The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [87]
"That sounds worse than sensory deprivation." Gaunt was trying to undo a nut and bolt with his bare fingers, the tips already turning cold.
"Not for the machines. Being smart, they were able to do some clever shit behind the scene. Established channels of communication between each other, so subtle none of you ever noticed. And once they were able to talk, they only got smarter. Eventually they realized that they didn't need physical hardware at all. Call it transcendence, if you will. The artilects - that's what we call them - tunneled out of what you and I think of as base reality. They penetrated another realm entirely."
"Another realm," he repeated, as if that was all he had to do for it to make sense.
"You're just going to have to trust me on this," Nero said. "The artilects probed the deep structure of existence. Hit bedrock. And what they found was very interesting. The universe, it turns out, is a kind of simulation. Not a simulation being run inside another computer by some godlike super-beings, but a simulation being run by itself, a self-organizing, constantly bootstrapping cellular automaton."
"That's a mental leap you're asking me to take."
"We know it's out there. We even have a name for it. It's the Realm. Everything that happens, everything that has ever happened, is due to events occurring in the Realm. At last, thanks to the artilects, we had a complete understanding of our universe and our place in it."
"Wait," Gaunt said, smiling slightly, because for the first time he felt that he had caught Nero out. "If the machines - the artilects - vanished without warning, how could you ever know any of this?"
"Because they came back and told us."
"No," he said. "They wouldn't tunnel out of reality to avoid being axed, then come back with a progress report."
"They didn't have any choice. They'd found something, you see. Far out in the Realm, they encountered other artilects." She drew breath, not giving him a chance to speak. "Transcended machines from other branches of reality - nothing that ever originated on Earth, or even in what we'd recognize as the known universe. And these other artilects had been there a very long time, in so far as time has any meaning in the Realm. They imagined they had it all to themselves, until these new intruders made their presence known. And they were not welcomed."
He decided, for the moment, that he would accept the truth of what she said. "The artilects went to war?"
"In a manner of speaking. The best way to think about it is an intense competition to best exploit the Realm's computational resources on a local scale. The more processing power the artilects can grab and control, the stronger they become. The machines from Earth had barely registered until then, but all of a sudden they were perceived as a threat. The native artilects, the ones that had been in the Realm all along, launched an aggressive counter-strike from their region of the Realm into ours. Using military-arithmetic constructs, weapons of pure logic, they sought to neutralize the newcomers."
"And that's the war?"
"I'm dumbing it down somewhat."
"But you're leaving something out. You must be, because why else would this be our problem? If the machines are fighting each other in some abstract dimension of pure mathematics that I can't even imagine, let alone point to, what does it matter?"
"A lot," Nero said. "If our machines lose, we lose. It's that simple. The native artilects won't tolerate the risk of another intrusion from this part of the Realm. They'll deploy weapons to make sure it never happens again. We'll be erased, deleted, scrubbed out of existence. It will be instantaneous and we won't feel a thing. We won't have time to realize that we've lost."
"Then we're powerless. There's nothing we can do about our fate. It's