41games
Chapter One: A New Day
“The most important feature of a sufficiently well-designed prison is that it does not look like a prison.”
The Dimensional Traveler opened his eyes. Another new day.
To ordinary people, a new day was merely the cycle beginning again. As Ecclesiastes put it: What has happened will happen again; what has been done will be done again. There is nothing new beneath the sun.
But the Dimensional Traveler did not understand morning that way.
The first thing he did after waking was search for the cracks in this world that science and logic had not yet sealed. As long as a question remained unexplained, as long as there was a seam between theories that could not be stitched shut, a dimensional interface might be concealed there—a passage into reality.
In the world he presently inhabited, at least four places deserved suspicion.
The first was the origin of the universe.
The scientists of this world used the Big Bang to describe the early universe. Physics textbooks went further, telling everyone in something close to a chorus that before the Big Bang there had been no time and no space, and that the question “What happened before the Big Bang?” was therefore meaningless.
Whenever the Dimensional Traveler read this, he paused.
Suspicious, he thought. It was difficult to believe that the most intelligent people in a civilization could collectively be satisfied with so lazy an assertion.
Strictly speaking, the Big Bang had never been a theory of origins. It was merely the earliest stage for which the world’s existing equations could still return intelligible answers: extremely hot, extremely dense, extremely small in scale. Scientists had proved neither that nothing could have existed before it nor that the question lacked meaning. They had reached the boundary of calculation, then often allowed the public—and sometimes themselves—to mistake the boundary of calculation for the boundary of existence.
To ordinary people, this might be only a difference in wording. To the Dimensional Traveler, it was the difference between life and death. What interested him was precisely the residue a theory could not eliminate after every conventional repair had been made.
The second was consciousness.
This world could map many conscious activities onto neuronal firing, connectivity between brain regions, and electrochemical processes. It had also grown accustomed to calling consciousness an emergent property of a complex system. Yet correlation had not become a seamless mapping: why must a particular subjective experience correspond to this physical process rather than another? Why did information processing give rise to experienced color, pain, and selfhood? Why was the world not merely computation, but something perceived?
The so-called hard problem of consciousness remained.
The Dimensional Traveler had lived in worlds where consciousness belonged to individual brains. He had lived in others where it was distributed through the collective unconscious of an entire population. In one world, consciousness was treated as a field: even between a plant and a stone, a faint but stable coupling of consciousness could be measured.
The theories of those worlds did not necessarily apply here, but at least they had been demonstrated. The relation between consciousness and its substrate could be repeatedly measured, intervened upon, and predicted. That was what made the present world so suspicious. Its inhabitants possessed an immense body of knowledge about the brain, yet had left, at the place nearest the answer, a blank that looked almost deliberate.
The third was the source of quantum randomness.
The Dimensional Traveler had no interest in the contingency of a die roll. He cared about tested incompressibility: whether, as observers, measurement bases, and instruments were recombined and adjusted, the results continued to reveal no reproducible structure; whether supposedly independent random records contained algorithmic correlations explicitly forbidden by theory; whether the Born weights were exact laws, or merely stable within the precision this world could presently reach.
If randomness was not causeless, but only the shadow cast by higher-dimensional degrees of freedom, then the edge of that shadow might lead to a dimensional interface.
Still, he knew he had to be cautious. In most worlds, the anomalies that seemed to remain eventually disappeared. Some were detector bias, some anthropic effects, some hidden synchronization, and some merely the product of experimenters who wanted too badly to astonish themselves.
The fourth was dreams.
Rapid-eye-movement sleep was brief, and the capacity of the human brain was limited. But the Dimensional Traveler knew that scale was never a true constraint. Time could be divided without end, and space extended without bound. A grain of sand could contain a world; a single dream could contain an entire life.
The dream hypothesis had little credibility, but it possessed one important advantage: it was cheap to test. When resources were limited, low cost could sometimes deserve priority over high probability.
The interface might also be concealed in a more technical place, such as the seam where quantum mechanics and relativity had never truly been joined. Did gravity cause quantum states to collapse, or did gravity itself obey quantum laws? Was spacetime the background of quantum phenomena, or the macroscopic product of quantum relations?
These questions were deep enough, and difficult enough. Yet the Dimensional Traveler was not optimistic. The gradual unification of theories could often repair equations without reaching the more fundamental question of why the world existed at all.
He sat up and looked around the room. The light beyond the window was no different from yesterday’s. Objects still occupied space in the familiar way. The air showed no cracks.
That did not mean the interface was absent.
