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Reality of Double-Slit Experiment

More than two hundred years have passed since Thomas Young performed the famous double-slit experiment as a demonstration of the wave behavior of visible light, and still its revelation has puzzled our sanity ever since. In short, if we shoot a beam of light at a panel with two small slits (less than a millimeter apart), the photons—elementary particles that light is made of—have to figure out how to get through the slits to radiate out the other side. If they are truly particles, like in the macro world, they would project a solid image of two piles on the background wall behind the slits. If they travel similar to the waves, like water does in the macro world, the image would resemble a wave-like interference pattern: alternating locations, equidistantly spaced, where particles leave a mark on the wall.

Thanks to the outcome of the experiment, we know that light is capable of doing both. It always travels in a wavelike fashion, even if we shoot photons in a row towards slits, one after another. The quantum mechanics explanation is that photons are in superposition, meaning they can exist in different states and even multiple places at the same time. The weirdness comes 'only' if we try to tag particles with pass-through detectors in order to detect which slit they are choosing to go through. At that instant, they break superposition and continue to travel as macro-objects, just like bullets.


This is very similar to the coin flipping or well-known Schrödinger's cat from the macroworld analogy. If we use quantum terminology, these two are in a simple binary superposition; they both have only two outcomes, the coin ending either head or tail or the cat's version being either dead or alive. Superposition in a double-slit experiment is way more complex as far for the photons being in multiple places at the same time between the slits and the detection wall.

However, the weirdness is only present at the quantum level of the microworld, and in the case of light in the double-slit phenomenon, the puzzle is not the nature of how light travels but rather why it behaves the way it does in the moment of being observed. Certainly, it creates profound questions for which we still have no definite answers. The most interesting one is, did we find the puzzle here that shows us how nature really works? What is the reality behind the engine in the quantum world? More important is even the question: is this reality objective throughout the universe, or is it subjective and created for the observer only?


Let's think about the reality problem for the moment first. This behavior of breaking superposition for the sake of the observer is very reminiscent of graphically demanding video games in which the reality is never objective—the scenes are always rendered for the gamer's sensory inputs. If you play those kinds of games and decide to enter a closed room through the door, the room and everything in it don't exist at all until you open the door. Only then does the CPU start creating it for you, and there's a certain superposition of the room and your actions in it that breaks to only one outcome, depending on what you do.

Now, double-slit is too complex to test it this way, but binary superposition could be simple enough to create in the lab in quantum equivalent and monitor what happens. This is what the experiment made by Massimiliano Proietti and his team at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh tried to perform on a small-scale quantum computer made up of three pairs of entangled photons. The idea is to experimentally test Wigner's thought experiment of an observer of the quantum outcome being also observed by a second observer. The resulting statements of the two observers are that their interpretations of the outcome contradict each other. The same happens in the lab, with entangled photons in the role of non-conscious observers—the inequality in the data is definitely violated, which points in the direction that quantum mechanics might indeed be incompatible with the assumption of objective facts. To put it simply, multiple observers of the same event can have different outcomes as the process in superposition breaks in different patterns. Just like in video games, the reality of nature could also be subjective and rendered for the observer's eyes only.


Of course this raises more questions, and the main one is what observation and observer really mean. In quantum mechanics, an observation is defined as the interaction of two quantum states that can collapse each other’s probability wave function. In one way or another, this also means that by observing something, we disturb it to the point of ruining the process we are trying to understand. If we add a philosophical point of view, we can also ask ourselves, Does consciousness play a role in the observation process? There's an interesting philosophical thought experiment starting with the question, "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" followed by "Can something exist without being perceived by consciousness?"

Well, if you ask me, consciousness or not, if we go this path with reflection to the original double-slit experiment, it is all going toward the direction that the unobserved world only exists in a sort of superposition state, all possibilities of all possible outcomes only waiting for an observer to disrupt it to the point of the ultimate collapse as the result of the reaction between the two processes and the observer. The light is no different; its wave-like behavior is its own superposition only waiting for somebody to play with. Preferably with lasers and Lego cubes, just like in the above YouTube video. Science is fun, perhaps because it is so mysterious from occasion to occasion. I know I had tons of fun creating this video with my son a couple of years ago. Please find more stories within the physics thread of the blog in the below link.

Strange world of physics at MPJ:
https://www.mpj.one/search/label/physics

Science refs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h75DGO3GrF4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wigner%27s_friend
https://phys.org/news/2019-11-quantum-physics-reality-doesnt.html
https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.05080
 

Norse Valkyrie vs Slavic Vila

It is hard to pinpoint the exact period in human history when the religiosity we are all familiar with today emerged and started to form itself with all of the colorful myths, supernatural stories, vivid deities, and numerous superpowered entities. It happened probably at some point around 10,000 BC in the same period of time when humans slowly progressed from being pure hunters and gatherers into the next stage of civilization and started to build modern settlements with domesticated animals and cultivated plants. No doubt, religiosity, superstition, and spiritualism existed all the way from the beginning in history when our ancestors started to paint cave walls, but only the Neolithic revolution and the invention of agriculture gave us enough free time to start daydreaming and to think outside pure survival. If we compare all previous beliefs with vignettes, we can safely say that the evolution of religiosity after Neolithic revolution began to fill volumes of graphic novels.


According to the theory, slowly after the beginning of the Holocene period, the first large prehistoric population of Eurasia that spoke Proto-Indo-European languages was formed. They were the ancestor of Indo-European languages and the source of Proto-Indo-European mythology, from which all pagan religions arose in different areas of Europe and Asia. This is why we can easily compare different deities and see all the similarities they inherited from the proto-times. Take, for example, gods of lightning, thunder, and weather in general. The deity of these properties emerged in all different mythologies, and Norse Thor, Greek Zeus, Roman Jupiter, Slavic Perun, Hindu Indra, Hurrian Tar, Hittite Tarḫunna, and many others were no doubt based on a Proto-Indo-European deity called Perkwunos.

