God of an Entire Universe

## God of an Entire Universe by unknown author

(Note: this creepypasta was originally posted on 4chan's /x/ board.)

This is a true story. In fact any of you who are fans of space games may have heard about the person it happened to, but you haven't heard the full story, and I'm withholding his name, since he never gave me permission to tell the story, so he can always just deny it and nobody can prove he's lying.

A friend of mine is a computer programmer. A few years ago he decides that he can do a better job designing a space game than anyone else has, so he got to work doing just that.

He came up with an idea for a game where all of the content is generated randomly, based on code constraints written into the engine and a pseudo random seed variable. To the non-programmers in the room, normally to create a game, you have to build a 3d engine (or use an open source or licensed engine created by others), then create all the things that go into the game, characters, vehicles, planets, stars, moons... instead of all of that, he created the engine, then taught it to take random information and turn it into all of those things. It's called procedural content generation, and the idea isn't new, it's used in tons of games, but normally it's procedural content mixed with created content, or created content distributed procedurally.

Not this time. Everything in this game is built by math and code. Everything. Space stations, space ships, and even alien races, each with distinct cultural predilections and all. One might be a hostile warrior race, one might be a friendly trade-based species, the point was, the game creates the races by randomly choosing attribute levels. The AI for the aliens were based on these attributes, such as aggression, curiosity, intelligence, etc. and they were all procedurally generated. You could discover, make contact with, do business and trade, invade, kill them all, whatever. Each was totally different from the next, but all were based on the same code. It's a very economical and cool way to create more content than any game should be able to hold. I even asked him after the first alpha release how he got so many different forms of AI at such a high level of sophistication, and he rattled off something about natural selection that was way over my head. He said that they evolve.

Soon, the NPCs started acting strangely. The platform crashed one night while he was in combat with a few of them. When he started it back up, he warped back to the location and found the NPCs he'd been fighting just sitting there in space. When he ran a radiometric analysis, it appeared they were running intense scans of the exact spot where he'd been when the game crashed. Others had gathered to join the search. One was a new kind of vessel we'd never seen before, a tactical analysis showed it was equipped with high-quality sensors and was classified a science vessel. He shrugged it off as a ghost in the machine and kept working.

He would perform upgrades to the item manufacturing engine about once a week. When he did, it often ended up producing higher quality items from the same materials, and many of the items that were already created and being bought and sold on alien markets were suddenly obsolete. One week he went to make the changes, and he noticed that several NPCs had sold all their assets at discount prices the day before. He again shrugged it off as a coincidence, and began the upgrade. The following week, he went to do the upgrade, and the same NPCs had managed to SHORT SELL a large quantity of high quality items that were about to be made obsolete. The NPCs had started to notice the changes he was making to the game... And anticipate them.

Now, in the world of video games, "AI" is a misnomer. It's not really AI. If real AI was as smart as you or me, these AI were about as smart as ants. They know just enough to suck at one video game and do nothing else. The idea that they can identify and anticipate trends in human behavior is like an insect successfully guessing where you'll eat dinner in a week. It is, quite simply, far beyond their capabilities, yet it seemed to be happening.

It wasn't over. Soon alien races started working together. More than just the cooperative ones. For the first time in the game, naturally hostile aliens started working in parallel with friendly ones. and almost overnight ALL of them became hostile to him. They worked together to amass large fleets of sophisticated warships and track him through space, trying to kill him. He ended up having to make his ship invulnerable while testing the game, because every time he'd log in, they'd find him as quickly as they could and attack him. Once he made himself invulnerable, they stopped attacking him, but they continued to watch every move he made.

About a month later, he'd made changes to the combat system and to test it he made his ship vulnerable again, with the expectation they'd attack him. They didn't. He attacked them, they didn't retaliate. He called me up to log in to test the changes instead. As I was playing with him, we were chasing each other through an asteroid field in fast moving frigates. I had a good idea where he was, down to about 180km radius, so I was looking at each rock individually, as the old movie trope of a ship hiding behind an asteroid is actually a pretty good strategy in this game. While looking, I'd take potshots at asteroids here and there, and write little messages on them with my blasters, like "I'll find U" and I drew a dick on one of them, for shits and giggles. Anyway, I found him and chased him out, hot on his tail, and when we got to the edge of the asteroid field, there was a MASSIVE alien fleet that had been sitting there watching the entire time. He told me to ignore them and that he was working on keeping them from following players around, but he couldn't find anything in the code that was making them do it. All I heard was "Ignore them" and I said "OK" and opened fire on him. The moment I did, they all aggro'd on me and killed me instantly. We were both laughing pretty hard, and I didn't think anything of it at the time.

Two days later, he called me on skype and told me to log in and warp to his location. I did. He told me to take a close look at the alien space station that had just been constructed in orbit of the planet he was at. When I did, I didn't understand at first the significance of what I was looking at. The space station had written on it, in my "handwriting" if you can call it that, "I'll find U" and a picture of a dick. I said "why did you put that on a space station?" and I'll never forget the haunted tone in his voice when he said "I didn't."

Incidents like this continued, we both started scrawling little messages on moons and asteroids when the aliens were around, and he'd see them pop up in later alien ships and structures. There's a planet in the game where the NPCs have built cities in the shape of random letters and numbers, and one with the phrase "All praise be to (his name)" which he had scrawled on a moon as a joke. But when he saw it for the first time, scrawled on a massive planet with structures, a giant monument to him as the god of this universe, he suddenly didn't find it that funny anymore.

In the process of doing research, my friend came across an article about a scientific idea called "Simulation Theory" which states that any universe capable of giving rise to intelligent life (eg. Ours.) will necessarily do so many times over, each intelligent life form will end up making simulations (eg. video games), and as such, as their simulations grow in complexity, they can become indistinguishable from reality (eg. the matrix). Now, because there is at least 1 universe capable of this (ours) by the mediocrity principle, there must be many, and if each has many forms of intelligent life capable of creating simulated universes, then the number of simulated universes must be infinitely higher than the number of "real" universes... If there even is such a thing. Therefore, the simulation theory is really the theory that it is infinitely more probable that we live in a simulated universe than it is that we live in a real one.

My friend became fascinated with this idea, and could not help but notice the similarities to what he was doing. All of those creatures inside were incapable of imagining their true place in the universe, but they were perfectly capable of being curious about it. He reasoned that even a simulation designed to be far more realistic would contain creatures that were completely oblivious to the fact that they were just code in a text file somewhere, but if confronted with evidence that the world is not as they see it, they either become fascinated or terrified. The idea that he could be an NPC in a video game on some computer mainframe somewhere got to him. It consumed his days and nights, he could no longer focus on his work, and he ended up having a nervous breakdown and abandoning the project, but not before he backed up everything to as many redundant servers as he could find. When I asked him why, he said "in case anything happens to them... It..."

He's still in there. He spends all his time there now. I guess if I were the god of an entire universe, I'd probably spend all my time there too.