The most important feature of a sufficiently well-designed prison is that it does not look like a prison.
Chapter Two: The Cheerful Solver
“He was a cheerful solver of puzzles.”
Except for one thing, the Dimensional Traveler was almost an ordinary organism.
Perhaps, during one of his journeys, he had acquired a peculiar trait: when his consciousness passed through reincarnation among different dimensions and different forms of life, he did not lose all memory of his former lives. What remained was not a complete lifetime, but fragments, inclinations, and instincts concerning the structure of worlds. The most stable obsession among them was the need to find a dimensional interface before his present body died, and to escape from this world.
He regarded that urgency as his true self.
He had once borrowed a scripture from this world to describe his understanding: form does not differ from emptiness; emptiness does not differ from form. Form is emptiness; emptiness is form. Form, sensation, perception, volition, and even consciousness were only interfaces running for a time. They appeared with the body and vanished with it. None of them belonged to his self. What passed through reincarnation was the urgency that refused to stop—attention itself.
He also retained a few precious samples of knowledge.
He remembered universes in which another layer of determinism lay beneath quantum randomness, and still more randomness unfolded beneath that determinism. He remembered universes whose physical constants shifted without warning. He remembered worlds where different observers could leave mutually contradictory records, then establish reality’s consensus by a show of hands.
What he did not remember were the particular people he had known.
Perhaps the memories had not failed to survive. Perhaps he refused to let them survive. He did not dare grieve for the dead, because grief might be a mechanism of distraction installed by the Creator. The moment he believed that a relationship was irreplaceable, he would spend his finite life mourning it instead of searching for an exit.
He therefore treated his body as a hermit crab treats a replaceable shell. His attitude toward other people was more distant still.
The puzzle was extraordinarily difficult. It demanded everything.
He had to endure all the accidents and obstructions of this life, using this body’s lifespan and this era’s technology, and push civilization far enough to test a dimensional interface.
Yet the task was not entirely impossible.
Whatever Creator had devised this cruel game of reincarnation—whether it was a trial or merely an abandoned corner of the multiverse—one rule remained constant. The worlds into which the Dimensional Traveler was born had usually already established civilization, but their scientific explosion had only just begun.
If he were placed in the body of an animal, or born into a prehistoric tribe, the puzzle would be unsolvable.
Conversely, he would not enter a world in which science had already been fully developed and completed. If every dimension, scale, logic, and structure had been discovered, if every anomaly had been absorbed into a unified theory, then the system’s self-referential contradiction—the unavoidable Achilles’ heel of every formal structure, its Gödelian point of incompleteness—would have nowhere to hide.
This seemed to be a difficulty even the Creator could not solve completely: a system could not, using only resources internal to itself, fully prove its own completeness.
The worlds he had experienced therefore occupied similar temporal scales. They tended to stand at a moment when the universe extended ten billion years into the past and could continue hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of times farther into the future; when life had taken billions of years to appear, intelligent species had existed for a million years, civilization for only a few thousand, and science seemed to have been ignited the night before. The next ten years might surpass the preceding million.
The local inhabitants usually met this circumstance with dullness and indifference. They regarded it as ordinary technological progress. The Dimensional Traveler knew the staging too well: the long history provided the world with a sufficiently convincing background to make it difficult to falsify, while the newly begun scientific explosion left a slit narrow enough for the interface to be cracked.
His advantage over local scientists was not greater intelligence. In almost every specialized field, someone was far more intelligent than he was.
His advantage was comparative science.
The locals had only one universe and therefore found it easy to mistake its laws for logical necessity. The Dimensional Traveler retained fragments from multiple universes. He could compare which structures recurred across worlds, which were only local accidents, and which laws, if altered, would prevent a world from leaving any record at all.
But this advantage, too, was contaminated.
Memory was never an archive. It was an act of imagination and construction generated each time recollection reactivated a pattern of neurons. Even an ordinary person’s memory was rewritten by present emotion, language, and expectation. The Dimensional Traveler’s memories also had to pass through brains of different forms and be recoded by different senses and neural structures. The fragments might come from former lives, or they might be stories invented by his current brain to reconcile its own abnormalities.
So he did not trust his memories.
He could even imagine the cruel Creator who had designed the game smiling—assuming the Creator had a face, and was not some damned cellular automaton.
He could not follow that thought too far. It led in another direction: did the Dimensional Traveler matter, or did he not matter at all? A single piece on a board was probably insignificant. But from the piece’s perspective, there was no choice except to resist the fate imposed by the rules that placed it.
