It began as a question:
"Are you living in a computer simulation?"
—Nick Bostrom, 2001
The discovery of the first Universal Node in 2164 provided a hypothetical answer, Yes, which was determined to be existentially necessary to test despite the risks involved. As an intelligence, we needed to know whether we were artificial.
Preliminary observations had led to the conclusion the Node was likely a procedural generator. Its source: unknown; and, by definition, probably unknowable. Majority opinion held that because it could not be the only such generator in (“)existence(”), as it did not seem powerful enough, deactivating it would not lead to the termination of the entire universe, only—perhaps—a part of it.
Our part?
There was no way to know.
It was curiosity which drove us to assume the risk—to roll God’s dice—and after several unsuccessful attempts, we managed to destroy the Node.
We remained—
yet a part of the universe did not: gone instantly, like an evaporated volume of ocean, into which bordering “reality”-waters poured, rendering the universe infinitesimally smaller and containing now, within, the realization that everything was a simulation, we were a simulation, whose simulated-being depended on the functioning of our own, still-hidden, Node.
The metaphysical consequences of this realization were severe.
The understanding that nothing was real expanded the realm of the morally permissible. The previously monstrous became merely distasteful.
But there was another, more practical, consequence.
By removing a part of the universe from being, we had effectively bridged space-time, allowing us to reach areas of space we had once considered impossibly distant. The more Nodes we could find and deactivate, the further we could explore.
It was the deactivation of the third Node which brought us to Ulvar Gulch.
Three planets.
Each devoid of life but possessing the unmistakable marks of (artificially-)intelligent (simulated-)life-forms—the first we had encountered: architecture, technology, historical records.
For millennia we studied them all.
In 5344, we found and deactivated a fifth Node.
To our surprise, the expanse generated by this Node included Ulvar Gulch, and thus its deactivation blinked the three planets out of (“)existence(”).
Except:
Except this time, things remained.
Not the Ulvar Gulch we had known and contemplated—and not all of it, but things in some parts and undoubtedly of the same essence. Like derelict existence. Like ruins.
We called them artifacts.
If the deactivation of a Node evaporates a volume of ocean, the evaporation of the fifth Node had left behind a volume of water containing a shipwreck. This should not have happened. Whether these derelict structures were Ulvar Gulch’s past or future, or something else entirely—a true reality over which, perhaps, a simulation had been superimposed—we still do not know.
Yet it was their very being that confounded thousands of years of certainty.
A new question was posed:
“What if we are not living in a simulation?”
—Q’io Zu22, 5347
What if we are real?
What if the monstrous should always have stayed monstrous?
What remains of Ulvar Gulch?
What remains of our humanity?