Forbidden Solution

One moment Steve the physicist is happily scribbling late night notes on a new theoretical model of quantum entanglement, and the next moment there is a door shaped hole in reality, screaming in the air opposite his desk.

After a huge theatrical rush of wind and light, what stepped through was surprisingly... unremarkable? A stereotypical FBI agent entered the room. Black suit, black sunglasses, slick grey hair and strong jaw.

The agent took a moment to flip out a badge and show an id. The badge said he works for some unclear three letter agency and has a photo of himself in the corner. Steve read it several times, but his mind kept slipping off of it like when trying to read a book when you're too tired. He thinks he saw the word human in there somewhere though.

"Sorry for the interruption, but I'm going to have to stop you right there. Pass over those notes," the agent said, making a friendly enough hand gesture, "and sit back down. You've almost gotten yourself in a whole mess of trouble."

He took a step forward and gathers the papers off the bench. Steve immediately started backing away defensively. The agent ignored this, and began leafing through the papers. After a moment he turned and let out a low whistle.

"Whoo yeah, that'll do it all right. Seems we've caught this just in time! Yeah, so, there's good news and bad news, and uh, Steve was it? You'll definitely want to be sitting down for this next part."

The agent patiently waited for Steve to gather his wits and return to his chair.

"So Steve, this is all a simulation. All of it, reality, this planet, you, me, my terrible texan accent, this whole universe. It's all computers. Boop boop. Zeros and Ones.

The good news is that it for all intents and purposes, that doesn't matter - we're all still real as far as we can do anything about it and so it doesn't really matter anyway. Solves a lot of religious issues, though right?" he laughed, before getting serious.

"But, there is some bad news too. This simulation that we're all in? It's not exactly complete, and it likes to cheat a lot. In fact things can get downright buggy, especially when you start making math and physics do certain things that they're really not supposed to do. Like you were just, about, to, do."

Steves mind is usually very capable, and he wouldn't call himself an irrational person. But he had just seen a man walk through a hole in thin air, and had heard some very questionable things about the very nature of reality. So right now the thoughts in his head were roughly approximating three fat people trying to get through a fire door. He managed to stammer out "Not.. supposed to do? What did I do?"

"Well, there's a lot of tricks to running a simulation this big. Lots of Undefined Behavior. Lots of Optimization. It's all really horribly efficient. " the agent made the emphasis and capitalization of words very clear.

"Like if you could, you really don't want to teleport a camera deep inside the earth right now. It's actually Mostly Undefined. Just 'Hot and Liquid'. Turns out reality gets a little lazy when it doesn't have a good reason to be currently loaded in, and so most of it just.. doesn't. Or isn't." he made a hand seesaw motion and continues - "In fact I'm pretty sure you can't even do basic algebra out past the oort cloud. One plus one equals 11, or sometimes -9 out that far."

"What - but - no? That can't be right - what do you mean undefined - we've sent probes - we've tested - the telescopes?!" Steve admirably stuttered out, in defense of his entire reality, but still largely dealing with the mind-fire-door problem.

The black suited man nodded, "- Yes, and that's the rub. If you start poking around in just the right way, you can break the whole system. " he paused and thinks for a second. "Like imagine you have a kid asking you 'WHY?' over and over, even if you've already given them an answer, and another answer. You'd eventually lose your patience right? Same thing here, except you really don't want to be around when the Universe itself loses its cool at you."

"But.. the fundamental laws? Physics? The speed of light...?"

"All just limitations of the system. Look, there's no real harm in you humans poking around your local solar system, at least on your current nearly-cavemen technology level, no offense. Anything that is not strictly defined at a macro right this second just gets filled in on the fly, you'd never even notice it. So I mean your planet isn't hollow, it's just.. not defined very well yet. Your sun too, for that matter."

"The.. sun.. isn't defined?"

"Right! But that's not really a problem - it's defined enough to do the job. Big, yellow, shiny, lots of radiation. Good enough. If you sent a probe at it, it'd look right all the way through. But it's only there because you're looking for it."

He continued - "But the problem here is what you were about to finish scribbling down here would have undone a whole bunch of the current optimizations. In fact had you finished that, it would have forced a full definition and simulation of this entire galactic core right down to the quark level. No more undefined anything. No more cheating. And that, as you can probably guess, is a huge amount of shit that needs to get loaded and processed."

Steve blanched while starting to ponder how many zeros that might be in terms of atoms, and then how many atoms you'd need to write down that many zeros.

"Yeah. In fact, it wouldn't have worked. I mean it would have, but then it would have caused you, me, and all of our suddenly very well defined cosmic neighbours to be immediately ejected from this whole simulation."

"...Oh."

"Yeah." The agent began carefully tearing up the notes. "For what it's worth, it's okay to think about whatever you want, but in your future please don't write down anything more to do with your current conjectures on undefined quantum information, thank you very much.

You were 100% correct, if that's any reassurance? Your theory, that is. But if you do keep pushing forwards with it, there's a good chance we'll get another alert about C minutes before you actually manage to write any of it down. Hopefully. Or we'll miss it, and you'll accidentally deoptimize the whole universe."

The agent shrugged, walked away and vanished.

Steve stared at the now empty air, motionless, for a long long time.

Finally he resolved that tomorrow morning he'd resign, and might go take some cooking classes. He presumed there was very little chance of prematurely ending all of reality by learning how to make a decent chicken soup.