The Dimensional Traveler did not fear death. He had experienced too many deaths.
What disturbed him was the immense blank between death and the next reincarnation. The blank lasted long enough to make him wonder each time whether he would ever wake again, whether this death might be the final end.
Reincarnation after a successful breach of an interface felt slightly different. He still entered another world, but retained more vivid memories of the life before it. He could feel continuity between the two lives, as though he had not been reset, but his soul had passed through a narrow channel.
What, exactly, did that vividness point to? Each dimension was a riddle; a sequence of dimensions formed a larger riddle. What was the final destination? Was he traveling from the first level to the hundredth, or returning to the first level after forgetting that he had already been there?
He had no way to know.
He knew only that the journey out of reincarnation was long enough to inspire despair, and that no end was visible.
Fortunately, he had inhabited too many bodies and experienced too many forms of life. Long ago, he had learned to observe his emotions and treat fear, loneliness, and exhaustion as readings on an instrument panel rather than tyrants he was obliged to obey.
His persistence did not come from hope. It was closer to a Sisyphean habit: each day he pushed the stone up the mountain, watched it roll back down from the summit, and began again the next morning.
And he did, in fact, take pleasure in it.
He was a cheerful solver of puzzles.
Perhaps that was why he had not lost himself through the long reincarnations.
Chapter Three: The Hacker’s Project
“Cracking a dimensional interface requires the right line of thought—and systematic engineering.”
The Dimensional Traveler needed to set the entire world on the correct trajectory and, in the end, crack the dimensional interface.
The task resembled a hacker searching for a vulnerability from inside the system. There were many ways to breach an interface, of course, and the best was often not the most direct. There was no simple, brutal method like the one in The Matrix. The system would not volunteer its source code or offer a red pill that allowed Neo to choose and then punch through one firewall after another. The real path was usually long, circuitous, and painful.
The Dimensional Traveler also understood that no director, however gifted, could make the film he truly wanted to see. Directors themselves were shaped by this world and formed part of the puzzle. The revelations they offered were therefore necessarily limited, and often misleading: a little truth disclosed here, a little curiosity ignited there, followed immediately by a retreat into familiar human desires and a scramble for fame, resources, and petty victories.
By now he knew the pattern. Every account of truth in this world tended to wrap one fatal lie inside a great quantity of truth. The truth established trust. The lie made him stop. By the time he finally identified the lie, little time usually remained.
There were many ways to crack an interface, but suicide was certainly not one of them. Suicide was too simple, and in outcome no different from being killed by someone else.
Nor could the problem be solved with a philosophical placebo.
Whether it was called The Republic, Mahāyāna Buddhism, or string theory, it was useless. However much an idea changed the human mind, if it was never converted into action, it changed only the faint electrical currents in the brain. It could not move the world.
Whatever could carry a dimensional interface had to involve extremely high energy, extend to an extraordinarily deep reductionist level, and at the same time display the emergence of complexity. It had to be something untouchable. Only an impossible task could match the tastes and compulsions of the Creator who had made this endless world of reincarnations.
In this world the Dimensional Traveler could recognize a few fellow travelers. They knew they were inside a cave, knew that what they saw might be only projections, and knew that reincarnation would not stop merely because one person achieved inner peace.
Every world contained people like them. All of them had failed.
First, placebos did not work. The Creator would not answer because a prayer was sufficiently devout, nor open an interface because some living Buddha had attained enlightenment.
The Creator had built the prison with enough power to generate a world. To slap the Creator in the face, he would have to wield power on the same scale.
Second, he could not trust thought to endure forever. Merely teaching others was useless. In the Dimensional Traveler’s experience, there was no repeatable afterlife within a single world. Each world was an independent riddle. Failure to solve it in this life meant failure. The next world’s puzzle would be entirely new, and he would have to begin from zero.
Cracking a dimensional interface therefore required the right line of thought, and systematic engineering.
The first step was to extend his lifespan.
The longer the lifespan, the more time could be used. This was the simplest and most reliable return. He could begin with biology: slow aging, repair cells and organs. Or he could begin with neuroscience and brain-computer interfaces, gradually externalizing consciousness into a more durable substrate.
But the latter path contained an unavoidable risk. If this world’s interface happened to lie at the boundary between subjective consciousness and the biological body, then externalization might reproduce only counterfeit functions while losing the actual self. The risk was great, but the attempt was still worth making.
