65 million years ago, Venus
He Dishēng was one of the greatest inventors in Venusian history. He was more than a decade older than Nikola Tesla and had once been Tesla's employer.
Over a century earlier, He Dishēng had invented the light bulb, DC power, and the phonograph, among other things. He was hailed as the man who brought light to Venus.
In his later years, He Dishēng's greatest wish was for the history of Venusian science to record him as the greatest inventor of all time, without exception.
He had nothing but contempt for Nikola Tesla's inventions and theoretical hypotheses, such as AC power and the so-called superluminal waves. He also often declared in public that AC power was unsafe and that the misuse of superluminal waves would bring enormous risks.
He Dishēng had been right. The Superlight Wave Power Station built on Venus had pumped excess energy into the planet's crust, intensifying tectonic activity. The land around Tower Island had risen, the sea had receded, and Venus's landforms and ecosystems had been utterly devastated. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and other disasters had followed one after another.
The Superlight Wave Power Station built on a moon of Saturn had triggered an explosion, forming a massive ice ball in the Saturn System. This had narrowed Jupiter's orbit and sent it closer to the sun, putting Venus, Earth, and Mars—the habitable zone's planets—on the brink of destruction.
How could anyone say Nikola Tesla was as great an inventor as He Dishēng? He was clearly a reckless scientific madman with no sense of awe, and the chief culprit behind the destruction of the Venusians.
He Dishēng believed scientific research and invention were two different things. The former could range without limit, but the latter demanded the utmost caution. After all, the Venusians had only one Solar System, and there were only three planets in its habitable zone.
Ever since the Venus Alliance government publicly admitted that the Superlight Wave Power Stations had caused a series of crises, public opinion had been in an uproar. The government had announced a rescue plan—blowing up Mars, stabilizing the Solar System, extracting genes, uploading consciousness, and surviving the catastrophe—which had once again split public opinion.
The vast majority were pragmatists. Give them a lifeline and hope of rebirth, and they were willing to fight to seize it rather than waste time complaining.
Opponents of the plan were a minority, but their voices rang loud across social media.
Interestingly, though they all opposed Tesla's plan, their beliefs and demands varied widely—sometimes even clashing outright.
Under Venus's current technological capabilities and the plan's arrangements, once Venusians chose to upload all the consciousness in their brains, their bodies would lose all signs of life. In other words, they would die.
Those who opposed the plan all rejected uploading their consciousness, but they had very different reasons for doing so.
Some people with strong religious beliefs felt that everything was ordained by heaven. Uploading consciousness and cloning bodies would profane the gods. The dead would ascend to heaven, so why go to such lengths to disrupt the gods' plan by human means?
Naturalists believed that birth, aging, sickness, and death were natural laws, and that death was an individual matter, unrelated to the group. Disease, traffic accidents, and the destruction of the Solar System were merely different ways to die; the result was the same. Death was death. Don't give me that insipid feel-good talk about preserving the Venusians or protecting the Solar System.
No matter how loud the opposition grew, it would have no real effect on the rescue plan. The Venus Alliance government did not interfere with dissenting voices.
Perhaps believing they had tacit approval, some radical opponents even called for action to stop Mars from being blown up.
Their argument was that Tesla and the scientists at the Venus Academy of Sciences claimed that only blowing up Mars could prevent the habitable zone from being destroyed—but who could guarantee their calculations were correct?
What if Jupiter's orbit wouldn't have changed at all, and Venus could have "made do" with maintaining the ecosystem the Venusians needed? Wouldn't that mean Tesla and the others had directly caused the opponents' deaths by blowing up Mars? That would be murder!
Kill one person to save fifty. It was the same unanswerable philosophical dilemma.
The Venus Alliance was resolute. The Council and government served the vast majority. In a matter of life and death, stabilizing the Solar System and ensuring the survival of the Venusians came first.
The radical opponents refused to give in. They needed a more persuasive leader. In both scientific achievement and personal prestige, He Dishēng was an ideal candidate, fully the equal of Tesla.
And so a polemic by Venus's greatest inventor, He Dishēng, went viral. He wrote:
The government neither needs to nor has the right to blow up Mars. That is my position, and it is also my reflection, as a scientist, on what is called science.
