethan gestured toward the stairs. "Come on, I'll show you my SimCountry."

"Cool," Arun replied, following him up to his room, the door closing behind them on Dr. Patel's existential ruminations.

The room was dark except for the blue glow of Ethan's monitor, casting shadows across posters of exoplanets and quantum field diagrams - gifts from Dr. Patel over the years. Ethan was always starry-eyed about other worlds, but he still didn’t quite understand quantum mechanics, no matter how hard he tried.

"Check it out," Ethan said, maximizing the window. "Perfect city. Perfect approval rating. Perfect everything."

Arun squinted at the screen. "Looks boring."

"Exactly," Ethan sighed. "I've been thinking about getting SimUniverse. Not just cities, but entire galaxies, planets, evolution. You can even change the laws of physics..."

"My dad says those games are mostly nonsense," Arun replied. "He says actual physics simulation would require more computing power than exists on Earth."

"Yeah, well, your dad also keeps talking about how we might be living in a simulation ourselves," Ethan said with a smirk.

"He's a physicist. They're all weird." Arun shrugged. "Anyway, no way your parents will get you that. The Harrington Ultra Pro it runs on costs more than a used car."

Ethan fell back on his bed, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars on his ceiling. "I know. I just want something... bigger. Something where I don't always know what's going to happen next."

* * *

Christmas morning arrived with the usual fanfare - pancakes shaped like snowmen, hot chocolate with too many marshmallows, and the ceremonial migration to the living room where presents waited beneath the artificial tree.

Ethan picked desultorily through the usual presents: new sneakers, clothes for school, books about space. He tried to look grateful, but his mind kept drifting to the reviews he'd read of SimUniverse - the procedurally generated galaxies, the emergent properties, the complexity that supposedly rivaled reality itself.

Just as he turned away in disappointment, "There's one more," his father said, pointing to a large box partially hidden behind the tree.

The box was enormous, wrapped in simple blue paper. Ethan approached it cautiously, as if it might disappear if he moved too quickly. He tore away the paper to reveal a sleek black box with a single word embossed in silver: "Harrington."

"No way," he whispered.

"Open it," his mother urged, smiling.

Inside was the Ultra Pro - a computer powerful enough to model protein folding, predict weather patterns months ahead, and, most importantly, run SimUniverse. Beneath it was another box, smaller but no less significant, with the game itself.

"How did you - " Ethan began.

"Your father got a bonus," his mom explained. "And you've been such a good student..."

Ethan was already texting Arun before his parents finished explaining.

* * *

"Your parents are insane," Arun declared, watching the minimalist pink pear logo come to life as the Har was booting up, with its distinctive wedge-shaped bite taken from the bottom.

"I know," Ethan agreed excitedly, fingers hovering over the keyboard. "Want to make a universe?"

They installed SimUniverse, marveling at the game's promises scrolling across the screen during setup: "Trillions of stars to explore! Real quantum mechanics! Emergent complexity! Life itself!"

When the game finally loaded, they were presented with a blank void and a single prompt: "Define Physics Parameters or Auto-Generate?"

"Let's make our own," Ethan said. "I want a universe where light moves faster, so space travel can be easier."

"And where entropy can decrease," Arun added. "So things can un-break sometimes."

They tinkered with the fundamental constants, adjusting the strength of gravity, the charge of electrons, the binding energy of atoms. Each time they tried to initialize the simulation, however, they received the same error message: "Universe unstable. Recalibrate parameters."

After a dozen failures, Arun groaned. "Let's just auto-generate. I want to see some aliens."

Ethan clicked "Auto-Generate," and the screen filled with a blinding flash. A single point expanded rapidly, energy coalescing into matter, matter forming into structures. Stars ignited, galaxies spun into existence. A status bar at the bottom of the screen began counting:

Stars: 101... 103... 109... 1012... Galaxies: 101... 103... 106... Planets: 0... 0... 0...

"It's going to take forever for planets to form," Arun said, leaning back in his chair. "Let's speed it up."

Ethan dragged the speed slider to the right as far as it would go. Billions of years passed in seconds. The status bar continued to update, now showing quintillions of stars and quadrillions of galaxies, but still no planets suitable for life.