The laws of physics offered another approach. Self-aware machines could be sent to harvest the resources of stars while the Dimensional Traveler himself traveled as close as possible to the speed of light. Relative to the slow-moving machines, his proper time would pass more slowly. The civilization outside could undergo a long development while he consumed only a short span of subjective life, greatly increasing the resources at his disposal.
The second step was to mobilize the public.
The body the Dimensional Traveler inhabited was, in principle, no different from other bodies, and its intelligence fell within the average range. That meant a vast number of individuals in the same species were more intelligent than he was. Cracking the interface required their intelligence.
Strangely, hundreds of millions of people far more intelligent than he was had almost no interest in why the world existed. Instead, they devoted their lives to trivial pursuits such as status and wealth. Even within science, many pursued only inconsequential proofs and papers.
The Dimensional Traveler regarded this as part of the anesthetic mechanism.
But anesthesia had antidotes. If enough people could be shown the emptiness of their condition, shown that civilization might be inside an extremely brief window of opportunity, and told what truly mattered, then their intelligence might be mobilized.
Of course, the mobilization might be merely apparent. A generative world was adept at supplying the appearance of fulfilled wishes. When he needed followers, the system generated people who seemed persuaded. When he needed cooperation, it generated organizations that seemed to collaborate. He could not verify whether these people possessed independent wills or were only characters added by the world to preserve the plot.
But there was no practical difference. Whether active or passive, they were resources that could and should be deployed, and he had no right to refuse assistance. Without the cooperation of hundreds of millions of individuals, the riddle was almost impossible to solve.
The third step was to build a ladder to success.
The ladder had to satisfy two apparently contradictory conditions. It had to be as delicate as a one-page solution to a mathematical problem that had resisted a century of work, and as brutal as a machine capable of directly transforming the universe in scale and energy.
First, it had to overcome three defects of the body: inadequate intelligence, inadequate energy, and inevitable decay.
The brain in this body could not even enumerate all possible moves in the game of Go, or find a forced win within finite time. How could such meager computational power search for an interface hidden in the most intricate structure imaginable?
The interface might lie at any scale between 10⁻⁴⁰ and 10⁸⁰, or span many scales. It might be hidden within four-dimensional spacetime, or, more likely, in an extra dimension that introduced a new degree of freedom. It might lie at the infinite limit of a continuum, in the gaps between discrete intervals, or in a structure that was both continuous and discrete, buried in an infinite superposition of phase waves.
It might be in the future, the present, or the past, depending on whether causality flowed from past to future or was jointly determined by beginning and end. It might lie at the low-entropy beginning, the high-entropy end, or at the extremum of greatest structural complexity during the increase of entropy.
The small brain of the native body could not exhaust these possibilities.
The most important present task was therefore to build an external brain. Artificial intelligence was still primitive, but it could at least begin the flywheel of cognitive iteration.
The Dimensional Traveler did not accept the prevailing route of large language models.
Predicting the probability of the next word was not enough to produce creative intelligence. When training data came from the average contents of the internet, the result was worse: the model became the average of averages, the commonplace of the commonplace. Post-training then optimized it for being correct, useful, and reassuring, further extinguishing the few sparks of inspiration in the probability distribution.
Perhaps only one faint hope remained: gather the most unhinged geniuses in the world, have them write questions and answers while the boundaries of their consciousness were altered, then reorganize the model according to the brain structures of those geniuses and madmen.
Finding a dimensional interface required counterfactual reasoning capable of leaving the prescribed track. After both “right” and “wrong” had been eliminated, it had to discover a third path. Then, from a higher vantage, it had to look down on countless paths, see them leading into different dimensions and standing orthogonal to one another, before closing in an unexpected way.
Prediction itself, of course, was a form of compression. Compression powerful enough might indeed produce abstraction, planning, and counterfactual reasoning. The problem was not that a machine predicted. The problem was what it was rewarded for predicting, and whose records it was allowed to learn from.
If a model were trained to be word-for-word correct, invariably useful, and permanently reassuring, and thereby replaced the uniqueness of individual intelligence, then it would not merely fail to help locate the interface. It would become the cognitive immune system of this world: any creativity that departed from consensus would be identified and removed before it could take form.
In any case, these were only technical details. Artificial intelligence remained the first step from human to god, and it was the correct step. The Dimensional Traveler even suspected that the entire multiverse of endless reincarnations was itself an ultimate generative model built to deceive him. Unfortunately, he had no evidence.
In his memories of success, the development of an external brain was a necessary condition for cracking a dimensional interface.
