The Rings of Elysium

How much is a Trillion? (And don·t shake off the 200,000,000,000 just yet)

Some of yu have read in my dream journals that i can eat a universe for breakfast every morning and still make it to work on time , and scoffed . Here·s how yr hard-earned tax dollars are being spent .

Let·s say yu had to do a skit , for drama class , like a pop quiz that yu only had 24 hours to study for , and yu wanted to turn that into solid gold .

So yu practice the skit with yr friends . The first time , yu mull over the lines , and for the first dozen times yu try a few different ways of doing it , and from there , trying out what works and doesn·t in various combinations .

It·s really important that yu get a good grade , so yu tell yr friends yu·ll unlock the doors as soon as yu·re done . The first twenty-five iterations are kind of fun , and the next 25 iterations are less fun and more routine after that . By 75 iterations yu·ve all been repeating the same lines for hours , and by 100 iterations the words are sickly stiff in yr mouth . After a hundred yr friends start getting sick of it and start being snotty , and by 150 they·re already planning on back-stabbing yu and stealing the keys . Oh , no can do guys , the locks will only open on a perfect take .

By 300 yu·ve tried every combination yu can think of , in varying lengths of short quips to long and drawn-out diatribes . Beyond that yr friends start ad-libbing , and after assailing yrself against the rocks of exhaustion , after 500 yu start ad-libbing too .

Yu find that trying out each others· characters and trying new things leads to micro-insights , so yu spend another hundred repetitions getting into yr characters· motivations . Okay , so if yu create a kind of round-robin style rotation for new and original roles , the next fifty aren·t really a pain , and the next fifty after that . By around 800 everybody is sick of each other again , and yu·re all out of ideas , so yu bust open the costume department and start playing with some props . That·s fun for another couple hours , and by 900 yu·re ready to start dipping yr friends in pools and taking the ladders out just to see what happens . It·s not like any of yu can die , yu just keep coming back at the end of the skit .

Yu would think that once yu got to 1000 it would be easy to start roping some blocks off and designing some cubes , yet yu·ve already tried everything yu can think of and yu·re all out of ideas .

By 10,000 yu·re getting into the episodes , the Christmas Episode, the Summer Episode, the Spring Break episode, the Hallowe·en episode , with guest roles , celebrity appearances , the Tokyo Episode, the Mumbai Episode, the Dubei Episode ...

By 100,000 yu·re trying out the best of the list of Episodes , in alternate-world scenarios , what if Washington was invaded, what if Antarctica melted, what if there were Mice on Mars and they drove Bikes , what would it look like then? .

By 200,000 yu·re coming up with whole series . If each of the alternate worlds had its own syndicated television show , what would the 300th anniversary episode look like? . If Pirate Island were a video game , what would the DLC for the fourth installment of a spinoff series look like? . Remember , fifty-two iterations was enough to make a normal human sick . So we have lots of time to explore these kinds of scenarios .

At 300,000 , because each rep of 100,000 is about a year in real time , all of yu are sick to death of coddling each other in order to work together , so yu·ve been doing competitions until yu·ve been ready to slit each others· throats over who sits in the froggy chair this round .

By 500,000 yu can navigate every hallway in the building with yr eyes closed . Yu·ve peated and repeated and repeated the same scenarios so many times yu can do them backwards . Yu can do them backwards and switch directions mid-way , having memorized by rote every letter and waveform . Exhausting yrselves on the absolute limits of cat-fighting led to torpor which led to ennui which led to fatalism . Having no choice , yu turn to yr frienemies and devise means of keeping the boredom at bay .

In the stretch between 700,000 - 800,000 yu·ve all mastered the art of dragon-boating , performing fifty reps one way , and then fifty reps in reverse , and then fifty reps forwards , and then fifty reps back , like yu were the star rowers in some kind of lethal-stakes river rafting competition from Hell .

900,000 is a box of glitter , as yu start looking for all the things yu haven·t done . Well , i guess i didn·t try this , well , yu never got to do that . Like the first hundred thousand , these start off as individual scenarios one by one , and then move into pairings and doubles , and then the partials , and then the group activities , and by around 950,000 yu·re dressing up the space itself in the leftover ribbons from the ribbons iteration and plastic guts from the guts iteration .

Then , yu realize that , if all yu tried and tested adventurers wanted to try a time reverse of the whooole stack , it wouldn·t turn out symmetrical , because at both 000,000 and 900,000 the granularity is fine on the left and coarse on the right .

So yu go to start 1,000,000 off at the end point of the previous stack , except yu didn·t write down the orders yu did things in as yu were doing them , so yu have to reconstruct everything yu all did . And now yu·re a hundred iterations over the line and the whole million is ruined , so yu start planning how yu·re going to counter-perform a fourth million when at the end of the third million yu·re going to need to unlearn the steps of the orders yu did things in .

yu·re doing reps of ten or twelve at a time , forwards , backwards , performing long iterative chains of nearly-identical iterations , more like each scenario were 3D film frames ,

we·re about 1/1,000,000th of the way there .

