Quantum Simulation
[WP] You and your friend are time travelers, but any changes you cause to the past or future are erased 24hrs after your arrivals. Sometimes you like to challenge each other. This week’s challenge is who can topple the Roman Empire in a single day
“Ready, Set, Go!”
Kay and Greg each leaped through their respective open portals, disappearing in a blast of light.
Each portal represented an individual quantum tunneling event, a pinprick in the very fabric of the universe. The tunnelers were powered by sheaths of matter and anti-matter held in perpetual opposition, the same tech that powered the Imperial fleet and their Alcubierre drives. Beyond the two all blue portals lay iterations of the multiverse, artificially harvested temporal states, taken from the flow of quantum information that defined all reality.
These were not actual time portals, at least not exactly. They were temporary constructs derived from the quantum record, exacting simulations recreated from snapshots of old quantum states. The traveler was not traveling *back* in time, but rather *out* of time. As a result, their behaviors there had no effect on anything outside the quantum construct in which they occurred.
As this tech trickled down from government and military to civilian use, historical arson became exceedingly popular. People would race back in time to various points in history and wreak both systemic and personal forms of havoc. The ability to go back and confront abusers and victimizers became a mainstay of psychological treatment, for example.
But not everyone tunneled for catharsis.
Kay and Greg had turned into a game. Every couple of weeks, whenever their schedules allowed, they met together at The Tunneler, the local tunneling joint, paid for 24 hours, and set out a goal. The goals could be anything but usually involved bringing powerful modern technology into the ancient world and blowing the place to pieces.
Today 100 credits to the man who most nearly, most completely, destroyed the Roman Empire within 24 simulated hours. Each had had a week to plan their tactics, and each had, as usual, spent far more on equipment than the token credits at stake in the bet.
Greg and Kay had been at this now for over a year, and they were each very good at it. As a result, they had a bit of a cult following, local tunnelers who came to each meetup and watched their progress on large viewscreens. The Tunneler’s owners were more than happy to host these unofficial, Greg and Kay viewing parties, as they brought in new business.
A modest group of viewers watched on the screens as Greg and Kay each stepped out of their quantum portal and into the center of ancient Rome. By now everyone had gotten used to the various “hotspots” of quantum travel. Rome’s white stone structures, and impressively angular cityscape was no more impressive to these viewers than the half-completed Egyptian Pyramids, or the expansive cities in the forests and swamps of the Aztecs. Instead, all eyes were on Greg and Kay, wondering what tricks each had up their sleeves.
Kay took out a small device and began rummaging over it carefully, as local Roman’s turned to look, their faces awash in confusion. As Kay worked on whatever it was he had planned, Greg burst into action.
It is worth noting here that the Quantum Simulation is not, exactly, real. The experiences imprint on the tunneler’s mind, and in that sense they truly *happen*. But the tunneler’s body is not, really, anywhere. The cells that make up the tunneler, and the atoms that make up those cells, are held in a kind of stasis. What Greg and Kay were experiencing, and therefore what the viewers were watching, was not the physical embodiment of two people from the future *actually* walking around *actual* ancient Rome, but rather the temporary immersion of Greg and Kay’s minds – the quantum probability wave of their beings – in a complex quantum construct.
All of which is to say, neither Greg nor Kay, nor *any* Quantum tunneler, was ever in any true physical danger – barring an equipment failure, of course, which would result in the tunneler being trapped for all eternity inside the construct, forever reliving whatever constrained loop the tunneler was programmed to recreate.
As Kay continued to work on whatever small device he had brought with him, Greg removed something *everyone* recognized immediately from inside his jacket pocket. When the room saw it, they all began to place bets on Greg’s victory and huddled in closer to the screen in order to get a good view of the insanity that was about to break loose.
In Greg’s hand, he held a Tevitron Atomic Destabilizer. They were absolutely illegal for any civilian to own, and how Greg had gotten his hands on one was anyone’s guess. Both Greg and Kay were enigmatic figures, each with powerful corporate and governmental connections. What the two men did for a living was a mystery to everyone.
However Greg came upon the Destabilizer, there it was, the perfect silver sphere carrying within it its immense potentiality for unbridled doom. Without any hesitation, Greg held the Destabilizer in one hand and with the other flicked a small switch, arming the device. Then he smiled mischievously and made a gesture intended for the viewers back in Quantum reality. “Zoom out” was the message, and it was received loud and clear.
