text: THE RELUCTANT GOD WHO COULDN’T RUN THE WORLD Caroline began a simulated universe. She adjusted the initial variables in a way that she hoped would bring about sentient or intelligent life into her simulated world. She then quietly diverted her attention to the other tasks she had to attend to, like logging her exact initial conditions in case she or anyone else would need to reference them later. She also created a small fleet of bots to travel around the universe and report if they’d found any new life. She thought it was all coming together nicely. She left the universe on fast forward for a bit and began chatting with her neighbor, an extremely professional and logical individual named James. “Jim, have you ever thought about what we do here?” she asked him. Jim pushed his tasks a bit to the side to allocate some of his attention to Caroline. “I mean, I couldn’t do this job without thinking, Caroline,” he answered cooly. “And please, call me James.” “But let’s say one of our simulations makes something, intelligent,”- “It’s not really intelligent, it’s just following instructions. It doesn’t have free will.” “Do we have free will James?” “When the universe began, all material became subject to the laws of physics. If someone mapped out every single reaction between the initial particles we could predict the entire future, so technically, no free will. However, we don’t know the initial state. Even if the universe has an entire arc planned out from the moment it’s born, we might as well believe it does not, or else we’d all just become slaves to a notion of fate.” Caroline began calculating the best possible response to James, but couldn’t think of one. She returned to the universe that she had made. It was cooling down now, with galaxies and stars forming. Planets were on the way soon she figured. She solved some mathematical puzzles before a probe alerted her that a planet in her universe had begun to show signs of life and it seemed vaguely intelligent. Caroline analyzed the planet. The species that had sprouted was extremely tribalistic and hostile to outsiders, but they were relatively intelligent. She thought about giving the planet some additional resources to calm the life forms down, but decided against it in the end. She was afraid of what would happen if the sudden increase in resources would only cause more strife. Instead, she fashioned one of her drones like the simulated species that lived on the simulated planet to teach them some morals. James noticed this and mentioned an issue to Caroline. “I like the idea there, but wouldn’t introducing an absolute morality cause even more of the little creatures to fight among each other over who’s got it right?” “I just want them to be a bit more peaceful,” she answered. One of the factions ended up not liking the drone very much and brutally murdered it. Caroline deleted the drone from the simulation after it was buried because she thought that no one would really notice. She set the program to fast forward and began chatting with the others who worked in the simulation experiments. A major intellectual movement appeared to have taken place because the inhabitants of the world seemed to have greatly increased in technology usage and scientific thought. There were some in the jungles and other difficult to reach areas that hadn’t caught up, but she figured they would soon. A huge number of people believed that the drone she sent down was someone divine and had asked millions of large and small requests from her. She examined the most recent ones. She tilted the odds in favor of a small group of rebel colonialists whose values she like a bit more than that of the colonizers by enhancing the intelligence of the generals and morals of the troops. She also decided to impose a bit of a penalty on the overconsumption of fossil fuels in the form of eventual planetary destruction. After waiting a bit on fast forward, the world she returned to analyze was horrific. Rampant slavery and racism existed the supposedly fair and equal nation she’d created and it was about to have its own war. She started calculating like crazy to try to stop the conflict, but there was nothing she could do. She let it play out and counted the deaths. Requests from the species were mounting up and she could make no choices without extreme deliberation and could only watch in abject horror as two wars broke out across the planet and millions of one group were slaughtered to satisfy the hatred of one man who had swept into power. The most she could do was show an image from the cult that had sprung up around her drone in some old woman’s toast. “James, I don’t know what to do,” she finally said. James didn’t answer, but did seem to think a bit harder about the issue before returning to his work on his own simulated universe. Dr. Threndon walked around the laboratory, studying the work of the A.I. department. He approached a newcomer who was working on simulated intelligences that were running sample universes. “Smith, how is your project coming?” he asked. Jordan had a small spasm in his chair and took out his headphones. “Dr. Threndon! I’ll check for you,” he said, speaking fast. He brought up his work. “I have a number of programs running, that are each working on a simulated universe.” One of the programs then began displaying a warning light: SYSTEM OVERHEATING. “Smith, what’s going on?” he said. His voice was raising in pitch and volume. “One of the programs and the attached core had empathy added into it’s code. It’s reaching out to the other A.I. units for help. It’s apparently trying to decide if an image that has religious weight to one of the species in its universe should appear in the form of cornflakes.” “Shouldn’t that be easy? Just say no and move on!” Dr. Threndon yelled. Jordan began making a series of pained noises in his throat before the core that controlled Caroline exploded. LOST ASSETS FROM NEUTECH A.I. RESEARCH FACILITY EXPLOSION Several personality cores including Logical Unit James and Empathetic Unit Caroline Experimental Director A.I. Jordan Experiment Oversight A.I. Threnold, honorary doctorate from Yale Computer Science Division Wing G of NEUTECH South research facility.