MPJ

After the longest minute of my life I finally regained my senses and rationality back and more importantly ability to speak. Well sort of. At the moment all I came up with was few incoherent words.

"I.. I'm.. Also glad..  To meet you. Phil?"

The initial fear and tremble started to fade out so I went to my desk and sit on the chair. The orb followed and kept the same distance.

"I am sure you have a lot of questions for me?"

"Well.. For starters you could tell me who you really are? And.. What is the meaning of all this? I mean, what happened five years ago.." - I was trying to remember all the questions I had after I woke up that morning and found the orb on the clock table next to my bad. But now all the new ones started to form in my mind and I was pretty confused. The orb definitely saw it on my face.

"It was five years for you but where I came from time is something entirely different. It was just a moment ago for me." - Phil gave me couple of seconds to sink in and then continued. "In my plain of existence, I am a student, just like you." - The orb made a slight position change and proceed. "But let's back to your conversation with your father couple of minutes ago, it would be best for you to understand if we start from there."

"Yes.. You said he was right. You mean two dimensional bubble around the universe is real. We are made of holographic particles reflected by our true selves from the balloon surface?

"Yes and no." - Phil continued to flicker in all colors while speaking. "The bubble exists all right, but it is created in four dimensional reality. The only thing is that dimensions are not all proportional. One of them is larger than the others and one is really tiny, speaking in physics terms. They are designed in that way in order to cast three dimensional objects inside the bubble. Everything here in this universe is actually a three dimensional shadow from the bubble surrounding it. Or to be precise, every four dimensional object in the bubble is actively casting it's own representation inhere."

"But how this casting really work...." - There was so many information for a high school student in just couple of sentences and only now I realized I missed the premise. "Wait. You said designed? Created? By whom?"

"By me, of course."

At this point it occurred to me two more explanations of all this. It's either I finally went 100% crazy and this was my first hallucination or somebody is pranking me with some cool magic trick. I was about to announce to my new friend here that first option is more likely but he promptly continued.

"I am not God or anything like it, if you are thinking about it right now. Look at it this way, you here developed complex computers with ability to render equally complex simulation. This is very similar. Where I came from, we use, sort of analogue computational devices capable to create sub-dimensional environments. We utilized those machines for education. This is one of them and there are many more. Just like I hinted five years ago, this is similar to those zero-player games you are probably familiar with. I created only initial states of the three-dimensional universe and the rest came out from it by evolutionary steps. The best about it is that I can monitor what happens in snapshots. The time in the bubble is set to be very fast comparing to my end."

The voice sounded excited while explaining. I took it as a sign of his character as a student who is still learning exciting things. I know I was no different either.

"But to answer your second question, casting is possible because the energy needed to cast objects from four-dimensional bubble into three-dimensional interior is coming from.."

"Fifth dimension!" - I interrupted way more enthusiastically then him before. "The origin must be one dimension higher! You are fifth dimensional being!"

"Exactly right. Two of two."

"Amazing! I saw once Carl Sagan's interpolation of the tesseract from 4D into its shadow in 3D. This is just like it, except we are talking now about a live universe who gave birth to life!"

"Not exactly."

"What do you mean?"

"It's not live. Actually, not a single universe in any simulations I've heard about ever succeeded with emerging life by their own."

"But.. All the life here on Earth.. How?"

"I created the model to assign sentient driver to every object who's born naturally or artificially within the system."

"Sentient driver?"

"Something similar to the artificial intelligence from your world. Much complicated though."

"So, my conscience as everybody's in the universe is just a software part of your bubble computer.. What about free will?"

"There is no such thing. Biologically or otherwise. Free will is just an illusion coming from vast number of variables. But don't take it inferiorly. In my world, sentient drivers are equal in complexity to the real life, if real life is what I am supposed to be.. Actually nobody believes that even we could not be sentient drivers either. We could also be shadows of upper-dimensions as well. Life as it seems is as much as mystery as it is here."

I found my way back to the chair. I certainly didn't expect anything like it. This really is the game, only we are all non-player characters in Phil's zero-player game that even he cannot deviate from the course of artificial evolution. Or can he? After all he is talking with me from fifth dimension in real time. The orb must be anomaly of some kind. A back door to his own simulation.