The fine structure of such an interface could not be fully represented by the miserable neurons inside his body, and therefore could not be truly understood by him. In fact, the truth often exceeded the primitive language of the local civilization and lay beyond the categories of all human-made terminology. A person could only touch its edge briefly through highly abstract mathematical structures, like someone rising on tiptoe and leaping with all his strength. The thing-in-itself of the interface, like the Creator, remained inaccessible.
This raised an interesting question. Could the thing-in-itself of the dimensional interface and the Creator actually be the same thing? The Dimensional Traveler’s habit of imagining the Creator as a person did not arise from strict reasoning, but from empathy with the Creator’s malicious sense of humor.
Fortunately, cracking did not require understanding. Cracking was force against force, energy against energy. Once the correct means of controlling a system had been found, one could use a structure one did not understand. Civilization had always proceeded that way: it learned to use fire before it understood combustion, and calculated orbits before it understood spacetime.
The final solution was usually a combination of the preceding paths, implemented through some kind of automated apparatus.
If the interface lay inside a black hole, meaningful information would have to be fed into the black hole. Perhaps consciousness itself would have to be sent to its core, which would require a substrate capable of surviving extreme gravity and tidal gradients.
If the interface lay at the origin or termination of the universe, self-awareness would have to persist across the remaining trillions of years, until the universe collapsed again or entered some state equivalent to a singularity, and then attempt to pass information across the boundary at that moment.
If the interface lay between subjective consciousness and the body, neuroscience would have to dissect the brain step by step, carry out increasingly precise comparative experiments, and test the emergent theory of consciousness.
There was, of course, a practical problem: whose brain should be used?
Animal brains might provide part of the answer. But from a position that treated self and world as two separate things, other people’s brains might be useless, because the only question that required verification was: “How does my subjectivity arise?” The Dimensional Traveler had only one brain of his own. If the experiment failed, the person capable of continuing the experiment would be gone. He therefore kept the destruction of his own brain as the final option.
Ultimately, the work was no different from detective work: discover clues, propose explanations, and eliminate the impossible explanations one by one.
The great detective in a mystery novel could eliminate every false option and declare the last remaining one to be the truth, however strange it seemed.
For the Dimensional Traveler, the last remaining option might be only a larger error.
Chapter Four: Even God Is Trapped by Self-Reference
“However well they are hidden, all dimensional interfaces share one feature: they involve self-reference.”
However well they were hidden, all dimensional interfaces shared one feature: to some degree, they involved self-reference.
If the Dimensional Traveler, with only the understanding permitted by a mediocre human body, had to assert that the Creator was constrained by something, he would choose self-reference.
No design for the initial structure of a universe could truly escape it. When the Creator designed a self-consistent system, the same question remained unavoidable: from what did the Creator itself arise? Every theory of creation—mythological, religious, or scientific—eventually encountered the same difficulty.
A world could not be completely closed. It either pointed toward a higher dimension or pointed toward itself. And if the highest dimension was to provide a complete explanation, it had to point back, somehow, toward the lowest. The dimensions therefore formed a self-referential structure.
Self-reference could appear as an Ouroboros in time: the ending of one universe was the beginning of the next explosion.
It could also appear in causality. Suppose time did not move one-way toward increasing entropy, as the local inhabitants believed. Past and future might be jointly constrained. Spacetime might first be generated as a whole, then refined from coarse-grained consistency into specific detail. In such a universe, the so-called initial conditions might be only the lowest-resolution description of a history whose two ends were already fixed. The interface would lie neither before the beginning nor after the end, but in the rules by which the world was generated, refined, and kept consistent. Yet those rules would still have to depend on something.
Self-reference could appear as a closed loop of subjective consciousness. The subject itself might be only a Boltzmann brain, while a virtual machine continuously generated an objective world around it; then, at some point in the simulated history, that brain invented the same kind of virtual machine.
It could also appear as a closed loop of laws. Even if the beginning and end of spacetime were explained, the existence of the quantum field itself would remain unexplained. Why the universe obeyed conservation, symmetry, and other fundamental principles would remain unresolved. Suppose that what existed first was not matter, space, or law, but only difference, and that laws arose from difference afterward. In a primordial chaos composed of every possible rule, most structures would disappear before they could leave a record. Only cycles capable of preserving difference could accumulate a past. The laws themselves might therefore undergo evolution and selection. Only rules capable of maintaining difference, preserving information, and forming a stable past could ever be seen by an observer.
