Still looking at the console, Anthalmera picked up the headphones and put them on. The pressure on her ears was a comforting, familiar sensation, vaguely painful, but she was used enough to it not to pay much attention. She reached for the videoglasses, untangled the cord distractedly, plugged them in and flipped a switch. As she typed in commands on the simulator, colors flickered before her eyes, making her blink. She leaned back on her chair, taking a deep breath while the image stabilized.

This was her world, all hers. It was only two months ago that she bought the simulator. She had seen an article about them in a science magazine, and by the end of it there was no question that she wanted one. "You can't always interpret everything," she thought, partly about herself, partly about her world. The simulator was a world of raw complexity and interaction, not one of sense. She delved into the complexity almost religiously, feeling the structures, the growing organization.

A harsh click brought her back to what she was doing. In a matter of seconds, her eyes had gotten accustomed to the unreal shapes and colors, the odd sense of perspective, and her ears to the inhuman sounds that the machine produced.

She slowed down the simulation somewhat, her fingers barely touching the keys on the console, and routinely adjusted the color and brightness mappings. The world, as she liked to think of it, had definitely changed, grown, since the last time. Some structures had started to appear and develop, from large clusters of data she would have called galaxies, to interlocking patterns so small that the machine could barely handle them. Shapes were dancing in front of her eyes, while she zoomed in and out by massive factors, exploring. "This is a Universe, not just a world," she thought proudly, and in her head she could almost hear herself pronounce the capital 'U'. She smiled.

This was her first real success with the simulator. In two months of trying, seeing, and learning from her mistakes, she had managed to create a set of rules, initial conditions and generators, that had evolved into this. It was wonderfully unrelated to humanity, to the real world; it stood on its own, and yet she was allowed to explore it, if not to materially enter it. "How did a dull girl like me ever get the chance to play God?", she asked herself ironically. She didn't think of herself as dull, of course, but her acquaintances (she wouldn't have thought of them as friends except maybe in her more optimistic moments) most likely had that idea of her. Anthalmera shrugged.

She felt tired. Consciously, she relinquished her attention from the simulator, and let her thoughts wander. There was so much to see in her Universe, so much of it she'd never see. She had wondered, when she first read about simulators and what they did, if they could ever be accurate and complex enough for some form of life to appear within a virtual world. She was fascinated by the idea.

Complex structures were appearing already at an almost alarming rate, as intrincate as a cloud or maybe even a star in the real world, but the system would have to run weeks or months still before she could hope for anything resembling life to appear. She pushed a few keys, and what could vaguely be described as a purple twirling cloud appeared in her field of vision and almost immediately vanished, its edges glowing, accompanied by a pulsating, ethereal sound which lasted a few seconds. Looking for the highly organized patterns of life wasn't going to be left entirely to luck and intuition; it would be fairly easy to program the machine to do the bulk of searching, if she was able to express the concept of self-replication in the simulator's rather arcane programming language. She was confident she could do it, but not today. She was too tired. "And too much of a procrastinator too," she thought to herself, with a hint of a smile.

Closing her eyes for a moment, she switched the machine back into non-visual mode and took off the videoglasses and headphones, leaving them on the console still plugged in. She took another deep breath and opened her eyes. The light in the room was too bright, and the whole view somewhat lacked depth, but it only took a couple seconds for her eyes to adjust to it again. It was, after all, the world she had lived in for 19 years, almost 20 now. Setting the machine to its full processing speed, she rose from the chair. Her world would still be raw and young when she would look at it next, but the evolution would certainly be noticeable.

She quickly brushed her teeth, feeling a little hungry but too tired to eat. She walked to her bed, slipped off her clothes, which she let fall on the floor, and crawled, naked, into her bed. "I need to do laundry," she thought as she closed her eyes, a purple twirling cloud dancing there for a split second. Then she fell asleep.

Anthalmera sat by the simulator for the first time after four days. She was a little tired, but in an excellent mood. Of the three classes she'd had today, one had been fairly interesting, even though her teacher seemed to be convinced that the students were unable to grasp the concepts of his lesson. At least he knew what he was talking about. Still, even in that class, she found herself thinking about her problem, going from the general approach to the details, and back again, making them fit together.

"Can I borrow your notes from yesterday, Anth?". Andrew's question, directed at her, took her by surprise. She had smiled back, fumbled in her bag for a moment, and handed him the notes. "I won't need them till thursday, at least." Andrew was always nice to her and regularily made visible efforts to start a conversation, but he never seemed to find much more to say than platitudes. She imagined showing him the simulator and its contents, and her search program once she finished it, and he'd nod and gape in admiration, and then possibly make some comment about how alive she sounded when she was talking about it. No, of course, she wouldn't show it to him, what an idea.