"I know what are you thinking right now. And you can relax. I cannot read sentient minds, you are on your own. That's for sure. While I can project objects like this orb inside the simulation I cannot affect evolutionary steps or to interfere with driver's actions. Not that it's forbidden or anything. It's just impossible by it's nature. I can project a dream or two here and there but this is not influencing the system with much significance. If at all..." - Phil made a significant pause here. I could tell by the light and the glowing vanished for a long second. I couldn't describe exactly how but when it came back the feeling it radiated changed. "The thing is that this is my first educational project and I shouldn't interfere in any ways. But overtime I grown attached to this entire space it was created. It is really beautiful in more ways than you can imagine..."

"Why then? Why are you do it? Why talking to me?" - The only question left at that point remained floating in the air and I was little afraid to raise it.

"Why me?"

Phil rotated and the glow transformed into recognizable patterns. Images started to form on the orb's surface and change from one to another in a fast snapshot fashion. Some I recognized from the history lessons, others were unfamiliar and futuristic. Some looked alien but beautiful nevertheless. Then it returned to the regular form.

"Because..."

The orb floated a foot closer.

"...I need your help."

I guess my sentient mind wasn't programmed to reply to this in any ways so I just cluelessly stared at Phil and his three blue shivering nodes and his smooth surface glowing in all colors I was familiar with and some I imagined to see for the first time.

"I want you to help me to save the universe." 

Sometimes after lunch my father and I enjoyed talking about different things and on many occasions we exchanged opinions about science fiction, movies and mysteries of the universe. That warm October day was no different.

"You gotta be kidding!" - I was inspecting my father's face in search for any hint of a concealed smile that would explain a joke he was telling me. "There is a two dimensional balloon surrounding our universe where real life is located and the 3D cosmos inside a balloon is just a holographic illusion? You are saying that you and me are flat as two pieces of paper, actually living at the end of the universe and all these here are just holograms?" - For some reason I was unusually irritated by the silly physics. Although, on the other hand, if cosmology was not that strange to begin with, we wouldn't have that many great sci-fi shows and movies... "So, we are made of... What exactly.. Light? Energy?"

He smiled. "Holographic particles. It's not a joke. Real science. A valid theory at least. Take black holes for instance, they are still a big mystery.. If Hawking was right, any black hole no matter how massive would evaporate over time. When that happens all the information swallowed inside would be lost. The problem is that quantum dynamics is clear about it - nothing, especially information, can ever be lost.. They say that information could be located somewhere else." - He paused to allow the words to sink in.

I don't know how to explain... 

I mean people have vivid dreams for sure. My best friend told me about his dream just the other day and boy... It was real horror story and it had everything, amazing heroes, real twisted villain and so much details with action to the level that even Stephen King would not be ashamed of.

But me.. I don't know. It's so strange... 

My dreams have left me. Five years ago I had my last dream. Ever since then it's blank. The nights are just restful and uneventful. There's no remembering in the morning. And I am not sure that last dream was even a dream. Hell.. I know it was not a dream. I know because it is still here. In my room. 

The orb.

The strangest thing is that it's still glowing. But even more peculiar about it is that I am the only one who sees it. The glowing I mean. The orb is not noticeable otherwise by anybody who visited my room. Except for my father, I saw him once taking it in his hands and inspecting it like it had some special meaning to him. Maybe because he was in my dream too. After all, he was the one who told me in the dream that life is just a game of some sort. He was the one who gave me the orb.

"Where did you get this orb from? It looks little familiar.. Old too." - He asked me while rotating it and examining its perfect grey curve but seemingly not noticing the glaringness from one of the blue bulges carved on top of it.

"Ahem.. You don't you see it?"

"See what?"

"The blue node.. Do you.. Do you find anything unusual about it?"

He turned the orb and had a closer look to all three nodes but I could tell he's not seeing anything unusual and extraordinary.

"The curvature is perfect and it does look too heavy." - He put it back on the small dresser next to the clock where it was. "What is it anyway?"

"Just a decoration.. Somebody gave it to me for my birthday on Sunday." - I answered and turned in hope he didn't see my disappointed expression. I never told him about the dream and the glowing orb. I never told anybody about it. I was afraid back then.

After five years the fear was different. Instead I was afraid for my sanity. After all the dreamless years I was starting to believe I was going crazy. But from the bottom of my soul.. I don't know. All my rationality was telling me that there was more to the story. It's just a feeling telling me to wait. Telling me that the fear is irrational. Telling me that a new dream is coming.

I couldn't be more wrong...

