You had to pay for days like these. The clear air, the quiet and the pure summer sun didn't come cheap. Doug had a lot of money. So much in fact that he could afford the luxury of growing his own strawberries. Only the birdsong wasn't real, but there are some things that money can't buy.
Doug was settling down to his gardening when something started flashing on the interface. He felt it as an itch on his cheek, and a soft chime rang in his ear like dawn breaking in the Garden of Eden. As Doug weeded between the close-packed rows of strawberries, his mind flicked quickly along a chain of free association till this thought occurred to him,
Memory Usage 95% - Please Collapse Wave-Function.
He thought back through the log files. They told him that close on twelve million distinct works had been produced in the past century of simulation time. The number was high, but within the predicted range. The last twenty of those years, however, had seen an extraordinary proliferation of futures. He checked the novelty index. It was low and that was a good sign. When novelty was low the universes typically stopped branching, freeing up space for the more creative ones. Even at the high production levels he was seeing, a low novelty index should mean at least ten more years simulation time before the wave-functions needed collapsing again.
Doug continued his methodical search for weeds among the ripening fruit as he thought through the possible reasons for the overload. He'd found a particularly aggressive thicket of multiplying universes when the flashing started up again. This time it didn't itch. It hurt.
Memory Overflow – Simulation Suspended.
The pain snapped Doug to his feet. For a moment he forgot himself and scratched at his cheek. The numb half-feeling of his cracked fingertips against his cheek snapped him back to unreality. For a few seconds Doug was lost in a daze as his mind worked through the snarl up. He collapsed some of the less important wave-functions, picking them out from the dense network of futures that had sprung up and then he restarted the simulation. Almost immediately the message came back:
Memory Overflow – Simulation Suspended.
Doug closed his eyes. He retraced the chain of influence, digging back to the root of the problem. Sometimes these anomalies were beneficial and he let them grow, collapsing the wave-functions of less profitable universes to make room for them. Other times, like the weeds that sprung up in his strawberry patch, they had to be removed. He dug deeper and deeper. The summer afternoon and strawberries were gone completely from his mind. And there it was. He separated it out from the other multiplying strands and marvelled at how rapidly it had spread. He checked through the consequences briefly. the
He contemplated the dreary cluster of sterile universes. The Bible had come from one of these universes but now it looked as though they'd dried up. If another billion-seller didn't come along soon he could say goodbye to his garden in the sun. He needed to concentrate. For a long time Doug gazed inward down into one of the almost infinite number of barren universes that had caused the overload. Weeds they were: all weeds. He looked deeper and for a while his eye lingered over these words, then he collapsed the wav
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