She pressed a button, and some letters appeared on the machine's display. Life, what was life? It was not enough to look for patterns, two stars can be as alike, and as different, as two humans, yet one is alive and not the other. She had to find criteria precise enough to distinguish one from the other, yet general enough to deal with the un-earthlike universe of her simulator. She had her ideas, though. The problem had occupied most of her attention for the last week, and the different pieces were finally fitting together in enough detail to start implementing them. Designing--programming--was not just a matter of method; it engaged her creativity, and as such made it hard for her to concentrate on anything else. "Perhaps if I organized myself, I'd be more productive," she had thought many times. It just didn't work that way.

As she started typing, she realized how the search algorithms would be hard to test. If her world had any data representing life, and she knew where it was, she could check her program against it, but then she wouldn't need the program at all. She interrupted her work often, checking how long she'd been there, or how much she'd typed. The sensation of working at something was almost awkward as she watched it grow at her fingers and in her mind, under her control, but with a logic of its own. "And I'm only starting," she thought. Then she forgot about it, and was able to concentrate on the work.

She was hungry. She realized she hadn't eaten since her quick lunch on campus. When she came back three hours earlier, she had immediately gone to sit at the simulator, instead of making herself a sandwich as usual. The core of the search engine was done, although it still needed some testing and fine-tuning, but the interface was missing. She started an automatic profiling package that would analyze her code, finding inconsistencies and possible optimizations, and left the computer work alone for a bit. "This place needs some cleaning up," she thought for a moment, remembering how her mother was going to visit sometime soon, and how she'd inevitably say those words, with a tired voice. She relegated the thought to the back of her mind; "I'll do that later." Looking through the cupboards, she settled on spaghetti, which she prepared quickly, against the directions, in the microwave. It tasted okay. "I bet Andrew calls again, pretending not to understand something I wrote." No, he wouldn't be cynical enough to pretend, he just wouldn't try very hard to understand it on his own. Or maybe she could call David and Charlotte, and see if they wanted to go see a movie; the last one she'd seen wasn't very good. But not today, it was already late and she wanted to finish with the search program.

Typing, testing, finding mistakes and correcting them, it was a routine which she was comfortable with. From time to time she would move away from the console, pacing around the room, until some piece of the puzzle fell into place, then she'd go over it once more before making a change, or adding a test. She put a CD in the player, and found herself paying too much attention to the music, which she liked and knew note by note. When it was over, she didn't start another one. "I won't get anything done otherwise." Still, it was coming out better than she had expected, and she felt confident that her code was solid.

"This will take forever to run," she thought. The processing power of the simulator was immense, orders of magnitude higher than anything that could have been imagined just a few years before. Still, searching through massive amounts of data for the intrincate patterns of life was a much more complex task than repetitively applying local rules to run the simulation, and also not one the machine's processors had been designed for.

She would just leave it running all night, and find the results by the next morning, if it was done. She would also need to start thinking about the upcoming exams, and re-read all her notes from class. "This is done," she decided, and typed in a command to run it, and another one to freeze the simulation, dedicating all the machine's resources to the search.

It was late, but she was too excited to feel tired. Andrew hadn't called, nor had anyone else, and she was suddently aware of the silence that surrounded her. At 2am, it was only to be expected. She forced herself to pick up all her books, papers and CDs, and placed them on the appropriate shelves. Then, unable to find a good excuse not to, she went to bed.

The phone ringing woke her up, and she realized from the light seeping through the blinds that she had overslept. She didn't have any classes that morning, but she had planned to study. "It must be my parents," she thought, "who else would call at this time." And it was. Making a deliberate effort to sound awake and cheerful, she told her mother all that was new (and some that was old) about her classes, teachers, friends, flute lessons, and asked her how things were going at home. Her father had just fired his secretary at work, which had been some of a strain for a peaceful man like him; her older brother was making arrangements for his upcoming wedding. All was going fine. Did she go out much? No, of course, her mother knew that but she still had to ask. She mentioned a book she had started reading, which her mother would probably like too, and for a moment wanted to tell her of the simulator and the results she was expecting from it, but decided against it. Her parents never liked it much that she, a girl, spent so much time with computers. "Thanks," she said almost mechanically, when her father, who had picked up the other receiver, wished her good luck with her exams. "I'll call you back when I'm done with them."

