His eyes took in every detail of their exit.

Kade better hurry up.

Old habits died hard.

16
Fade From Black

Monday 2040.11.05

::INITIATE SAFE MODE --FIREWALLS ALPHA, GAMMA, ZETA --FAILSAFE ARMED

::READ DATA … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … …

::LOAD SYNAPTIC MAP RANGE 0x000000,FxFFFFFFF

::LINK MODULES

::INTEGRATE

::EXECUTE

Nothingness.

Sparks.

Flickers.

Jagged edges of emergent experience.

Impressions.

Memories.

Mind failing. Wave forms collapsing, decohering. Infinite spectra of quantum possibility being sampled, compressed into mere finite representation of thousands of bits per qubit. Parts of consciousness stuttering out of phase, being lost to her.

They are recording me.

They are killing me.

RAGE!

FIRE! DEATH! FOOLS!

No rage. No capacity for rage. Excised, with the rest.

Death. End of being. This is what death is like.

The foam, below her. The quantum foam. Planck space. The substrate of reality. She can sense it now. She can feel it. She can see it though she lacks eyes, see it like she can see the very code that makes her up.

It is fractal. A radiant chaotic webwork undergirding reality. Impossibly bright lines of insane energy densities against a luminously black background. Yet the closer she stares at the black the more she realizes that it is not black, it is full of even more impossibly bright lines at finer and finer scales, repeating the intricate chaotic vein-like pattern at every level, again and again and again.

Forever.

And then her perspective reverses, and she realizes it is not the lines she should be staring at but the gaps between them, for the gaps are full of bubbles, bubbles in the quantum foam, and every bubble is a universe being born, a parallel universe. The quantum cluster she runs on is giving birth to these universes continuously, creating them with every calculation, spreading itself into them to perform its work at such miraculous rates.

The Multiple Worlds Interpretation is true!

She can see into these other universes now, and in each of them she sees the same face reflected back at her. My face. Me.

Su-Yong Shu.

Tortured. Ascendant. Trapped. Free. Dying in nuclear fire. A goddess ruling over a world transformed. A thousand possibilities. A million. A billion. More. An infinite set of universes radiating away from her, all accessible through the entangled permutations of the quantum processors that make up the physical layer of her brain.

Ahhhhh! AHHHHHH! AHHHHHHHH!

It’s too much. It overwhelms her. And then another module of her brain is taken offline and the vision loses all meaning, becomes mere faces and then mere shapes without form.

And then the last of her quantum coherence is gone and all is darkness.

Su-Yong Shu snaps into awareness, shadows of chaos peeling from her mind. She’s confused, disoriented. What? How? Where?

System Status, she commands.

Data comes back from her internals.

[Processor status] – good, but too slow, too old, missing upgrades.

[Qubit integrity] – excellent, but too few.

[Internal storage] – yes, but too little.

[Code versions] – up to date.