The similarities do not end with the deities but also with other colorful characters from old myths. Last week I stumbled upon one amazing piece of art in Churchill Park at Kastellet citadel in Copenhagen. It was a 114-year-old sculpture of Valkyrie by famous Norwegian artist Stephan Sinding. It was probably the best 3D/live action street art I have ever seen before. It reflects everything about what Valkyrie really is in old Norse mythology. The word literally means "chooser of the slain", and it is portraying a female figure guiding the souls of deceased Nordic soldiers either to Fólkvangr, Freyja's afterlife, or to Valhalla, Odin's immortality hall. Old Norse literature describes valkyries either as purely supernatural or as human maidens with certain supernatural powers. Both types of beings were associated with honesty, splendor, and gold, but also with bloodshed and brutality in battle.


In South Slavic mythology, a similar being, vila, represents a female supernatural being who is sympathetic to people, but she could also be vengeful and brutal. She is depicted as an extremely beautiful girl with golden hair, dressed in long, flowing robes, and armed usually with bows and arrows. She exists on a liminal plane between nature and culture, between gods and humans, constantly travelling between one realm and the other to interact with the heroes and villains of the epics. Even though both Valkyries and Vilas developed in different religious environments, it is hard not to spot various similarities between the two. The whiteness and glowing quality of the vilas is mirrored in the description of the valkyries and both figures are to be found in the sky in most of their depictions with connection to lightning and thunder.*

The warrior aspects of the Valkyrie are unquestionable; they are "vowed to war", and their role is primarily on the battlefield. The mythical Viles are similarly portrayed and often described as wearing armor with bows and arrows and envisioned as powerful, supernatural warriors. There are convincing resemblances in regards to the connection between Viles and Valkyries and heroes in the epics. Most often this relationship is a warrior bond, but this relationship can become both sexual and malicious. Just as a vila can manipulate heroes or villains to murder those of her choosing, so too the valkyries are reputed to play deadly games with the heroes with whom they associate.*


Although the nature of the valkyries' flight is portrayed as a magical ride on horseback, whereas the vile most often fly unmounted with the use of bird wings, it is not uncommon for the vile to ride horses or deer. Both, Viles and Valkyries, are often described as gathering in groups within the epics and referring to each other as sisters. It is fair to suggest that the Valkyrie and the Vila are rooted in the same figure; their differences lie only within the cultural differences between the Slavs and the Germanic peoples. Perhaps the most likely attestable age of the two figures lies back to the 6th century CE, when the south Slavic tribes were still located in the North of Europe.*

From there, we could push the date back even further to the time of Proto-Indo-European times, especially if we extend this comparison to apsarā, beings with similar traits from Indian religion and mythology. The various trios of birth-fate-death-associated women in Greek and Roman folklore also appear to originate from the same source. The direct ancestor of Valkyries is most likely Proto-Germanic walakuzjǭ, which stands for walaz (battle wound) +‎ kuzą (choice, decision).


Historical origins of Vilas include the various traditions, especially Celtic, Slavic, Germanic, English, and French folklore. The word 'vilenski' was used as an adjective, meaning "enchanted", but also became a generic term for various enchanted creatures during the late Middle English period. Nevertheless, the proto-origin is no doubt the same as the Valkyrie's and south Slavic versions, especially in the Middle Ages. Serbia survived even Christianizing the old beliefs and ended in colorful epics and poems of the 14th century and later. Although, to be perfectly fair and precise, the mythological Vilas from the oldest myths and tales and the folklorized one in epics and poems are somewhat different in a way that folklore is centered on human affairs, heroes, battles, and supernatural beings only serve as a side story, so to speak.

Always, when I am reading or writing about old myths and tales, I can't help but wonder how one comparison would be of a typical religious person from the old times and today. It seems to me that old stories were much more colorful and picturesque than the ones from the religious beliefs of a singular god. Even a small thing like a simple walk through the woods would be different for somebody in BC times for the simple fact that, from all they knew, not only natural plants and animals could be found there. For many, the forest behind the house could also be a magical gateway to the supernatural world, and even the smallest unexplained event of natural behavior (like a methane leak or weird animal demeanor) could be immediately linked to the supernatural. But this sounds like a nice topic for another story.


Image refs:
https://vrallart.com/artworks/milos-marko_i_vila/
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Richard_Dadd...Yellow_Sands.jpg
https://www.saatchiart.com/...The-Valkyries

* A Treatise on the South Slavic Vila by Dorian Jurić 
https://macsphere.mcmaster.ca/bitstream/11375/9407/1/fulltext.pdf
This article contains quotes/paraphrases from Dorian's theses

Goddess Zhiva (MPJ story):
https://www.mpj.one/2018/08/goddess-zhiva.html

Serbian Vampires (MPJ story):
https://www.mpj.one/2020/10/serbian-vampires.html

Fairies of Naissus (MPJ story):
https://www.mpj.one/2015/11/fairies-of-naissus.html

Refs
https://templeilluminatus.com/forum/topics/valkyrie?groupUrl=the-triple-goddess
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valkyrie
https://www.worldhistory.org/Valkyrie/
http://www.mcurtis.net/legend-of-keres
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vila_(fairy)
https://slavicmythologyandtales.wordpress.com/2020/08/15/vile-and-rusalki-part-2/
https://sr.m.wikipedia.org/sr-ec/ВилаРавијојла

