Modeling Our Demise

It is not often on Bard Owls that I post short fiction but today it seemed appropriate. Largely because it is also not every day that I find an artist as good as James Vincent McMorrow. The first song of his I heard was his new single Cavalier. I recommend you give it a listen and point your eyeballs at my short fiction ode to The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke.

Modeling Our Demise 

The model ran through the night, a peculiarity worth noting. The computing power long ago made short work of explaining the earth’s and indeed many other planets’ biogeochemical cycles. The even greater step of predicting the outcome of these systems for the next several billion years had originally taken most of the computational power on earth to calculate. Now, even that once monumental task could be completed with any number of iterations and down to an infinitesimally small degree of error in no more than a margin of a second.

The model that currently occupied the network of earth’s supercomputers had been built upon these past two accomplishments. All of the data that was ever created on earth was fed into the model. All existing predictions made by the previous models, all the butterflies flapping of wings and all the hurricanes in the pacific that ever were and all that ever would be until the earth’s destruction by the sun had all been neatly factored into the model’s consideration. When the last number of ephemeral rainbows, drops of ocean water on the side of every last fjord and the forces of every last subatomic particle in existence had been rounded to last significant digit, the universe blinked. For with nothing left to be found, understood, or created the process of the universe was complete and with that it promptly started to condense, collapse and close up shop, waiting to once again bang into existence and be learned anew.