The owner of the establishment went picture in picture, with the new screen zooming the perspective way out, so that the entirety of Rome could be seen, as if from 30,000 feet in the air. With a deep breath, Greg activated the Destabilizer.
There was a second where nothing happened, and then the sphere began to glow, brighter and brighter. Greg closed his eyes as the glow began to stretch from the sphere into Greg’s flesh, the irreversible reaction beginning in earnest. All around Greg, Roman’s stopped and stared, and eventually screamed and ran, as Greg’s entire body became a beacon of light, brighter than the bulb of a lighthouse, then brighter still.
As every single atom in his body simultaneously released its internal energies, everything that was Greg exploded in a gargantuan fireball, brighter than the sun, more powerful by megatonnage, by several orders of magnitude, than the cumulative total of all the nuclear bombs ever exploded on planet Earth.
From on high, it looked like a second sun had risen in the middle of Rome. A ball of vaporizing energy expanded up and out, consuming the city in a wall of annihilation, and then stretching out and out, until all of Northern Italy was ash.
The crowd of viewers broke into cheers.
Meanwhile, Kay was still tinkering with whatever small screen he had brought with him. What, everyone wondered, could he possibly be up to and how, everyone wondered, could it possibly outdo a Tevitron Destabilizer?
Suddenly, apparently apropos of nothing, Kay looked up from the small device and smiled. With a brief raise of his eyebrows, he waved at what he knew were the expectant viewers back in Quantum reality. Right then, Greg reappeared from his Quantum portal, whole and unhurt.
“What’d you think? Not bad huh? What he’s up to?”
A bunch of the viewers shushed Greg and everyone in the room watched Kay’s screen carefully, expectant.
It started at Kay’s right hand, where he held the small device he had been toying with. It was almost as if the viewscreen was fuzzy there like there was something wrong with the pixels. The hand blurred around the edges and then darkened. But soon, the blurriness spread up Kay’s arm, and then to his torso, and down his abdomen, up his neck until it surrounded his face. Soon, to everyone recoiling disgust, the skin of the right hand disappeared, like a time-lapse video of a corrosive acid on metal – first, the skin went, then the muscle, then the tendons, until there were only skeletal bones, and then the bone went too. The disintegration traveled up Kays body, vivisecting him in horrendous fashion.
Watching behind the throng of enthralled spectators, Greg cursed. Soon everyone else understood as well.
Nanobots. Somehow, impossibly, Kay had managed to get ahold of a nanobot system. No doubt his ten minutes of tinkering with that small device had been him setting it to the most destructive overall setting. Once that was done, it was just a matter of activating the bots, and watching exponential growth do its thing.
In under a minute, there was no more Kay, but a floating gray cloud. The wind took it, and wherever it touched people and objects things began to disintegrate in the same horrendous way. Roman’s screamed and stared in horror as their bodies broke down into nothing before their very eyes. The buildings began to collapse and tumble to the ground, even the rubble being turned into gray dust. Within twenty minutes, the cloud had all but encompassed the city, but it did not stop there. Over the next 5 hours in the simulation, sped up to take only a minute real time, it spread across the face of the planet, consuming every bit of matter, until the entire surface was a gray cloud. But it did not stop there. over the next 15 hours, the Earth itself was consumed down to the mantle. As the gray cloud of nanobots made its way downwards, the upper portions, having completed the resource deconstruction phase, began constructing whatever it was that Kay had ordered.
As the spectators watched, the matte gray cloud that used to be Earth began to transform into a bright, *silvery* gray cloud.
Just then Kay stepped out of his portal and pretended to wipe dust from his shoulder. He smiled ear to ear and watched as the plume that was the simulated planet Earth turned bright silver.
Greg turned to him and handed him 100 credits with a scowl. “Fair is fair.” Then he turned back to the screen and sucked his teeth. “What did you have them make?”
Kay turned to the owner of the place. “Zoom in, would you?”
The owner zoomed in on the gray cloud that used to be the fake Earth, in and in from orbit, until he was right up inside it.
Paperclips. Trillions upon Trillions of paper clips.
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