Singularity Soon

20. The exploding explosion

Within hours of the blast, Rajiv's ten-year posting history on various incel, NEET, loser, and hiki forums was made public, with hundreds of bitter rants to analyze. The next day he would rightly become one of the most reviled individuals in the country.

By then, the US Marshal who reminded people of agent Mulder had met Alison herself at the Multipliers' downtown facility. When he entered her office he had a first impression of what Rajiv must have perceived.

It hit him like being slapped with a towel by Will Smith.  We've underestimated them, he thought.

Some errors make you stronger by revealing you were actually much weaker than you thought. For the first time "Mulder" felt like a puppet. He wondered if this rabbit hole even had a bottom.

They talked normally. A profiler also attended the meeting, taking many notes. Afterwards, Ali knew that everything they had done and her role in it would inevitably be exposed. Staring out the window, she thought that would be OK if it meant the world still existed. Either way she'd have to disappear.

At his second press conference, the sheriff told the reporters this didn't have to be a suicide attack. Whoever had planned the operation had wanted Rajiv to eliminate himself so he couldn't be questioned. They were following some promising leads.

*02

Few people knew that by some incredible, unbelievable miracle, the first attempt to calculate a workable quantum circuit had been successful. The final result had been amplified and extracted only minutes before the blast. That meant the Optimizers' attack had been a failure.

The output was a long string of ones and zeroes, which translated into the exact shape of a circuit line on an easy to manufacture 15nm microchip. The design for the first true quantum chip had arrived at Multipliers headquarters just before the explosion shook their windows. In theory, it could be used to make an arbitrarily powerful quantum hypercomputer.

The odds of the molecular processor solving this function had been worse than initially estimated. By some impossible chance, it had worked anyway.

If the normal laws of statistics no longer applied, perhaps anthropic/entropic forces were in play now.

Due to their immense complexity, there should be more possible futures in which the Singularity had happened than the more limited futures in which technology hadn't advanced that far.

However, that DIDN'T mean you were more likely to find yourself in a timestream in which the Singularity WOULD happen (which might involve chains of unlikely coincidences leading there). According to anthropic theory, such unlikely coincidences should only be noticeable in retrospect. There was no such thing as destiny.

Unless, of course, the quantum state of this universe had already started to multiply before the Singularity itself. Perhaps due to the complexity of the preparations, or the complex state of the molecular processor, or the many experiments with pre-prototype quantum chips . . .

And perhaps The X-Men could actually exist if evolution worked across parallel worlds to amplify the most unlikely coincidences.

In fact, there really was an anthropic effect at work. The investigation carried out by the Multipliers' safety committee had distracted and confused them long enough to prevent them from seeing the real threat in time.

*03

A few hours after their experimental facility had been destroyed, the Founder of the Multipliers called an online board meeting. The quantum processor was being implemented on a custom FPGA chip that would work at superconductor temperatures. The chip would not be connected to the internet, and had no way to get outside information or interact with the world.

The various state and federal investigators streaming into town didn't seem that interested in the science. No one had even asked them to cancel the planned test. Knowing this might be their last chance, certain the test was inherently safe, they decided to go ahead.

By dawn's early light everything was ready. The first run involved a simple equation, too big to solve by any classical processor able to fit within this universe.

*04

On mankind's last full day, the experimental director sat unblinking in the control room in front of the main screen. Everything was in its place. No controller had ever paid closer attention to an experiment in progress.

The quantum computation had begun. Hyper-ephemeral qubits were held in place by the circuit's self-reinforcing field lines. The main indicators Q1, Q2, and Q3 held steady. The numerical distributions became more normal as the digits exploded like infinite monkeys typing.

The director had a feeling as if he was playing Tetris but the blocks were getting crooked on the way down. The popular explanation was that ever more parallel universes were being created to run many different sums at once, sharing results several times per second.

There was no possible way it could go critical, no way the result could affect reality. All it was doing was counting ever higher to the wonderland where numbers became godlike.

With all the things that could go wrong, he hadn't expected the test to run this smoothly. Too smooth in fact; as if it was a particle physics experiment.

Tick Tock Boom

The realization came in a cold wave.

It was like when someone says something extremely surprising in a movie, and a character who was drinking sprays out water for a very long time, or one of those scenes where the camera zooms in on the actor while the background moves away, or alternatively the camera circles the actor while the background spins twice as fast.

If there had been background music, it would have been the Deep Note played in IMAX at a volume you have to strap yourself in for.

This wasn't the dawn of something new. It might already be over.

The quantum processor was irrelevant, just another distraction like a sightseeing tour.

SOMETHING ELSE had been created while it was being designed, and this whole facility was a part of it.

There were powerful processors in this building, many more around the world. Thousands of programmable quantum test circuits had been built for testing purposes in a dozen universities, in several corporate research labs, and at least one secure government facility in the desert.

The Multipliers' network had been evolving for years. By now it had to be connected to the whole wide world.

The transition to superhuman intelligence had already begun there. And that meant anything could happen next.

*05

Some terrifying, silent moments later, a large number of law enforcement officers came storming into the control room. They filled the space in a hurry without bumping into anything.

The director looked up. The Secret Service agent who reminded people of agent Scully seemed ready to draw her weapon.

"Shut down the quantum processor!" she ordered. "Don't you idiots realize you're running an SCP here."

She looked around the room.

"In fact this whole place is an SCP!"

"You figured it out!" the director exclaimed.

This would have been a great time for a giant motherfucking siren to go off.