A quick glance at the simulator's screen showed that it was not done searching, but it would be within two to three hours. She could study for a while and leave early to eat on her way to class. Grabbing her notes, as well as one thick textbook, she sat on the bed, her back against the wall with a pillow on her lap, and started to read them. It was not too hard to understand, but there was so much to remember that it became blurred if she let her attention wander. "I'll probably forget most of this after the exam anyway," she thought.

By the time the alarm sounded, she had gone through all her notes for one class, and had just started with those for another, less interesting, one. The sound, deep and reverberating like a gong, made her drop her papers, push the pillow away, and rush to the simulator. It meant success. She reminded herself, in the back of her mind, that it could also be a false alarm, a mistake in the program, but she was too excited to dwell on it. She typed one command, then another, and the machine told her what kinds of patterns it had found, how fast they were evolving, and most importantly, where to find them. The transition from the real world to the simulator's was brutal, as she hardly gave herself a second to accomodate her eyes to the videoglasses, and started keying in the coordinates to one of the most promising spots before the image had even stabilized. Everything was still; she pressed a key, and the simulation resumed at a speed suitable for viewing.

Life, it was there, in front of her eyes. It was quite unlike anything one could find on Earth, but there was no mistake, it was life. About as complex as algae, or mushrooms, she saw molecules combine, and whole organisms appear, grow, split into uncountable little pieces, which would then merge with others, re-combine, fade away. "This could be my call to fame," she thought for a moment, and, reassured by the thought as well as by the certainty that she would keep it to herself, she went on exploring. The variety of forms in her world was astounding; if her world inside the machine hosted all this much, and this after just a few weeks of simulation, how many stars and planets in the universe were home to species possibly as advanced, or more, than humans? Despite the dreams, hopes and fears of so many, the limit set by the speed of light made it unlikely that this question would ever be answered. "I wish I'd paid more attention to those biology classes," she thought, watching a rough-edged egg-like shape undulate and grow.

It was time to go, and she reluctantly took off the videoglasses, leaving them next to the keyboard. She left the simulation running, but at a moderate speed. Given enough time and luck, the lifeforms she'd found might evolve into fully-fledged animals, plants, and--who knows--maybe beings advanced enough to communicate, to build civilizations, to love ... "and to destroy themselves, eventually," she thought. Anthalmera believed firmly that nothing, be it a structure, a trend, or an idea, lasts forever. But she had too much left to discover to worry about that at the moment. "I need to run," she thought, grabbing her bag and keys.

She arrived in class just in time, when most people were already sitting down but the teacher hadn't started speaking. Unobtrusively, she sat at the back of the classroom, took out her pen and paper, and re-read the last few lines from the previous lesson. Her thoughts kept going back to her world, so much richer now than she had thought possible. Had the designers of the simulator even realized that this could happen? The article she had read was mostly concerned with the physical aspects of the virtual world and the design issues of the simulator's specialized processors, the software, the interface between the machine and the user. She could only guess, but surely the idea must have occurred to them at some point, but they hadn't pursued it, too unrealistic. "Anth?" Andrew's voice called, quietly. She looked up; he was sitting in front of her with her notes and was giving them back to her. "Thanks," they both said at the same time, which elicited a smile from her. The teacher had almost filled the blackboard, and she took notes quickly, before he erased it.

After the class finished, she caught herself running in the corridor. She crossed Charlotte and waved to her without stopping. The movie could wait. Before leaving the building, she bought some cookies at a vending machine, which she ate while walking back. "Life, indeeed, who could have believed this?"

"This must be it," she thought. "One of these moments you want to come back to, afterwards when you realize how bland your life is in comparison." For hours she had been watching the creatures inside the simulator, their movements, their reactions, how they organized themselves and adapted to their world. She wasn't sure, but she would have rated their evolutionary level to be comparable to that of some insects, maybe ants. The rules and logic of their environment, though, had little in common with anything that could be found on Earth, and she wasn't trying to analyze them, but to get used to them.

The dilemma was that the simulation was just as irreversible as real time, and each time she made the machine skip through whole eras, she knew she could never go back to them. But she wasn't going to spend days and months looking at primitive algae-like forms when animals, for lack of a better word, were just a command away. Sure, the computer could take snapshots of regions of the virtual universe, and even record a few hours' worth of the its evolution, but recording the system's state every single step of the simulation would have taken a computer the size of the Earth, if possible at all. "If I miss some crucial moment, it's lost forever," she thought. "Just like in real life."