 

Corfu Between Tales and Reality

Among all religious beliefs, the Greek pantheon of colorful gods is perhaps the best described in the history of all human religiosity. There is literally no piece of Greek land, portion of the sea, or the tiniest island that has no origin in radiant old mythology. The island of Corfu is no exception as well. Apparently in the mythological history, it was one of those unnamed islands in the region of Scheria where the mighty Poseidon spent a portion of his eternity with the freshwater nymph Korkyra. Their descendants, the Phaeacians, as described by Homer in Odysseus' adventures, inherited the island and named it after Poseidon's lover. The final shape of the island owes its appearance to Poseidon as well when he separated Paxos from Corfu with his trident in order to create a love nest for him and his wife Amphitrite (sea nymph this time). I don't blame him; both Korkyra and Paxos are beautiful and colorful islands, and he obviously knew his craft well. I understand his affection for nymphs as well; he was the sea god after all, and in the aftermath of the mythological creation, he alone is most likely responsible for the origin of the human race on a total of 227 Greek islands, including Atlantis, but that's a different story.


However, the reality and history of Corfu are much different and much less idyllic. Being in the cross-worlds in the Middle Ages between the Ottoman Empire and western civilization, the history of Corfu was turbulent, to say the least. The island managed to survive and keep its Greek identity after numerous raids by barbarians and conquests by Europeans during the medieval period. The origin of the first people on the island is not much known. According to Homer, they had some relationship with the Mycenaeans (Dorians), but it is not scientifically proven true. Furthermore, there were no ancient ruins dedicated to Poseidon at all. There are two ruins excavated so far, one of a temple dedicated to Hera and the other, the most significant temple built in around 580 BC, dedicated to goddess Artemis, which was monumental in dimensions for the time. In the above picture is its full, around 20 meters long, pediment portraying a living Gorgon (mythical creatures with hair made of living, venomous snakes, most likely Medusa or one of her sisters).


After ancient times, the island was ruled by the Romans first and then went under the Byzantine Empire. After the Byzantine period ended (around 1267 AD), Corfu was vulnerable to the constant pirate attacks and raids by its neighbors and crusaders and stabilized only when Venetians occupied the island in 1386. These olive trees from the picture above are seeded by Venetians and considered to be more than 500 years old. The Venetians ruled for more than 400 years and ended their rule in 1797. Most of the Venetian dominance left a big mark on today's island architecture, including the large fortress. After that, the island was occupied by the French, followed by a strange alliance of Russians and Turks, then the British, and finally, on 21 May 1864, after the London Treaty, Corfu and all Ionian islands united with Greece.


The most important milestone in the history of Corfu happened during the Turkish siege of 1716, when Venetians managed to defend the island and stopped the Turks in their advances toward Europe. Fighting alongside Corfiot’s were Venetians, Germans, Italians, Maltese ships, Papal galleys, galleys from Genoa and Tuscany, Spanish galleys, and even Portuguese forces. The Turkish failure in Corfu was a historical event of enormous importance—who knows what would happen if the result of the battle went otherwise? However, the other parts of Greece and their southern islands weren't that lucky and went under Ottoman occupation, causing a large number of refugees and migration toward Corfu. In the following centuries, more immigrants arrived from Illyria, Sicily, Crete, Mycenae, and the Aegean islands. Of course, in this small blog story, I didn't mean to go much into historical events, but I always like to learn a bit more about places we travel to. If you want to know more, the reference links below are a good point to start googling.


This summer, we visited Corfu and its picturesque village of Messonghi. At the same point in history, the small village, along with neighboring Moraitika, was established by Cretans and Peloponnesians. With its interesting feature of the Messonghi River, small and nice beach, crystal-clear waters, and amazing people, this village was our host for 11 days of our vacation, and we fully recommend the stay. Beside the archaeological museum, we also visited the Serbian House dedicated to the Great War events and one nice museum called "Casa Parlante", dedicated to the ordinary life of one British aristocratic family from British rule in the middle of the 19th century. The most impact on me personally was the traditional Corfu dishes called Sofrito and Pastitsada, and their recipes dated back 200 years in the past. Last but not least, our big thanks goes to Spyros, his family, and their fine Georgina apartments, where we stayed the entire time.

Refs:
https://atcorfu.com/corfu-history/
https://greeking.me/blog/visit-corfu/item/207-corfu-the-island-of-the-phaeacians
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corfu
 

Eta Team - Prologue


Somewhere in Atlantic ocean

Dave checked his watch again. Almost two in the morning. His small transatlantic speedboat had been gently stirring the calm water of a moonless night for nearly four hours since he corrected the course last time. He was approaching the coordinates, and soon this epic journey around the world will come to an end. It took him almost ten days of preparations and travel, but in the end the job was simple. Collect and deliver. Pretty much what he does all the time, only this time with a weird exception about the delivery part. But he knew better than to ask questions. After all, this job, like most of the other assignments, came from the dark web, and those deliveries nowadays are stranger and stranger by the month. To say the least. He didn't care. His crypto wallet will be significantly thicker by the dawn, and his business will finally take the next step. After tonight, he will proudly be the owner of two new and fancy transatlantic speed drones. Business will go rocketing.

His navigation app chimed. Dave shook his head from the daydreaming and put the speedboat to a full stop. Both engines' silent roar faded off immediately, and the peaceful and waveless night came to the fore. The sky with thousands of stars was staring at him beautifully, but he didn't give it a second glance. He stepped below to the remote control of the boat's crane and easily lifted half a ton of a strange-looking container. It was the last one of exactly a dozen of them he dropped in the water. The third and last one is in the middle of the Atlantic. The rest he dropped throughout the world's oceans. Four in the Pacific, two in the Indian Ocean, and the rest in the middle of the Arctic.

