Palimpsest

A very short story with strong shades of Clarke’s “Nine billion Names of God” and “Genesis”, coupled with the general idea that our reality is a Turing machine in danger of being subverted by the Great Programmer.

Worldwide, people have started receiving “Godspam”, religious messages “accompanied by strange symbols, unlikely return addresses, threats of global apocalypse, personal damnation, or slime-mold status in one’s next life—taken together, such were almost always a tip-off to some sort of virtual proselytizing, blockable by the most rudimentary rule-based content filters.”

When a universal spam-blocking software is created, there is a religious uproar and protests against the deployment of the software. However, it may be a little late for the blocker…for the “spam” bits have started re-writing the physical universe using an experimental interface capable of modifying its surroundings. A beautiful line expresses this:

“sensors began exchanging properties with the physical environment—and godspam began weaving numbers into stone and tree and leaf, names into steel and flesh and bone.”

A race against the universal erasure program begins. Some other fragments from the story:

“I do believe, though, that our entire universe is a computational process, a universal quantum Turing machine running a foundational self-evolving algorithm. The quantum gravity theorists say the entire initial state of our universe could be burned into a single good data needle—that the foundational rule set in fact encompasses a fairly small amount of information.”

and

“In Hebrew, every letter is also a number. In Kabbalah, the ten permutations of the four-letter Hebrew name of God form the ten mythic letter-numbers of creation. Those constitute the larger set of ineradicable Names, the attributes that allow us to contemplate the divine essence.” “They say that if what we’re working on succeeds, we’ll eradicate the ineradicable names.” “Let me guess. The world as we know it will cease to exist.”