Human Error

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“They broke the system. Again.”

Frederick and his colleagues looked at their screens, baffled. The simulation they had created was intended to replicate all of the physical realities of the universe to test the understanding of universal laws and develop novel technologies yet to be discovered.

For most of the life of the simulation things were pretty quiet. It takes some time to form stars and planets so that life can begin springing up.

Most intelligent lifeforms developed amazing technologies never thought of before. There was now several new technologies being developed in the fields of space travel, time manipulation and resource renewal. Some creatures though seemed more keen on destruction than creation.

“These humans are a blessing and a curse.” Angela exclaimed. “This is the third time this week.”

Humans, the advanced species of Earth, was by far the most destructive creature in the simulation. Their most intense curiosity seemed to be discovering how the universe worked and they had developed increasingly advanced technology used to smash things together to see their constituent parts.

In a perfect simulation this would be fine. The results would just be what occurs in the real world. But as humans became more advanced their experiments started to create errors. Fundamentally the simulation can not process infinite data, and recently human experiments had been producing just that. System crashing, impossible outputs.

This was inherently a good thing. These showed the holes in the current mathematics behind universal laws; however, once the system crashes the research team has to fix the error by adjusting the equations to create a possible outcome. This could take days or even months to complete, all the while the simulation would have to be shut down.

Rolling back the simulation was pointless. The humans would ultimately run the same experiment, get the same results and crash the system in the same way again and again until the error was addressed.

At times, with mounting pressure from the government, an imperfect patchwork would need to be put in place just to get the system running again. It was valuable to address the errors properly, but months without any new technological innovation was no longer acceptable. There are several problems still being worked on and the researchers were painfully aware of how these temporary solutions could increasingly impact the validity of their findings.

“Any insight on what happened this time?” Angela asked.

Frederick was skimming through the error output on his screen trying to figure out what they had done this time. “This is going to take a bit to unravel, but it looks like they shot some kind of probe into their star.”

“Into their star?” Angela sounded baffled. “How would they even get any data out of it?”

“Great question. If you can figure out the answer then I can get this running again shortly.” Frederick took a deep breath to reset his composure. “The measurement itself at least seems sound. Hand that up to the data distribution team; it should at least buy us some time to figure this out. The problem seems to be with the transmitter they used. It uses some sort of space-time tunnelling mechanism to bypass the star’s dense energy.”

“That is absolutely absurd.” Angela replied, somewhat defeated. “So what I’m hearing is this is technology we should be able to create, but can’t because we don’t actually understand how that part of our own universe works?”

“Yep.” Frederick answered flatly.

“So to properly fix this we basically have to invent what they have just to figure out how it works.” Angela’s sense of defeat deepened.

Frederick nodded. “That about sums it up.”

Angela let out a deep sigh. “I’ll run this solar data up to D.D. Then I’m grabbing myself a drink. Then I think I’m going to think long and hard about enrolling in the personal therapy program.”

“I’ll make sure the rest of the team is on the same page and then I think I’ll do the same.” Frederick took one last look at the error readout on his screen. “Humans. What great and terrible creatures we have birthed.”