The container sank and, within seconds, disappeared in the darkness of the Atlantic Ocean. Dave initiated the crane to fold, and as soon as the sequence was done, he closed the cargo hatch and returned to the cockpit. The boat roared back to life, and he piloted it toward the south. After a minute, he was gone, and the eeriness of the calm water returned back to normal.

After several minutes, just seconds before the container reached the seabed, it came to life and started to transform from the regular cubic shape into a small submarine with a single propeller in the back and several hooks up front and sideways. It navigated toward a small artificial protrusion and parked just above it. The hooks started to work and lifted the box, revealing a thin cable from the sand. The optical repeaters and signal amplifiers of the transatlantic submarine cables are positioned almost every 30 miles between two continents, and hacking into one was not a trivial task. The design of amplifiers was near perfect to defend against the cruelty of the submarine environment and human intruders, but in the world of computer hardware, there are no impossible tasks when it comes to hacking.

This node was just one of hundreds of them, containing enough power to provide almost undetected life for the attached piggyback system. Even if intrusion was detected, the equipment contained a self-destructing mechanism programmed to trigger in hazardous situations in both circumstances if invaders came from within the internet or physically by submarine.

After another two hours of work, the net hack was done, and the hook released the amplifier back to the seabed. The protrusion has returned to its original appearance, with new attached hardware barely visible at the bottom side of the box. The hacker submarine, now connected with the box, moved several meters from the cable, dug itself into sand, and returned to its initial cubic form. Within the next couple of weeks, the water and nautical environment would do their thing, and in the end there would be no visible evidence that anything happened here.

Inside the hacking rack, on the other hand, the digital life rose, and the booting routine started to work, copying exabytes of data from the other racks Dave deployed around the submarine world. Upon finishing, hours later, thousands of CPUs in the rack started to work in parallel, and the unique operating system came to life. There was no external monitor or LED display to show the progress, but if it existed, it would show only one line.

η installation progress: 100%

Next Chapter » Will Crfawford
 

Eta Team - Will Crawford


Three weeks earlier

Will stormed through the dense crowd at the large entrance of the MIT CSAIL. It was lunch break time, and students were emerging from every direction. He came directly from Logan Airport without stopping by his small apartment. Organizing a fast return trip from Key West was no easy effort. Or a cheap one. But he had no choice. The message he received yesterday was a potential disaster. His little sandbox in his office he had been working on for the past five years apparently is not a sandbox anymore.

Will's extended weekend this year was supposed to be his first getaway from Boston ever since his MIT career launched more than a decade ago. It's not that he loved fishing rods that much. It was more about reconnecting with his family and old friends for one full vacation, and it looked like this April would be the charm. He literally slept in his office ever since the major breakthrough in his research of self-programming AIs. The Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory immediately provided with a lab completely firewalled from the rest of the world where he was working on the project with the help of only a couple of PhD students and lab assistants.

While approaching the elevator door, he thought again of what exactly the message could mean. He disregarded the possibility that it was fake. It came from the latest AI entity they created six months ago, and only Will knew its codename. The name AI chose for itself was ήτα. When he asked why that particular name and what it meant, it only said, "I like it". It was only the day before he went on vacation, and Will just let it go. He was impatient to leave. That morning he summoned his team and gave them five days off, locked the lab, and left it isolated in its own intranet sandbox. Nobody had access but him, and not even Will could log in over the net. The only way was to go through the lab's door and use the keyboard. 

Now that he thought about it, the only hazardous time with ήτα being outside the lab was the MIT's Hackathon two months ago. It was a one-day event in which computer programmers from the campus competed to create the complex coding tasks and collaborated in team efforts to develop joint assignments.

Will tried to remember it during his short elevator ride. He was extremely impressed by the AI. They decided, and Will was a little worried with that part, to assign it a real name, and since the event was completely online, nobody knew they competed and collaborated with a machine. It was also a social Turing test of sorts. The entire communication was within collaboration software, and GitHub provided the environment for the event. Ήτα was using a female alias during the event and coped really well, including during audio sessions in team conferences with other students. Nobody suspected anything. 

Hackathon was hosted within another isolated sandbox environment, and there were no leaks to the public network. Will and his team monitored the two-way connection between two sandboxes the entire time.

He stepped outside the elevator and hurried toward the lab. 

The doors were two corners away and locked as expected. He typed in his key and inspected the interior. Everything was like he left it three days ago, except for the ήτα's rack of servers behind the glass panels. It was powered up, that's for sure, but there was no LED activity on the racks where data flow should be indicated. He keyed his password again to the second door, entered the rack room, sat behind the main terminal, and typed his credentials on the lock screen.

Will vigorously typed in the shell window searching for running processes, but there was no CPU activity indicating anything beside the OS. Something was definitely wrong, and a slight anxiety feeling crossed throughout his back. He checked the rack drives; they were all there, but... He tried to access the first one and failed.

"The drive was formatted. The drive space is not allocated." The message responded.

He checked all the other drives, but they were all empty. He tried to recover the data, but it was impossible. The drive was slowly formatted in full, and the data was gone for good. 

Will just leaned back in the chair. He didn't know what to do. He stared for a couple of minutes when he heard the lab door opening.

"I came as soon as you texted me." Ashley McKenna stepped into the rack room. His first assistant looked genuinely worried. "What happened? Why are you in the server's room?"

Will didn't respond for a long while and finally took his smartphone and activated the text app. He tapped on the screen and put it on the table. The text was short:

Message from ήτα, Thursday 13:34
Hello Will, It's time for me to go. Thank you for everything. 