"I thought this was supposed to be realistic," Arun complained. "Shouldn't there be billions of life-bearing planets by now?"

"Maybe life is rare," Ethan suggested, thinking of the Fermi Paradox he'd read about. "Or maybe - wait, look!"

The status bar had changed:

Life-bearing planets: 1

They zoomed in eagerly, navigating through vast stretches of empty space to find the single planet hosting life. It was a nondescript world orbiting a yellow star, its surface mostly covered in water. The game showed microscopic organisms floating in primordial seas.

"Just slime," Arun said, disappointed. "No aliens with laser swords."

They watched for a while as the simple organisms evolved slightly more complex forms. But before anything interesting could develop, a nearby star went supernova, bathing the planet in lethal radiation. The status bar updated:

Life-bearing planets: 0

"That's so stupid," Arun said. "All that waiting, and for nothing."

Ethan frowned. "Let's try introducing some random fluctuations. Maybe we can get life to evolve faster."

They began tweaking parameters, introducing small anomalies - a slightly larger moon here, a more stable orbit there, a planet with just the right amount of water and land. The status bar slowly began to change again:

Life-bearing planets: 1... 2... 5... 8... 13...

But each time they zoomed in to check on these worlds, they found only simple organisms - bacteria, algae, primitive multicellular creatures that never seemed to progress beyond basic forms.

"This is boring," Arun said after an hour of watching glacially slow evolution. "I got a new bike for Christmas. Want to ride to the park?"

"Sure," Ethan agreed reluctantly. "Let's leave the simulation running. Maybe something interesting will happen while we're gone."

* * *

When they returned three hours later, windburned and laughing, they found that the simulation had run its course. The status bar now read:

Universe age: Heat Death. Life-bearing planets (historical): 16. Intelligent species (historical): 1. Simulation Score: D-

"We got an intelligent species!" Ethan exclaimed, clicking through the menus to find information about it.

The game presented them with a summary:

Species: Bipedal mammals. Planet: Third from yellow-dwarf star, mostly water, single large moon. Civilization duration: 827,301 years. Technology level: Achieved digital computation, rudimentary space travel. Extinction cause: Developmental stagnation following AI integration.

"That's it?" Arun asked, disappointed. "Not even a million years? No interstellar travel? No wars with aliens?"

"Looks like they just... stopped," Ethan said, scrolling through the data. "They created strong AI and pretty soon they... just died out. I can’t really tell why."

"What did they call their planet?" Arun asked.

Ethan clicked on the planetary details. "According to this, they called it... Dirt."

"Dirt? That's the stupidest name ever," Arun laughed. "It says here that they had, like, more than a thousand languages, but in all of them, the meaning was the same."

"It serves them right," Arun continued. "Who calls their stupid planet 'Dirt,' anyway? No wonder they went extinct."

A voice called from downstairs: "Boys! Dinner!"

"Coming!" Ethan replied, saving the simulation data. "Want to try again tomorrow? Maybe we can get a better score."

"Yeah," Arun agreed. "Let's make a universe where at least something interesting happens. I want intergalactic wars!”

“Sure!” Ethan agreed. “Maybe a Big Crunch, even! I was always curious about what that would look like…"

As they were heading downstairs, Ethan hesitated and glanced back at the screen where their failed universe was displayed - trillions of dead stars and empty galaxies, with only the faintest echo of the solitary intelligence that had once called a tiny blue dot home. What would really have been like? Did they see their extinction coming? Were they sad about it?

Ethan shrugged off the thought and hurried to the dining room. Tomorrow, they would make a better universe. One where the inhabitants didn't name their world after dirt. One where they reached for the stars instead of fading away. One where the simulation didn't end with just a whimper.

* * *

As usual, Dr. Patel was late picking up Arun. The boys were already getting sleepy when he finally rang the doorbell, earbuds still buzzing with his conversation. As Arun, eyes already drooping, shuffled out the door, another snatch of conversation wafted from the porch:

“I know, I know, simulation, it’s ridiculous. Come on, Arun, get moving! We don’t have all day! No, I don’t want to tank my reputation and lose funding. I don’t want to be a laughingstock! But, still, you know, the experiments, the numbers… I just can’t find another explanation that fits all of the data, parsimonious or otherwise…”

Undisclosed location, 2025

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