Celestial Differentiator

Within is the core of the planet Screwllum… a planet locked inside a cage formed from countless levers, pistons and gears. The residents of Screwllum call it the “Iron Sun”.

On the origin of machine life, the carbon-based scholars of the Intelligentsia Guild have an interesting conjecture: a cluster of electrons born entirely by chance.

Electric currents ran through the atmosphere and across the ground, and under countless impacts from gravitational and repulsive forces they were split into secondary forms of differing magnitude. According to the scholars' hypothesis, this act is the equivalent of cell division in carbon-based life. Afterward, countless currents randomly produced differing electric potentials through transistor structures that had formed naturally on the planet's surface, and so created the most primitive program. The pleased scholars argued that machines possess a “thought” comparable to that of carbon-based life.

A certain machine scholar objected to this: carbon-based life cannot yet understand the origin of its own life, so what right does it have to argue the matter? The words were barely spoken before the academic world of the universe was shaken. Machine life began to re-examine “carbon-based centrism” and to look into the origin of its own kind.

However, the residents of the planet Screwllum had to halt their steps for a while… because their planet's energy was running out faster than their vein of inspiration. First of all, they needed to find a way for their people to survive.

In the end they decided to carry out a mad plan that ran several Amber Eras ahead of its time: they used the dying planet as fuel to power the Celestial Differentiator. That colossal device, which draws gasps of wonder from all who see it, processed punched paper tape without tiring, and performed its repeated calculations with perfect clarity. Supplied with the energy of planets, the giant machine simulated a hyperstable and utterly real ecosystem. Afterward they would build their new home around this mother star.

The planetary crisis was resolved, and the residents of Screwllum could set their minds at rest. With their unfailing reason, optimism and elegance, they resolved to seek the answer to their own origin by purely rational means.

The vast system is filled with the sound of grinding bearings, and dense rows of sprocket teeth drive the punched paper tape forward to distribute data. One branch leads into many branches, and many branches drive trillions of gears roaring on… Then these branches collapse, time after time, falling into the furnace and returning to silence in the seething core. Over a long stretch of time, the programmed hyper-ecosystem gradually became a magnificent and relatively stable ecosystem. In the end, the conjectures about the origin of machines began to set the residents of Screwllum thinking without pause.

The cast iron structure that keeps the dying star running has once again set their intelligent trains of thought in motion. They will go on pondering and exploring their own origin until the mechanical sun has burned away completely.

The planetary ring bears up everything on the planet Screwllum. How many have ever realized that these densely ranked rectangular slots have written out the truth of the planetary system?

Most of the Screwllum race do not know that the planet Screwllum is a great attempt by inorganic life to investigate its own origin.

Screwllum felt slightly empty. Understanding the operating logic of the planet Screwllum did not even cause any particular fluctuation in his intelligent pulse waveform.

He stood on the broad terrace of his villa and looked up at the planetary engine that had never once stopped. The ring system, with its dense square holes, pierces upward from the far side of the planet. Everything this planet holds up rests upon this ring, turning silently around the engine at its axis, day after day. He had seen the hopelessly absurd nature of this planetary system: a chain of equations of motion in an elegant state, a colossal frozen cylinder… that is the whole of the planet Screwllum, no more and no less.

By his reading of the equations, its first founder intended to explain the origin of the universe as a cellular automaton and its recursion, and the planet Screwllum itself as the result of the game of life.

The Screwllum race and the other inorganic life on the planet act as “cells” within this automaton, and are at the same time cellular automata on a smaller scale. An automaton is always made up of many smaller automatic structures, and one may trace the current back to the smallest components of all the matter that makes up the universe. But what is the smallest component? No one knows. Neither Screwllum nor the first scholar who proposed building the Differentiator knows.

That is why Screwllum feels empty.

Did that scholar's attempt fail? And yet the Differentiator has worked tirelessly for several Amber Eras. Does that not mean that the origin of the Screwllum race, of their mother star, and even of the whole universe can be reduced to that elegant chain of equations? Not quite. Until the hyper-ecosystem collapses completely, the equations cannot be verified.

He swirled a glass of the finest machine oil back and forth, his gaze fixed on the ring that records the truth of the planet. The perforated ring is like a giant screen that never tires, and the late night moonlight passes through that cipher of rectangular holes. Screwllum cannot stop thinking: do the endings of the recursion truly exist? What is the nature of inorganic life… or what is the origin of the universe?

Is he really willing to be no more than a witness to the ideas of his predecessor?

“No,” Screwllum concluded. He decided to go and seek the answer.