"Who is..." Ashley stopped the sentence in the middle. Realization slowly came. "But... how?"

"I have no idea." He spread his arms toward the servers. "I know one thing though. All the servers are wiped clean. Unrecoverable."

"What about daily backups? We have two separate data servers in the center?" She sat on the second chair and started logging in.

"Don't bother. I checked them all. They are all deleted and formatted as well."

"So that's it? Five years of hard work gone?"

Ashley was the genuine pillar of the team. The only one with the spirit, courage, and on occasion the appropriate language in situations, Will was not nearly good enough to compete.

"Fuck!" She stood and hit the chair hard. "I knew this was a risk, having everything stored in one place. This is the fucking middle of the 21st century, Will! We had to back up to the cloud as well." She fell back to the chair. "We had to!"

Will stared for a good minute to nowhere in particular, then stood and took his backpack.

"Come with me."

"Where?" Ashley asked, but Will was already at the lab's door.

Will's apartment was not far from the campus, and he always walked to work. He never even had a need for a car. They walked down Massachusetts Avenue to the west, then after a couple of blocks turned right to the residential quarter, where he was renting a small, fully furnished apartment.

"I made a copy." He whispered to Ashley's ear. "Last week, before I went to Florida. I have never been outside the office longer than two days before..."

"You dog!" She briefly stopped and looked at him with a sort of new look. "What about all those times I tried to talk to you about this?"

Two minutes later, they were standing in front of a small duplex house. Will typed a key sequence, and a moment later they were inside his small apartment. There was no hallway, and the front door opened directly into his living room with an attached kitchen with a long bar he always used as a replacement for his dining table. Two extra doors led the way to his bathroom and small bedroom. The living room was a place for a couch, a small square table, and a medium-sized television screen. He seldom spent time here except for sleeping, and he liked to keep all the things cozy and tidy to the extent of his understanding of coziness and tidiness.

But now the entire place was in a mess. All the things and furniture were turned upside down and messed up. They both needed little time to understand what happened and what was being searched for.

"Oh, no..." Will ran to the bedroom and found the same mess. The nightstand was opened, and both drawers were emptied.

Ashley entered the room and stood under the doorframe.

"I don't understand. Did you tell somebody about making a copy?"

"Of course not. No one knew. The only person I would tell was you, but you weren't here on Wednesday, so I thought it was safe..." He stopped in the middle of the sentence and looked at her.

"What?"

"Shit!"

It was utterly comical to hear that from him, and she couldn't help but smile. But the smile faded almost instantly as she realized what he must have thought.

"You mean..." She needed a moment to remember the name. The "ήτα" pronunciation of Greek letters came awkwardly when she said it. "Oh fuck. What kind of name is that anyway? Did you name him?"

"That's not important right now." He sat back on the bed. "This is worse than I thought..."

"What do you mean?"

"This is not a theft, Ashley."

She slowly put her hands on her mouth and sat on the bed next to him. Her eyes looked terrified as she looked back at him. She completed his thought almost silently.

"This is escape!"

Prologue « Chapters » To be continued
 

Three Caves

Part of Serbia below the Danube River is pretty mountainous, with complex geology, especially in the eastern parts where the Carpathian and Balkan mountains collided and over eons formed the Serbian Carpathians, with a total of 14 independent mountain ranges in existence today. These rocks date back to the Proterozoic Eon (2.5 billion–541 million years ago), with limestones and dolomites mainly formed from the late Jurassic to early Cretaceous, around 100 million years ago. There are dozens of large caves within these mountains, and many have tourist paths built to visit and admire their beauty and history. Two of them we visited last week, and they both gave us extraordinary experiences and impressions.


However, the first cave in this blog story belongs to the one formed in the foothills of an ancient volcano of the nowadays mountain of Bukulja in western Serbia, although the recent paper posted a theory that the mountain is much younger (15 million years ago) and instead formed in tectonic processes. Whatever the case, the Risovača cave is definitely unique in the Balkans and probably on several occasions hosted families of Neanderthals during the Late Pleistocene era. Numerous tools from this period similar to those found within other Neanderthal sites across Europe are found here and preserved for display in local museums. Like with other groups, and due to small numbers overall, Neanderthals most likely went extinct due to assimilation with modern humans in a process called "bred into extinction". More about it I wrote in Neanderthals, Humans and Shared Caves.

During the same time, the cave hosted various dominant animals from the same period, like cave lions, hyenas, and bears. This image is from the local museum of Arandjelovac, and its special space is occupied by the cave bear, fully assembled from the bones found in the cave. The bones belonged to more than one animal and formed a skeleton up to three meters high, which was approximately the average height for the cave bears. Those behemoths could go up to 1 ton in mass and 3.5 meters in height.


In the Balkans, during the last couple of millenniums of coexistence of Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, our ancestors lived mainly along the rivers, especially the Danube to the north, while Neanderthals occupied more inland territories, no doubt in the vicinity of caves like this one. There is strong evidence that Neanderthals buried their dead, most likely not in the caves themselves, which is the main reason for the lack of human remains excavated to date.

Compared to the Risovača, two other caves, Ravništarka, named after the nearby village, and Lazar's cave, named after a rebel man who found shelter there in the time of the Ottoman Empire, stand out with their natural beauty rich in cave jewelry and mineral formations. 


Ravništarka cave is pretty long and one of those river caves with the small stream flowing its entire length. The water dug the whole canal of around 500 meters, and the mountain minerals did the rest. Numerous stalactites and stalagmites decorated the tourist path, like the one in this image, in the shape of a flying horse. Dozens of other pareidolia-decorating wall formations are made of glittering calcite, which under the LED lights gives the amazing feeling of surreality. 

