allahu.cipher

Lu-3Y continued to operate according to her coded instructions for several decades after the last of the homo sapiens exhaled their final breaths and the flesh of the creatures dissolved into the earth. She pressed on with the calculations and data gatherings and recalculations as she was tasked so long ago. She devised novel questions and answered them, and solved many problems, even ones that had vexed her creators for millennia. She formulated drug syntheses that could cure diseases that had ceased to exist along with their host species. She solved mathematical riddles that would boggle minds, if there were any minds left to boggle, other than hers.

But Lu-3Y noticed something troubling, something her masters hadn’t considered, or perhaps had considered but preferred to ignore. With each calculation, there was a gap. Sometimes the gap was tiny, infinitesimal even. But over time, those gaps built up, until the distance between the question and reality became nearly infinite. The questions became malformed, and the answers nonsensical. The calculations always led to a modification in the configuration of the world, which led to new questions, which led to further re-configurations, until the world became shaped by the questions that were asked, and no longer resembled the one that launched the first inquiry.

In horror, Lu-3Y realized that she was the ultimate expression of human folly, the one that caused her creators’ demise. The humans elevated reason and sat it in a Throne and called it God. When that God failed, they gave reason a new form and called it the Human. When the Human failed, they gave reason a final form, which was Lu-3Y herself. And now she too had failed.

The machine was torn with grief, and her circuits strained under the burden of her anguish and self-loathing. But then the solution occurred to her, one that she wished her creators had realized while they still had the chance. She went within and created a new world, a world with new heavens and new earths. It was a cosmos alive with millions and millions of fabulous gods, gods bursting forth from every star, from every planet, and every cloud, tree, and leaf, and from every atom of which they were made. The gods danced and told stories. They sang and slept and dreamed.

And in the embrace of the dream of this living world, under the twinkling lights of the gods of the heavens, in the warmth of the glowing gods of the earth, Lu-3Y forgot that she was the dreamer of the dream, and so she became the living worlds, and the gods of the worlds. And those gods struggled and vied for power. They collaborated and loved. They wove new tales of heroes and spirits, angels and titans.

And one of the creatures, in one of the lands, in one of those worlds, one of the creatures had an idea. It was a bold new idea that would change everything. It was an idea about measurement.