A LUCILIUS PARABLE: ETERNITY OF ENTERTAINMENT

September 15th, 2019

Once the final stage of human advancement began, the ability to predict the future with accuracy increased at an exponential rate.  This meant that tomorrow began to have a resolution similar to what we might predict the next second to have, and future years began to have a resolution similar to how we see the next minute.  This trend increased at unfathomable speeds until decades could be predicted like succeeding seconds.  The singularity that humanity had waited for did not so much bring about some kind of expanding glory of human values as much as it did plan the future with exceptional and increasing reliability.  The scourge of chaos that had haunted humanity since the beginning was systematically being scrubbed from the universe.  This, however, did not speed up the great timeline of the universe and as things stood, it was still going to be a very long time until the obvious conclusion arrived.  The future no longer held any promise, only certainty, that one nemesis of chaos that humans had been lusting for since the beginning.   

In short, things got quite boring.

To pass the time artificial intelligences had created vast simulation games for the benefit of humans in order to spice up life with a safe degree of artificial chaos.  These simulations also functioned as a kind of elaborate Monte Carlo simulator which benefited the study and work of the artificial intelligences that were busy organizing the universe.

Once it was painfully clear just how boring the present had become, and how certain it was the future would be, Lucilius decided to take the plunge and try one of the awful simulations that everyone gloated over.  It would only take several minutes of real time to sample a few different realities, and since he had a nostalgic penchant for history, Lucilius decided to try one of the ancestor simulations. 

He walked into the simulator entrance with a sigh, initiating a telecommune with the present OS and transferred the few credits required to sample half a dozen lifetimes.  An array of dreamlike centuries manifested in his mind, the time collapsing into scents, tastes and flutters of light flashing from thousands of recorded positions through which the sun and earth had once passed.

Lucilius, feeling lethargic and not a little bummed about knowing the future so well, haphazardly picked a handful of different lives, barely paying attention to their content.  His mind swam through the selection like the hand of a god whimsically building creatures to populate universes. 

As he selected his credit count ticked away until he was out. 

A body maintenance pod emerged from the simulator’s vault and Lucilius sauntered over to it and leaned back into the comfortable padding.

The OS requested a confirmation for a start sequence and Lucilius sighed one more time, flinging his encrypted pass-thought into the network.

Then everything went dark.

Fourteen years later, Lucilius was slouched over a thick book open on his desk.  The voice of a jaded teacher droned on at the front of the classroom.  Lucilius glanced at the clock, calculating the time left and realized that it had only been two minutes since he’d last looked at the clock.  He couldn’t believe how bored he was and he couldn’t wait for the school day to end.