Continues in Revelation of Life - Phil

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire 

Since time immemorial, scientific thought did not flow in a straight line. It was full of retrograde motion and ups and downs and many theories were debunked along the way. Take for instant Einstein’s static universe or theory about existence of small planet in the orbit between Mercury and the Sun. On the other hand, illusions originated in our brains were not uncommon either. For the biggest example, we are all aware that weirdly huge Moon right next to the horizon is coming strait from the trickery of our mind. But what about time? It is definitely something we are taking for granted for a vary long time. Could it be both, construct of our own brain and yet based on something more fundamental and still waiting for better understanding?


The time from our daily experience, feels very much real. We are living in it's present state and it flows inevitably forward to the uncertain future and thanks to our memories and factual evidence all around us it came from the certain past. If we bring the physics to the help, the future state of the universe is as it seems and thanks to current understanding fully dependent of the previous state, energy, speed and direction of its every component down to the smallest particle or energy unit or whatever is the most fundamental object of the universe. The current mainstream science agrees with Einstein who presented time as a mere fourth coordinate of the three dimensional space we are living in.

However and by all we know today, we could imagine an incredibly powered computer capable of predicting any future state of the universe just by knowing current state of all fundamentals within. In simple words if we know that two particles are going to collide our futuristic computer could accurately predict what happens after the collision based on direction, energy, speed and all the properties of the two particles. Or energy waves. Or strings. Or whatever. Now, if that same engine is the one governing the entire universe, it could easily render the next state of existence and pretty much everything what will happen in the future. And not only that it could render all the states of the universe in the future - it could store them all in so called block universe that contains everything that has ever happened and will happen at any time and at any place. In such solution, the time would only be changing states of the block universe from one render to another.


In this kind of philosophy of time, all states of predefined or pre-calculated universe we could call present. There is no past or the future. Instead, the present state simply constantly changes. Or simply the past, present and future all exist - and are equally real. To paraphrase physicist Max Tegmark from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the analogy could be the disc with a two hours long movie. If we are watching the movie we would need that two hours to pass and yet the entire movie is stored at that one disc. Every single scene of it is there at once and we could go forward or rewind to each scene and the moment of perceiving them would always be the present.

Now, if the block universe is what we are living in, could we go fast forward to the future render or rewind back to some point in history snapshot? In this alternative of what we recognize as time travel, could we make changes and would it force the universe to recalculate and re-render everything that this particular changes affect from that point forward? It's easy to imagine that even the small information leaked from one present frame to another could cause the ripple and the need for new rendering of countable percentage of the block universe depending to the degree of the change.


How we, conscious minds living within the block universe, experience time would be just an illusion. What we know as yesterday, today or tomorrow would all be the same, encoded snapshots of one universe govern by the fundamentals on the microscopic level we are all made of. It's sure hard to accept this possibility as the one of the feasible solutions to the grand understanding of everything considering the fact that everything is already determined and that the free will is only apparent due to enormous number of variables. On the other hand we are already living in the weird world according to all we know today that we are taking for granted. For instance, consider the time needed the light to come from your loved ones standing just next to you and the time needed the brain to process the image captured in your eyes into neural network of your brain - what you are actually seeing is already in the past. Few fraction of nanoseconds but the past it is. What we think of the present, it could be something else entirely.

At the very end, and to jump from scientific philosophy to science fiction, exploring the idea of living in the block universe with possibility to travel back to earlier memory and keep original timeline memory stream intact would be extraordinary to say the least. Yesterday I finished reading 'Recursion', a novel by Blake Crouch that is centered to this very idea. Without spoiling anything further I'd just say that my entire review to the Amazon's page was: "Where's the sixth star?" 

Image refs:
https://plus.maths.org/content/why-not-block-time
https://www.syfy.com/syfywire/.../blake-crouch-on-his-wild-new-thriller
https://www.healththoroughfare.com/science/.../first-time-machine/

Science refs:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-04558-7

It was early December of a remarkably warm autumn in Alexandria. The year of 185 was going to expire soon and Hero felt that the next one would be the most challenging in his entire life. He turned 15 today and was at the very end of his first master class in the Great Library. Hero was fluent in several languages even before he entered his teenage years and he knew that Alexandria had to be his next stop a day after he read Ptolemaîos' Almagest, the scroll he had lucky to stumble with in Antioch's atheneum.

Today and after two years in the campus he knew that he was at the crossroads. Earlier this morning Hero realized the passion he shared toward the imperial history and the stories from the past was taking the toll with every passing day and the time has come for the next step. Here, laying on the small carpet just outside southern city walls and watching the starry sky he made a definite decision. As soon as his course is finished he would start traveling the world with his own papyrus and quill. The Rome first. All roads lead there anyway.