When I was young, like most scientists, I believed the scope of science was far narrower than that of philosophy and theology. But as I grew older and Venusian science and technology continued to advance, the boundaries of science grew increasingly blurred to me.
Someone once asked me if I believed in the gods. I said that if by gods they meant beings who were everywhere and all-powerful, then I did not.
But if they meant a creator, then I could not help but believe. Otherwise, we could not explain why the universe on a grand scale and the particles of the microscopic world were distributed so evenly, or why their structures were so similar. The world in which humanity exists, near or far, large or small, is too uniform, too perfect. It seems more like something that was created.
Now that the Venusians can run programs on computers, set up scenes and characters, build electric cars and robots, and even upload consciousness, I have no reason to reject the following idea:
The world in which the Venusians live, and we ourselves, are a program written and run by a "creator"—a game he designed.
If what we call reality is actually virtual, then the creator should also know about the crisis we face. If he has not grown tired of us, then the Solar System and the Venusians will not be destroyed.
The so-called rescue plan would require us to go to great lengths, and to take lives in the name of helping the majority.
But for the creator, it might be very simple. He would only need to press the reset button.
He Dishēng's influence was indeed extraordinary. The rescue plan forced through by the Venus Alliance Council was once again thrust into the spotlight. Though the number of opponents was small, the situation was growing worse by the day. To untie a knot, one must find the person who tied it. Speaker Kent and Dean Abbott went to visit He Dishēng.
He Dishēng understood perfectly well why they had come. He spoke first. "Tesla's Superlight Wave Power Stations created this crisis. I believe his so-called rescue plan is an even greater crisis. You should stop the Mars explosion plan."
"Mr. He Dishēng, this is no time to assign blame. Besides, Tesla only proposed the theory; we were the ones who built the power stations. The pursuit of science has always been accompanied by risks," Speaker Kent said. "If we take no action to resolve this crisis, we'll all be destroyed—unless you have a better solution."
"If you came here only to go around in circles about measures and solutions, then we'll have a hard time reaching an agreement. I think I should tell you about my reflections on science and the gods over the years."
As he spoke, He Dishēng switched on a holographic screen and laid out his reasoning. In recent centuries, Venusian scientific research had made tremendous advances.
Elegant, concise equations and laws had been discovered. The vast, all-encompassing world could be explained through mathematical logic and recreated with computer code.
From images to videos and then virtual reality, science's power of "simulation" had advanced to the point where it was impossible to tell the real from the fake.
Dean Abbott understood He Dishēng's idea. He realized that the discussion would indeed be difficult to resolve, because they understood science differently. With that in mind, Abbott followed He Dishēng's line of thought and asked:
"If the creator you speak of really exists, can you be sure he'll save the Solar System and the Venusians on his own if we do nothing?"
"Why wouldn't he? He can decide for himself whether to blow up Mars. He might even have a simpler way to stabilize Jupiter's orbit," He Dishēng replied.
"I'm at a loss for words. Fine, let's go with what you're saying. Could you describe what you imagine the creator to be like?" Abbott asked helplessly.
It was a fascinating question. If the creator had the power to make any scene in three-dimensional space and create any kind of life, what would he do?
He Dishēng believed the creator would build a huge, stable structure and set it in motion, then create all kinds of living things inside it, because that would be fun.
A beetle, a dinosaur, or even Thanos—any living creature could be chosen as the protagonist of a particular round.
But after changing the game's setting and protagonist from one round to the next, the creator might suddenly realize that being a spectator was boring. Why not take part directly?
The creator would get the greatest pleasure by joining the virtual reality game he had designed as a player. So the protagonist among all the things he created would probably be a "special edition" based on himself. This most intelligent special edition—the creator's own kind—would be humanity.
So the creator's most likely form of existence was a human being!
If our universe were the setting of a virtual reality game, its creator might be a human from another dimension—and his doppelgängers, indistinguishable from real humans, would be scattered throughout the bustling crowds around us.
A poem pieced together from lines:
All know the Azure Emperor brings back spring, —Zhang Gongxiang, Song dynasty
Private wisdom cannot fathom the workings of creation. —Yu Yue, Qing dynasty
To serve as a model for recluses, —Liu Caishao, Song dynasty
I offer you a golden cup beneath the long-tailed star. —Qu Dajun, Qing dynasty
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