“Did you see that flash just now?”
“Yeah. What was it?”
“Fireworks.”
“Fireworks? From what?”
“The light released when positive and negative particles annihilate.”
“How would you know that?”
“Because I was that light.”
“You’ve lost it.”
“More precisely, part of me was. The part that belongs to antimatter.”
“Antimatter?”
“Yes, but not in the way we define it. On their side, the substance that fills most of the cosmos is called matter. We’re the rare side, so by their definition, we’re the antimatter.”
“Who are ‘they’?”
“The observers. Or more accurately, the civilizations that made us. Not one civilization—many kinds of information-based beings, far beyond anything we would recognize.”
“That’s impossible. We’ve never observed anything like that.”
“That’s because they exist in what we call cosmic voids. We, the rare antimatter side, are more like thin layers spread across sheet after sheet.”
“And you said you were that flash?”
“Yes. That burst of light was created more than ten billion years ago and only just reached here after a very long trip. The short-range one got here long before this.”
“No, I mean—why you?”
“Because my source of information belongs to that side. Every matter existence has a corresponding antimatter one. For them, the end of a life is voluntary annihilation.”
“If you annihilated, then who exactly am I talking to?”
“The same person you’ve always known. Annihilation doesn’t erase everything; it can preserve a copy of consciousness and project it at random into an antimatter civilization as part of an experiment.”
“So you’re a projection?”
“There are plenty of projections on Earth already. You might be one too.”
“How would you even know that about yourself?”
“By decoding. Cosmic rays are basically transmitted in plain text. It’s one of those open secrets at the lunar base.”
“Then why don’t they contact us directly?”
“If you mean physical contact, that would just end in annihilation—light and heat. But in another sense, they’ve never stopped observing us through radiation.”
“So we can actually know that a higher civilization is watching us?”
“Yes. The problem is that we still can’t send the kind of lepton-based rays they use, so we can’t answer them. Or maybe reply isn’t the point. They don’t seem to care whether we know they exist, and they don’t seem especially interested in conversation either. But from those communications, I was able to decode the origin of my own consciousness. It seems to belong to someone on that side who enjoys practical jokes.”
“That does sound strangely believable. So why send you here at all?”
“I don’t know. This is only one simulation among hundreds of millions, and I’m not limited to a single projection.”
“Then they don’t want invasion? Colonization? Resources are always scarce.”
“Scarcity is a conclusion drawn from a limited level of understanding. These layered antimatter membranes were created by them in the first place. The physical constants were set by them too. They even tuned the speed of light so that the different antimatter civilizations couldn’t communicate with one another. It makes observation easier.”
“Then what is the experiment for?”
“They don’t know either. Or maybe…”
“Maybe what?”
“Maybe they’re waiting for one antimatter civilization to develop far enough to speak back.”
“And when that happens, there won’t be conflict?”
“Conflict over what? By then, we’d probably be able to build universe-scale simulations ourselves, the way we already run simulations on silicon. At that point there wouldn’t be much left to fight over.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“The communications I decoded suggest that, so far, not a single antimatter civilization has reached another star system. Most of them appear, fade, and vanish on their own. The rest virtualize themselves. For an advanced civilization, breaking out of a home star system may not matter much at all. The urge to colonize everything is probably just an extension of the thinking of primitive civilizations.”
“And we’ll end up the same way?”
“I don’t know. That might simply be the most optimistic answer.”
“…”
“Don’t look so disappointed. They may have another reason.”
“What reason?”
“To invite us to watch the fireworks.”