"Here's our birthday boy!" - He heard Cassius' hulking baritone from the dune next to his. Hero waved him back little embarrassingly. He didn't try to avoid his best friend tonight - just needed couple of hours alone time to summarize the past year on his own.

"What's wrong with the Pharos promenade? Everybody went there tonight. The Greeks have a new play at the beach theater, you know.. Come on Hero, it's your day today! There is nothing wrong with a little fun, once in a while." - Cassius and Lucia appeared behind him with a bottle of wine and three cups.

"The fire is too bright. I can't see Mars from the beach." - Hero said and moved to make room for the couple. He was the youngest pupil in the class and Cassius was nearly seven years older but their minds were almost the same age with the same interests and plans for going to Rome next year. Lucia was probably the smartest girl in the class and Hero was always little envious of Cassius for dating her.

Lucia poured the wine, mixed it with warm water and salted with pinch of sea salt each. "It's Cass' grandfather's." - she said. "The best wine you can try anywhere in Bithynia and all eastern Mediterraneum."

Cassius raised the wine, touched Hero's shoulder and with an initial cough said: "To the Herodian of Antioch, future citizen of Rome and the youngest public servant in the history of the empire. May the ink he always carries in his left pocket never dries!"

"Thank you Cass." Hero said with boyish smile. "I know I wouldn't be here without your support. I owe you big time. To our friendship!" He raised his cup and sipped a long gulp. The wine was sweet and had a delicious taste but he knew well enough what more than one cup of this could do to him. After all he entered his manhood only yesterday, so to speak. He glimpsed the southern Alexandrian walls. "It's difficult to leave this place. It's amazing that this city even exists. I know there's no such extraordinary place like this anywhere in the world and I mean people more than anything else."

They emptied their cups and sat on Hero's carpet facing south toward the invisible horizon. The darkness was not complete, spoiled by faint city lights and grand lighthouse fire on the north but enough to provide the full greatness of the active heavens above their heads.

"So you are here because of Mars?" Lucia needed only second to find the bright reddish dot just dozen of angles titled to the left. "What's so special about Mars tonight Hero?"

Hero produced a piece of papyrus showing complex curve with his observation of the planet. Every dot he sketched accompanied the date of the observation. "I come here once a week in the past two years trying to understand the motion. It's amazing.. It's almost like Mars is determined to reach the horizon this year. Look. She was here two months ago, then took little retrograde motion to the back and then furiously returned to the initial path. It's like... I don't know.. She did that exact motion two years ago but not last year. Her path was completely different last December. I am trying to understand what's causing her to..."

"Her?" Cassius interrupted. "You know that this particular planet is named after the god of war himself?" He chuckled strangely. "There is nothing feminine and gentle in that bloody wandering star of yours. Just hints of future wars.. Mars was always a bad portent. The scrolls are full of it."

"Cassius, you know you're an idiot sometimes, don't you?" Lucia looked at him in the way many teachers from the astronomy class addressed superstition and myths. "Even centurions don't believe that anymore."

"Yes they do." He replied and gazed a long look up. It was obvious he was not entirely conformable about the religious folk tales and legends but his scholar mind couldn't push the mystery behind. "So you think Mars is headed for the horizon? Where exactly?"

Hero consulted his sketch for a second and pointed. "Right about th..."

In that same moment when his finger pointed the sky, a faint dot on the horizon started rapidly to glow and in less than a second became twice as big as Venus and much brighter, twinkling and shining in different colors but mostly orange and white.

Lucia screamed.

They stood up slowly and for a long moment were frozen in time. In the absence of the Moon that particular night the night sky was surreal. It seemed like the newcomer stole the sky from the rest of the stars standing right there ominously waiting.

Apparently with Mars silently heading toward it.

A light breeze came out of nowhere and they all felt the chill. Cassius was first to react.

"You still don't believe in bad omens?"

Sooner or later computation hardware and artificial intelligence algorithms will inevitably reach the point of enough sophistication that creation of a simulation of enormous proportions, for example the size of entire universe, will be effortless. So to speak. These gods-like engineers of such future simulation will indeed face a decision point regarding which degree of limitation to create for their simulated entities or artificial intelligence units in order for them to never reach the point of finding the proof that their world is in fact nothing more than just a series of electrical or optical currents of one inconceivably powerful futuristic computer.