After 1,000,000 , when every possible scenario and context for the skit have been skot, and their permutations, and their permutations· permutations, and each the generations from each, and the worlds they inhabit, and even a few gleaning insights into things never meant to be imagined , there is nowhere to go except back to the starting conditions . What if the lines read skit instead of skot? . Would the play be the same if we ran the script thru a few language translators? . What if we were presenting to the math teacher instead of the drama teacher? . And from there , the entire stack all the way up to a million , for each unique set of starting conditions .

Assuming yu did attempt to pull off four universes rowing back and forth across time spans of entire years at a time , let·s say that there were some errors or inconsistencies in five or six out of a million skits , so yu do it again , and generate enough leads that yu can justify origins for each of the original starting conditions , which allows yu to pull off some clever footwork during the third universe complex that should make a fourth and fifth universe complex . Fifty-two iterations was a punishment , yet a million seemed impossible and then there we were , so .

At 20,000,000,000 iterations , we·re only about 1/50,000th of the way there . With exponential and logarithmic steps like this , it·s easy to block off this many for this thing , that many for that thing , so at this point it becomes very possible to start seeing collapses of entire stacks of hundreds or thousands of iterations at a time as habitualization propels the reflexes forward even tho there·s nothing to attack here . The time scales of human lives are meaningless at this point , as every one of the drama class has been the master of their own verse and practiced it until they started putting out bouquets of their own hateful opposites .

This process or any portion or block size would then be repeated like a machine gun until everything down to the host·s nervous shakes and addiction cravings are exactly replicable every single time , and then another 100,000 to make sure it sticks .

Grip Click Vroom

Now , here·s where things start to get a little bit screwy . Because there is a limit to how many electrons can pass thru a 10nm gold circuit at a time , there·s a maximum speed as far as processing power . Memorizing so many identical movements and counter-movements would take years if not decades , so in the modern world people tend to offset their processing to computers . Hence , the more detail there is in the environment , the longer it takes to render .

At the kinds of speeds that would be necessary to demonstrate billions of iterations , the environment would necessarily have to take a hit . The faster the replay speed , the less people look at the walls , the tools , the project in their backyard . At the kinds of speeds necessary to reach 100,000,000,000 iterations at a stretch , there is no time for talking , for playing , or for stopping to smell the flowers , everything and everyone is go go go , busy busy busy . Much like modern humans . Mmhm .

The catch here is that it is neccessary to spend all those years gearing up from thousand to million to billion , yet the paradox is that one has to stop one render in order to shift gears into the next speed category . Failing to do so could result in having one·s soul sheared off as the necessary cultural anchor points haven·t been habitualized , turning the person into a mindless automaton that gets agitated if its reality tunnel is bumped in any way .

Which is what we witnessed happen to the Triplets after the Abbey autoprosh tried to rev everyone up to the same level , without knowing that twenty years of oneiric training was necessary to achieve these results .

At speeds above the electron limit , yu would have to be selecting for specific futures and trying to induce anomalous perception , rather than producing iterations and selecting for best results . That means playing and unplaying the same identical scenario over and over and over again until it makes yr soul sick enough to gulch yr ink sac into yr best friend·s brand new ride .

Of course , from here we start to get into Megastructures and the People Who Commission Them , which is a topic still Classified , So .

But Who·s Counting?

Postulation: At Render Count 1 i was a plain and simple human child , born to be wild . At Render Count 1.2Trillion i had been selected pre-birth and genetically engineered . Taking into account the Cybernetic Curtain of the Dreamtime , getting bumped up all the way to the render limit would have created a shaky second iteration from thin air , and then once the devils started moving around track segments , that would have made the render stack impossible , which would have killed the second iteration and bumped me up to Render Count 3 while still living my first life , which would have baked-in the karma from my treacherous shadow , while as a literal human i have literally never done any of these capitol offences they keep coming at me for , even tho there·s nothing to attack here . And then they carved up my dreams and sold them to Magic the Gathering . It really was a really traumatic process . I can assure yu that i have absolutely infinite reason to be bitter .

DihTech did a Kra-Si done for me as a birth chart . Because the Iteration count was greater-than 1 , OmniTech did a prosh hose . Because the Iteration Count was 999999 , the Federation started weaving in their Mentat training when i was in grade school . By the age of 6 (1991 AD) i was being tested for a Gifted school program , they started cloning me en masse by the time of Dolly the Sheep (1999 AD) , and then DARPA contracted [REDACTED] to build the Dream Transmission technology necessary to bring me up to millions-to-one (2017 CE) . Billions-to-one was a globalization free-for-all leading up to the End Of Time Lab materializing on the other side of the Veil of Time (2020 CE) , and Trillions-to-one was done by the HahaNanaHanaNaha when we got to Thunder Home (2022 CE) .

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