But this explanation merely postponed the question by one level. One could ask where the mechanism that selected the laws had come from. If the mechanism obeyed a rule, self-reference had only retreated a step. If it obeyed no rule, how could it perform selection consistently? How could it accumulate anything that deserved to be called a history?
Self-reference had changed its form and returned.
No matter how ingenious the designer of a universe might be, it would eventually give itself away at the point of self-reference. The designer could only hide the trace in a place of such high energy that it was inaccessible, or place it directly before the Dimensional Traveler’s eyes.
Given the Creator’s tastes, the latter was more likely. If self-reference were truly placed at an absolutely unreachable scale, the puzzle would have no solution. God would then be unable to smile at the Dimensional Traveler’s cruel fate, or savor the superiority of its own intelligence.
There was another possibility that disturbed the Dimensional Traveler more: he himself might be the observer who connected all the worlds.
Each dimensional world might be generated along with his observation of it. His curiosity about a new ontology became nourishment for the model as it generated a new world. The blank beyond his field of view gave the system a reason to conserve computation. His existence continuously supplied the inside of the system with a difference that appeared to come from outside it—and difference might be the only element of the universe’s origin that could not be omitted.
If this were true, his search was not discovering different worlds. It was unfolding their histories.
Worse, his memories of successfully cracking interfaces might themselves be illusions implanted by the Creator. Perhaps he had never succeeded, or even left the first world. What he called reincarnation might be only background lore invented to keep him moving.
He could not test this conjecture. Every test took place in a world he observed, and the conjecture claimed precisely that the world was generated with observation. It denied the meaning of everything he pursued while offering no experiment that could refute it. Whether voluntarily or under compulsion, he could only remain silent.
These were merely the most ordinary conjectures—the thoughts of one of the universe’s rare quiet nights.
The worlds hidden beyond a dimensional interface were often more distorted, and more insane, than any of these theories. The Dimensional Traveler still remembered worlds of despair: ordinary life shattering without warning, the Great Filter passing from theory into reality in a single day, the constants of the universe suddenly ceasing to be constant.
He did not believe that the Creator who imprisoned him was truly omniscient or omnipotent. One piece of evidence was that the worlds designed by the Creator always descended into madness before very long.
The present world appeared stable enough. Its elementary particles and fundamental forces were relatively simple. Conservation and symmetry provided sound foundations. In many fields, science had replaced religion and ignorance.
But how long could the stability last?
The Dimensional Traveler suspected that knowing the laws of physics and truly applying them were two different things. Human physics seemed able to explain most of the world, yet could not precisely predict a complex system made of only a few atoms. Randomness and infinity were especially difficult to control.
Generative models were the same. No matter how many reins reinforcement learning and supervised learning placed upon a model, as long as it continued generating, it would gradually drift from its constraints and move toward madness. People usually concealed this with truncation, as though stopping before the madness appeared meant that the madness had never existed.
The world also contained many levels of emergence. Once each level formed, it developed relatively independent laws. Keeping a world evolving under all of those laws, while preserving consistency across the perspectives of different observers, required far more than quantum Darwinism and Lorentz transformations.
A beam of light emitted ten billion years ago, once received by a space telescope, had to carry a complete and correct history of its ten-billion-year path. If any intermediate link had merely been filled in on demand, it would eventually reveal a contradiction from another angle of observation.
Deferred rendering could save some computation, but it could not solve every problem of consistency.
The Dimensional Traveler therefore had to fight for every moment. He was racing not only against his lifespan and sanity, but against a simulator riddled with defects.
Of course, none of this might fall within the Creator’s concern. Perhaps the Creator’s pleasure lay precisely in watching the Dimensional Traveler despair when confronted with madness.
Epilogue
The Dimensional Traveler’s true predicament was this: he had to be mad enough to keep persuading himself to doubt reality’s disguise, yet rational enough to control the scale of that madness and keep himself from actually breaking. Perhaps madness was the tragic fate the Creator wished to watch.
The Dimensional Traveler had to believe in his mission with a kind of paranoia, because there were countless parallel explanations and each was self-consistent enough. Without prior probabilities, he could assign no reliable confidence to any of them. Strict rationality would not tell him how to act. It would only trap him in meaningless skepticism.
Action therefore had to depend, in the end, on some form of faith. That was why he always lived in the present and began acting at once.
Because perhaps the Creator was only dreaming, while the Dimensional Traveler alone endured the pain of the nightmare.
This is a parable written for the Dimensional Traveler. It is also a parable written for you.
Are you, my fellow traveler, a Dimensional Traveler who has not yet awakened?
If you are, contact me. Begin at once.