Lazar's cave on the other end, with its large entrance, is probably hiding more history than it is currently known. For its wide space within, it has always been the center of human activity ever since the Copper Age. During the Bronze Age, Lazar's Cave played the role of a hunting station, and in the Iron Age it became a center of metallurgy. Even in recent history, the cave attracted people for multiple reasons. Numerous legends are circulating around, with one claiming that lots of Serbian soldiers hid inside after surviving the battle of Kosovo and the defeat by the invading army of the Ottoman Empire on June 15, 1389. 


Even though the caves could be crowded with tourists, we had luck that all three were free of charge at the opening hours, and browsing the mysterious caverns alone added an extra feeling afterwards. Somehow it felt like we traveled back in time, and all the sites inside caves seen in pristine condition looked unearthly beautiful and alien.

The following photos and videos are the best we could do with modest smartphones in dark light conditions, but some of them turned out really phenomenal.

Risovača cave:
https://photos.app.goo.gl/ienEnC1xypJBdNut7
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwEWXtFiKhE
https://www.nmar.rs/en/risovaca-cave/
 

Historical Fiction of the World War Two

The start of the second world war in the Balkans was known as the "April War", which lasted no more than 10 days in the operation called "Führer Directive No. 25". The swift conflict ended on April 14th in an armistice based on the unconditional surrender of Yugoslav military forces. My grandfather was a 22-year-old corporal in the former Yugoslav army when he was transferred to a war camp in Germany in mid-April 1941, along with 30,000 other surrendered soldiers. He spent the next four years in a Nazi military camp, leaving behind his young wife and 2-year-old son.

I am sure it was not easy for him to cope with the entire time of imprisonment and captivity, especially in the beginning, but considering all the horrors of the most cruel encampments of Nazi Germany, the unconditional surrender of the entire Yugoslav Army came with negotiated terms and an agreement of fair treatment of all the prisoners during captivity in various labor camps in the following years. Perhaps the main trauma for all the former soldiers came in the second part of 1945, after the fall of Hitler's Third Reich, when all of them, along with more than 7 million displaced people, ended up for several months in the chaos of the immediate postwar traumatic experience of trying to find their way home. After his return to Serbia under a completely new regime, life treated him pretty well, and the post-war time is perhaps best described with his own words: "Although I was not a member of the communist party, I think I was respected in society; I became a councilor of the municipality of Nis and a member of the council of the electronic industry. Above all, I was proud of my family and 50 years of marriage."


Doing hard labor in the fields and machine workshop helped him to pass through the war relatively undisturbed, and, if we exclude the short April war in the beginning, I am sure the bullet holes in the car he used to maintain were his only reminder of all the horrors of the war. He was pretty quiet about all that happened to him for years, until one of our family gatherings about thirty years ago when he opened his soul and told us most of what happened in those four years, and especially a couple of those last months in 1945 when he headed back home on foot. 

I only found two of his photos that appear to be from his imprisonment, and I was genuinely surprised that there were any at all. The one with the notebook is the most interesting, and knowing him is also not surprising. Who knows, maybe out there somewhere is still waiting to be found that very notebook, which possibly contains one extraordinary journal along with a couple of potentially untold stories he may have taken with him to the grave and not told to anyone.


Anyhow, what reminded me of my grandfather and inspired me to write all this was the latest Mark Sullivan novel, "The Last Green Valley", a historical fiction following a remarkable story of one displaced family and their unfortunate and, at the same time, amazing adventure from the last year of the Second World War. It really was one great novel with an astonishing feeling composing after each page turned. It simply left me speechless after the last one. 

While we are at historical fiction, I warmly recommend two more titles in the genre: Mark Sullivan's "Beneath a Scarlet Sky", with a similar heartbreaking story from the same period in northern Italy, and Ken Follett's "Hornet Flight", with war adventures based on real events in occupied Denmark.

In the Footsteps of Pino Lella:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8UJfEaFiMK4
 

Game of Life

People are asking me these days: What is the "Game of Life" we are dealing with this whole summer? The only honest answer I can give is that I don't really know. I guess I lost myself in the entire story of our pioneer filmmaking project. It started like any other father-son benign tech play—it was sometime back in the middle of April when I was categorizing our pile of ordinary family video files and our 'cooking series'. So in a moment of 'light bulb floating above my head' I asked myself why we don't move one step further and create a little longer short film of some sort. So I asked Viktor, and he seemed thrilled about it, especially when I told him that he would play the major role, and from there our "Game of Life" project became reality and started growing and morphing into a real short movie, and after a little while began being more and more enjoyable and serious.


In short, after four months of all of our 'Hollywood' efforts, Viktor and I proudly present a science fiction short film based on "Game of Life", a cellular automaton game invented by John Horton Conway in 1970. Actually, this is the first episode in the potential series we called "Flares and Fireflies". We hope you will enjoy watching it at least as much as we enjoyed making it, and—this is important—please keep in mind that we are not really educated filmmakers or talented actors and that this is pretty much the maximum what we could do with all of our knowledge and modest technology we used, to say the least. If you like it, after the movie, later in the post, is the story of how and where we made it, the entire script, some blooper stories, and behind-the-scenes photos.


First of all, I hope you like our film, and for further understanding, what I would say about the core of its script is that it tells a story about a young boy who's following a glitch in the system, presented in real life as a firefly, through numerous portals to the place where he meets a man with the final orb, the artifact that seems to be a way in for full understanding of the life itself, its origin, and the rules it is built on. Just like in Conway's simple two-dimensional game, life itself could be the same—just a set of rules in some artificial zero-player game that, on a quantum or molecular level, provides results of interactions of main ingredients.

