The Blind Gods
Copyright© 2025 by Wau
Chapter 87: A Path Through the Worlds
The Church of Quantum Survival ... what the hell is that thing, thought Lucky, as he pestered the LE sphere and disconnected from the nodes of Munich, of Mythic Earth, to ascend through the entangled micro-gates of the Drifts, up toward Titus, where titanic servers-vast as oceans ferrying billions of ships-centralized information before redistributing it.
He had forgotten his breathing, his legs, his eyes. He was almost comfortable, and navigating from one server to another gave him the impression of floating in weightlessness. He felt upon him the millions of tiny “hands” of the AIs, which felt like rain coming from every direction.
A Xeno cult, dating back more than 10,000 years...
... submerged ruins on Hume already show that...
Oh come on, don’t start annoying me, he thought, and he grabbed one of the AIs - a small, floating, transparent sphere whose organs looked like three-dimensional trees shifting orientation at regular intervals. A synthesis, you. No, not with words. I want a visual brief.
And before him appeared the immersive projection of the information.
It has existed for at least 10,000 years of Mythic Earth time - a Xeno cult known as the Cult of Quantum Survival, explained a simulated voice, showing the tumultuous seas of the planet Hume, where ominous serpent-men undulated. The image plunged into the green waters toward ruins where marine drones of the HS uncovered frescoes depicting those same serpent creatures dying and coming back to life, inscribed within a circle.
The Xeno Cult, he then learned through illustrated explanations, professes the idea that when a biological brain perceives itself dying, it triggers-within sentient species-a self-search and self-preservation protocol (the famous “my life flashes before my eyes”). It does not seek a direct survival solution, but instead slips into a parallel world contiguous to ours that...
-Wait, what does contiguous mean? Use simple words, for fuck’s sake!
In the theory of parallel worlds, as described in the 2522 study by an anonymous author named David, Studies on the Cerebrospinal Fluid of the Owls of Booz, the idea (still unproven to this day) of the existence of parallel worlds is advanced.
-Unproven, my ass! I know the Owls of Booz very well. You can totally say it’s proven. It works, they exist.
-Do you confirm that the statement “Parallel worlds exist, this is a certainty” is true? asked a passing AI who was supervising the others.
-You bet I do!
-Do you have elements to support this statement? Evidence, study syntheses?
-My word is enough, man.
And the entirety of the LEs of the whole HS updated simultaneously. At that very moment, millions upon millions of desperate souls, believers, children-who were asking questions about life and death, about the nature of reality and the universe-received an additional piece of information: “Note that we now know parallel worlds exist. This existence naturally changes our approach to the question.” And when a few astonished scholars asked for the source of the information, the LEs replied: “This deduction was made internally by one of our AIs and is verified one hundred percent.”
The descriptive AIs continued their explanations to Lucky:
-Parallel worlds are infinite in number. For example, what differentiates one parallel world from another may be the position of a single electron around any atom in the universe, and that for a fraction of time equal to Planck time-that is, extremely short. A parallel world can also differ considerably: for example, one in which the Big Bang expanded linearly and cooled very rapidly. That means, added the AI, aware that it had to use simple words, that in such a universe there are no stars, no planets-everything is perfectly dispersed dust.
- Okay, go on.
- The less an universe differs from ours-such as in the example of the single differing electron-the closer it is to our own. It is contiguous, meaning “stuck to” ours.
- Hold on. In all those universes, can anything happen? For example, could there be a universe where I’m the president of the HS?