It doesn't happen often that after reading a book you can compare most of the places and some of the portrayed characters with real sites and buildings along with real protagonists from the historical story. Actually, this never happened to me before and after I've reached the last cover of 'Beneath a Scarlet Sky', a novel written by Mark Sullivan, published in 2017 I saw the rare opportunity of visiting the city where it all happened and where all the sites still stand today. Not much later and after my entire family read the novel or at least got familiar with the story, we packed our backpacks and hit the road. In the aftermath, the result is this blog post along with embedded video story as a documentary of the half a day walking tour of Milan in Italy where everything happened more than 70 years ago. In the spirit of a fair warning I advise you to read the book first before watching the video since it might spoil the reading for you or to wait for upcoming series or movie with Tom Holland in the lead role.


The novel is based on a true story of an Italian teenager Pino Lella, who lived in Milan during the second world war and within the last two years until the very end of the WW2, helped many Jewish people to escape to Switzerland over the Alps and in the final year to act as a spy for freedom fighters while being a personal driver for general Hans Leyers, Adolf Hitler’s left hand in northern Italy. Pino survived all the horrors of the war and the Nazi occupation and deeply fell in love with Anna, a girl he met on the streets of Milan on the day of the first bombing of the city. He constantly dreamed about the future they would one day share.

This book tour would not be possible at all without fantastic Valeria Andreoli from BellaMilano who guided us throughout Milan beautifully almost five full hours! It was amazing to mix the real streets, all the buildings, the castle and the cathedral, hotels, the train station and even the monumental cemetery with our vividly built images of all the places we already formed from the book and Mark Sullivan's amazing narrative.


Undoubtedly, spending three days in Milan for us provided lots of more opportunities for visiting the history back to the time all the way to Leonardo da Vinci. Around the year of 1482, he moved to Milan to work for the duke of Milan, Ludovico Sforza as an engineer, sculptor, painter and architect. Until 1499 when Milan was invaded by the French he left behind the 'Last Supper', a famous mural painting of Jesus and twelve apostles, many paintings including 'The Virgin of the Rocks', Milan's Narvigly, the system of navigable canals to ferry people and merchandise in and out of the city, 'Leonardo`s horse', uncompleted equestrian sculpture and many more.

We were especially interested in Leonardo's engineering projects and his machines, models and sketches displayed in 'Museo Nazionale Scienza e Tecnologia - Leonardo da Vinci' and within new exhibition dedicated to this amazing man called 'Leonardo3' stationed in 'Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II', another Milan's landmark from 19th century. This second video log of Viktor's shows a glimpse of what we managed to visit and learn.


(Un)expectedly, at the end of our first visit to this great city, we have left with many more footage from what we initially planned to make with Pino Lella's and Leonardo's stories. All these are now packed in this third video embedded above and if you like to see more of Valeria and stories hidden behind Leonardo's paintings, especially the ones he did in the Sforza castle, if you want to learn what you need to do if you are in search for a good luck charm during your first visit to the legendary 19th century shopping mall or if you are eager to check out one great Italian restaurant along with couple of more places we managed to visit, this is the video definitely worth clicking to.

As for us, I am more than sure that Milan definitely didn't see us wandering its streets for the last time. The rest of Italy too.

The book references:
https://bellamilanotours.com/footsteps-pino-lella/
https://marksullivanbooks.com/

Beneath a Scarlet Sky:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32487617-beneath-a-scarlet-sky (en)
https://www.newtoncompton.com/libro/lultimo-eroe-sopravvissuto (it)
https://www.knjizare-vulkan.rs/istorijski-roman/44294-pod-grimiznim-nebom (srb)

Museums:
https://www.museoscienza.org/en
http://www.leonardo3.net/en/

Coincidentally, around the end of the first three "Star Wars" movies the time of my high school days begun. That meant, among other things, that the distance from my home to the new school building drastically increased, along with my everyday's commute time back and forth. If I decided to avoid the bus in the morning, it would take me about 30 minutes of leisurely walking to get there. In regards to today's story, it was half an hour of one of the kind entertainment I was enjoying on more than several occasions. Walking toward the school, I was mounting my state of the art Sony Walkman on my belt loaded with one of my favorite cassettes and listening audio recordings from "Star Wars" trilogy.


I am not talking about official movie soundtrack - it was the audio cassette of the entire film only without acting and dialogues. Just two hours of background orchestra coverage created by John Williams and performed by the London Symphony Orchestra. I wrote more about those days in post Science Fiction and even though it sounded nerdy and strange from today's perspective, it was one of those happy memories from my teenage days.