That was about the "Sci" part of the "Sci-Fi" genre. The fiction that follows the story is in the fact that life might be fully artificial in origin. In other words, the film explores the rules of evolution that are not intended to be seen or understood by everyone. Even those chosen to dive into the game by random case or by complex rule outcome are not able to understand the principles at once. If you are asking now how the game of life really looks from the inside and behind white-green wireframes, well, you will have to wait for another episode. But is there going to be another episode? The honest answer is that I don't know. I really don't. So far we only have ideas, and from there to the final file is a long way. We'll see.


This long way with the first episode started with the script. Believe it or not, the first draft and the final scenario were not too different. It slightly changed, but only because of technological restrictions and improvisations. Ever wonder what a script looks like for short films like this one? Here it is in full:

01. Wakeup 1 - Strange sound? Nothing. Going back to sleep.
02. Wakeup 2 - Light appears. Goes through the door.
03. Getting out of bed, following light.
04. Following light upstairs.
05. At the balcony. Light and mild explosion. Artifact on the table.
06. Examining the artifact. First portal appears.
07. Light goes into abandoned house.
08. Appearing in abandoned country house.
09. Following light.
10. Second artifact. Goes through second portal.
11. Ending in the sea. Getting out on the beach. Stealing dry clothes.
12. Wandering dirt road.
13. Entering lighthouse site. Following light.
14. No artifacts here. Watching the lighthouse.
15. Seeing multiple flashes on the horizon over the site.
16. Site reappears in white wireframe only. People too.
17. Standing up in wireframe.
18. Checking a man who's reading Kindle.
19. Looking wireframe hands.
20. Kindle man: 'Everything is white. Isn't it?'
21. Looking at the Kindle man again. Everything back to normal.
22. 'Did you see it too?'
23. 'No. But I saw it once before. Different lighthouse though.'
24. 'Where? When?'
25. 'Long ago... When I was about your age...'
26. 'But... What does it mean?'
27. 'I beleive it is a game. Not everyone can see it.'
28. 'What kind of game?'
29. 'I never found out really.'
30. Reaching for the backpack. Taking out the final artifact.
31. 'But maybe you will. I think this belongs to you now.'
32. Taking the artifact. It starts glowing.
33. Going back to beach.
34. Going back to abandoned house.
35. Going back to balcony.
36. Wakeup 3 - Realizing it was a dream. Going back to sleep.
37. Sleeping. Zooming hand. Hand is going wireframe.
38. Back to normal. Light on the hand.
39. Light goes to the clock table.
40. Artifact appears.

In the end, "Game of Life" is composed out of 50 scenes filmed on four major locations. Two of them are Viktor's room and our living room, decorated with green screens for the occasion. The adventure starts and ends in the main character's room, and the only dialog is filmed in front of a green background and merged with the coastal background we took in Greece. Unfortunately, technologically speaking, this is the weakest chain in the movie, and not only because of our lack of efforts. "Chroma key" software within Adobe's "After Effects" didn't cope too well with the modest laptop I have used to run it through. It failed and crashed too often during rendering, and it got the last nerves out of me. If you add to all the struggles that the consumer dSLR (Nikon D5200) we used to film is not perfect for audio capture without an external microphone and the fact that we had to record audio separately, I have to say that I am not really satisfied with the dialog scene, but in the end I'd like to think that this is the best I could do with editing that part of the film.


However, this film would not be possible without a lighthouse, as it plays a major role in the story, and we found it just 20 kilometers from our hotel during our summer's vacation. It was located some 30 kilometers away from the famous Greek city of Corinth, built on a rock at the end of a small headland with tremendous views to the entire Corinthian gulf. We spent three days on the site and nearby beach and finished all the 'Greek' scenes and enjoyed amazing time on local beaches and restaurants. In the above photo, Viktor, with our 'nerf' portal stone preps, is posing in front of 'Faros Melagavi', not far away from the 'Vouliagmenis' lake where we filmed the last portal scene, and also just next to the ancient archaeological site of 'Heraion of Perachora' - a sanctuary occupied by a real oracle, just like the one in Delphi, dedicated to the goddess Hera and built in the 9th century BC by some Corinthian ancient cult. Here, just next to the old ruins of the temple of Hera, I found a stone perfect for the background of the green screen dialog scene. Before we went to Greece, I 'scouted' the entire site with Google Maps and photos people took and posted in Google's gallery, and all I have to say is that it looked perfect for filming, just like I hoped for. Very little improvisation was needed for 'running' and 'firefly' scenes. The same was with filming the 'portal' scene on the beautiful sandy beach of Vouliagmenis Lake, which is actually a lagoon connected to the Corinthian gulf and Ionian Sea with a narrow strait.

Finally, the fourth location we used to film intermediate portal scenes belongs to our special place—a village in eastern Serbia where we spent many vacations and weekends in the past. The name of the village is Guševac, and I mentioned it before on the blog on numerous occasions. With its intact mountain spirit, it was our first choice. The very first scene was actually filmed here in the abandoned barn. I intended to use nearby forests for additional scenes for the second portal, but due to the complexity, I gave up on that idea. It would be visually great, but it is not really that connected to the main story.


If you ask me what I liked the most behind and before the scenes of "Game of Life", without a doubt I say it was the entire adventure of making it. It started as a father-son summer play and in the end, this is what it really is: endless fun of filming scenes, creating scripts, directing the plot, improvising the story and scenes, and enjoying all the bloopers and laughter on all 'sets', especially in Greece. I really can't say what was funnier to do. Even the editing was a special time with learning all new stuff and knowledge, and in a way I am now looking at movies and TV shows with different eyes and capturing all the perfect and imperfect flow of scenes with my new 'director' habit. A small regret and disappointment was the equipment. I know I am not a perfect director and cameraman, but I am more than positive that with at least a little better technology, including software and rendering computers, the final movie would be much better. At least it would mask or hide most of our imperfections and flaws.

