by Galen T. Pickett.
“First, something easy. Traditionally so, in fact. Write code that sends ‘Hello, World!’ to any output. Your display. Maybe our 3D printer. Anything,” Instructor said. A lonely keyboard made a clacking sound as the first student started typing. The sound grew as more got to work. Students murmured to themselves, then more audibly to their colleagues to their right and left. Instructor smiled broadly. He normally had to prod a class to get to work, reassure them that they could not seriously break anything. But this seemed to be a set of go-getters.
He started pacing along the rows of workstations.
The first student was already done. There was one window on the screen running an ancient interpreted language and the text:
10 print “hello werld”
20 end
Instructor nodded his head silently but did not correct the spelling mistake. The next had fired up a nearly as ancient complier and the text “hello.c”:
#include <headers.h>
Null main();
{
Printf(“Hello, World! \n”)
Return();
}
Up and down the rows he paced, barely needing to scan what was being typed. It was all so familiar. “You are making a great start,” he said, but in a tone that conveyed he had seen all this before and was maybe just a trifle bored with having to teach a beginning course in programming.
Eventually he came the last workstation at his extreme right-hand. There sat a young woman, scribbling in a notebook, with a set of textbooks in physics, chemistry, biology, and a few scrolls of what he assumed were ancient texts. There was even a clay tablet covered edge-to-edge with cuneiform.
He noted she was downloading a machine-level programming suite. The text editor had the beginnings of her code, if code it really was:
Initialize_constants(Optimize(G, c, e, h, mp))|
QuantumEngineBose(Graviton, Gluon, Z, W, Photon)|
QuantumEngineHiggs()|
QuantumEngineFermi(Lepton, Hadron)|
Initalize(StressEnergy)|
“Are you sure you understood the assignment?” Instructor asked, but the student barely looked up from her work and nodded. “Ok. You really don’t need to show off. Yet.” Again, she nodded, this time while consulting the open physics text and a famous research paper from the university’s archives on biogenesis. “You will be ready to turn this in tomorrow?” Again, the nod. He raised his voice above the conversation and clacking of keyboards, “One last thing class – we will be demonstrating our code to the class tomorrow.” She did not even look up when he looked back down at her. She was silently giving a thumbs up while intently consulting a scroll.
=
The next morning, Instructor had one student after another mirror their work on the main classroom display. Variations on “Hello, World!” poured across the screen. Sometimes it was plain text, sometimes it was operatic singing, and once it was an AI recreation of Instructor holographically projected at the front of the room.
And then it was her turn.
“Sophia,” said Instructor, “let us see what you have managed.”
Sophia stood and walked to the front of the room. “Ok. Everyone, please connect your multisensory input. Processor?” she said.
The disembodied voice of the Processor reverberated in everyone’s minds, even Instructor’s. “Yes, Sophia.”
“Please execute script universebeta0.1,” said Sophia.
The entire class swayed gently as Processor flooded their senses. The main display hinted at the experience. “Fiat Lux!” appeared as a closed caption and the timestamp started ticking. The display showed an intense flash of pure white. The color began to fade. Eventually the image became dull red. Finally it was black as the time sped past the half-million year mark. Here and there a spark of light appeared. The field of view panned a bit, and the display was filled with an intensely blue sphere erupting with prominences and eddies. Several students let out a gasp of surprise, and Instructor’s jaw fell loosely open.
Its brightness overwhelmed the rest of the sky. The star (for that is what it was) burned fiercely, until in an instant it started shrinking. Faster and faster, and then its brightness was extinguished, and there on the display was an entire sky full of young, bright stars. Some were embedded in great clouds of dust. Some had already collected into the beginnings of galaxies. But there was only a glimpse of this starry field before there was an explosion, and the screen again was featureless and bright. When the brightness faded, the remnant of the blue star was visible, spinning and flashing.
The view again shifted, following the wake of the shock of the explosion of the great, blue star. The passing front caused a featureless cloud of hydrogen and dust to begin to coalesce. Eventually another star ignited, this time much smaller than the first. And the dust around the star coalesced under its own weight and the pulsing winds of the new star. It became a distinct disk, and then dense regions of accumulated matter began to sweep up gas and debris, forming spherical bodies.
Some of these planets begat their own little moons and spits of matter as the field of view zoomed in on a rocky inner world of this new solar system. All the while the timestamp of the simulation sped forward. Ten billion years the time said. The planet accumulated an atmosphere – the sky and the ground had been created. Over the next billions of years, the waters of the young planet separated from the dry land, and creatures of all sorts swam in the deeps with Leviathan. Multitudes crawled upon the surface of the world. Some flew.
Creatures lived out their lives. Ice sheets advanced and retreated, and the field of view closed upon the surface of the world. People walked the earth now. Great cities appeared. One such city and one university campus filled the view. It was a recreation of their own school and the advanced simulation center they were in. Now showing their classroom, Sophia’s work ended with a simulacrum of Instructor at the front of the room, inspecting the work of the first student.
The final frozen frame of the simulation showed “hello werld” as the multisensory inputs went dead, and they awoke from Sophia’s dream.
THE END