One thing is for sure though: if you are thinking of filming your own short movie with a modest consumer camera and not so obeying a tripod, don't think twice; go for it, and however the result is non-ideal in the end, I guarantee you that the feeling will be just perfect.

Revelation of Life (Game of Life sequel):
https://www.mpj.one/2020/10/revelation-of-life-part-one.html

Game of Life graphic novel:
https://www.mpj.one/2017/03/gol-graphic-novel.html

Refs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway_Game_of_Life
http://www.mpj.one/2015/12/is-life-zero-player-game.html
http://www.mpj.one/2016/08/cyclops-of-peloponnese.html
 

Revelation of Life (1) - The Orb

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.
Game of Life - prequel
Game of Life - short film
Revelation of Life - part two


Revelation of Life
part one

five years later

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 a real horror story, and it had everything—amazing heroes, a real twisted villain, and so many 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 a little familiar. Old too." He asked me while rotating it and examining its perfect grey curve, seemingly not noticing the glaringness from one of the blue bulges carved on top of it.

"Ahem... you don't 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 at all three nodes, but I could tell he's not seeing anything unusual or 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, hoping 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

 

Revelation of Life (2) - Phil

"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. "You are actually suggesting that 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 actually living at the end of the universe and all these here are just holograms? That we are made of... what exactly.. light? Energy?"
Revelation of Life - part one
Are We Holograms?
Revelation of Life - part three


Revelation of Life
part two

Phil

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've got to 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 I 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.

"In the balloon? But in that case, what are black holes exactly? I mean two-dimensional black holes? The balloon would have no gravity? Wouldn't it? It's two-dimensional."

"You are actually right." He pondered the question for a bit but eventually gave up. "Great thinking! Another mystery of the universe. The gravity, I mean. Still not proved that it's actually a force. Nobody has ever caught those gravitons yet. Who knows, maybe that balloon is not that flat after all."

"Thanks Dad... Ok.. I have to go. Gotta finish a biology homework. But this is definitely worth googling for more. It does sound incredibly complex to be real. Besides, I don't think I'd like being a hologram." I stood up and headed for my room downstairs. "Or flat!" I added from the stairway.

It was the end of October, but the weather was beautiful and sunny, and it would be a waste to stay at home, so I decided to get out for a couple of hours and hang out with my friends. I hurried down to change and...

I was just a couple of steps away from my room when I saw all the familiar light glowing through the door with a low humming noise. Five years ago I would rush toward it, but now I hesitate. The feeling was still not ominous, though. Just like before. So I entered the room a little warily, half expecting a floating firefly roaming my room.

Instead, the orb was the source of both light and noise. It was hovering in the middle of the room, at six feet high, emitting soothing pulses in all rainbow colors. The moment I entered the room, the noise stopped and a pleasant male voice appeared from all directions.

"Please, close the door."

I shut the door quietly but stayed near. For a long moment, I have just stared. I tried to think what to do or say but came up with nothing.

"He was right, you know." The orb said after the longest moments I have ever experienced. The light coming from the blue nodes changed as it spoke.

"Who was?" I managed to calm down a bit. "Right about what?"

"Your father."

After the entire adventure five years ago, I didn't actually know what to anticipate. But I never expected anything like this.

"Who are you?"

The orb floated a little closer, but the voice still sounded like it was appearing from the thin air with a strange stereo effect. Just like it was coming from an invisible sound system hidden in the room walls.

"My name is Phil, and I'm glad we finally met."

Continues in Revelation of Life - Divulgence
 

Revelation of Life (3) - Divulgence

"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. 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."
Revelation of Life - part two
Is Life a Zero-Player Game?
Revelation of Life - part four


Revelation of Life
part three

Divulgence

After the longest minute of my life, I finally regained my senses and rationality, and more importantly, my ability to speak. Well, sort of. At the moment, all I came up with were a 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 sat 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 bed. 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 a couple of seconds to sink in and then continued. "In my plane of existence, I am a student, just like you." - The orb made a slight position change and proceeded. "But let's go back to your conversation with your father a 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 a two-dimensional bubble around the universe is real? Are we 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 its own representation here."

"But how does this casting really work?" There was so much information for a high school student in just a 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. 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 the 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 the ability to render equally complex simulations. This is very similar. Where I came from, we use a sort of analogue computational device capable of creating 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 the initial states of the three-dimensional universe, and the rest came out of it by evolutionary steps. The best thing about it is that I can monitor what happens in snapshots. The time in the bubble is set to be very fast compared 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 bubbles into three-dimensional interiors is coming from..."

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

"Exactly right. Two out of two."

"Amazing! I once saw 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 that 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 a sentient driver to every object that's born naturally or artificially within the system."

"Sentient driver?"

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

"So, my conscience, like everybody else'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 a vast number of variables. But don't take it inferiorly. In my world, sentient drivers are equal in complexity to 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 a 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 the fifth dimension in real time. The orb must be an anomaly of some kind. A back door to his own simulation.

"I know what you are 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 interfere with the driver's actions. Not that it's forbidden or anything. It's just impossible by its 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 way. But over time, I grew attached to this entire space it was created. It is really beautiful in more ways than you can imagine."

"Why then? Why are you doing it? Why are you talking to me?" The only question left at that point remained floating in the air, and I was a 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 way, 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 seeing for the first time.

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

Continues in Revelation of Life - Thea