She decided to concentrate on the three most promising places where life had been found. Closing her eyes for a moment, she made the machine skip forward a few thousand generations. As she had expected, little had changed in either of the three worlds. In the first, those tiny creeping bugs had expanded over a much larger portion of their world, and they had separated into several species, some larger than others, some living in large colonies while others had no apparent organization. In the other two, only vegetable life had flourished in a variety of forms.

For hours, Anthalmera sat by the simulator, her fingertips lightly pressed against the keys, typing in commands, searching, watching and hearing, going from one place to another, oblivious to the world around her. Every so often she would skip ahead in the machine's time. Before her eyes, slowly but surely, evolution took place, species appeared and died out, climates changed.

With a hint of tension, she pressed a key, skipping another three thousand generations of the dominant lifeform's time. The moment she opened her eyes, she realized that the world had changed. Nothing looked the same. She was looking at a desert world, the abundance of life was gone. The air had changed, and it was virtually silent except for some static-like sounds. Stepping back to observe the region of space around this planet (if one could call a 4-dimensional shape with no inside or outside, which remained together thanks to the laws of physics particular to this universe, a planet), she found no evidence of a collision with another body. The surface, on the other hand, was covered with the remains of what could only be artificial constructions.

She had been too late. At the cosmic scale she had been watching the planet's evolution, the rise and fall of a technological civilization had been as fast, as intense and unexpected as an explosion. And she had the remains to explore. A quick inspection didn't reveal the slightest sign of any remaining life. Thinking for a moment that some intelligent beings could have protected themselves and survived in shelters, she ran her search program on the planet, with negative results.

Almost trembling with excitement, she decided to focus on the constructions, searching for art, books, computers, drawings, information in any form. The buildings were in a surprisingly good condition, and had no inner walls or compartments; most of them were quite large and contained machinery she did not recognize, apparently still functioning. Examining them more closely, she could identify some of the bulkier, sturdier machines as power generators, operating on principles she could easily understand, as they were a direct consequence of the laws of physics particular to this world, which she had designed.

But there was no trace of art, writing, or anything that could give her an idea what had happened, other than the machines. Taking a closer look at the more intrincate ones and their internal structure, she quickly came to the conclusion that they were computers. The electronics on which they were based were new to her, but computer design was her speciality, and she was able to identify the processing units, the memory banks and the encodings they used. Even in this world, binary logic was still the natural foundation to base computers on.

Some of them had relatively simple processors, with a centralized design not unlike that of traditional human computers, and were connected to large racks of storage devices. They were apparently idle. She guessed that they were archives. It wouldn't be easy to examine their contents; the natural way to do that would be physical intervention, but there was no easy way she could even press a button, let alone insert a disk in a machine inside the simulated world. She would have to think of something better.

Another of the computers caught her attention. It stood at the corner of the building, its insides flashing with activity. The design puzzled her. It was decentralized to an extent she had never seen even in the most advanced parallel computers, like her own simulator. Memory and processing units were not separate parts; instead, they were coupled, tightly interwoven in a net of incredible complexity. She examined the interface between this processing mass and the user. Standing to the side of the computer, it was a hollow, vaguely round apparatus, directly connected to the computer. One of the panels inside was paved with symbols, and she suspected it was sensitive like a keyboard. The other side was a rough surface, covered with an irregular but intrincate array of little thorns and prongs.

She wondered what it felt like, for the creatures that had designed these machines, to be there, their senses connected to the devices like she was to the simulator. In a matter of seconds, the solution presented itself to her. She could program the simulator's own interface to show, interpreted as shapes and sounds, the stream of data that was flowing inside the alien computer. Cutting across levels, she would explore a virtual world inside a virtual world. In a flash, she visualized an infinite collection of nested universes, simulated one within another. "This box here in my room contains a whole world, including its own computers, which contain whole worlds with... who knows."

She twitched in her chair, her fingers flying on the keyboard. Building the search engine had familiarized her with the inner workings of the simulator, and this time the code almost typed itself, the solution to each problem she considered appearing immediately to her. She couldn't have said how long it took, typing blindly at first, then making the machine superimpose the contents of the screen in a corner of her field of vision. Without stopping to check if her program worked, she activated it, feeding the alien computer's signal, barely decoded, into her videoglasses and headphones.

She blinked. All she could see and hear was static, loud cracks and shapeless colored stains moving too fast. Something was wrong, and then she knew what. Typing blindly again, she added a short decoding section to the program, and added a line to disable the normal display of the virtual world. She pressed a key. The simulator evaluated the new code, and her vision cleared.

The movement was jerky, she had no control on where to go and what to look at, the colors were all wrong and the perspective was so odd she almost felt sick, but it worked. She was standing in front of a house, beneath a tree with large, blue leaves. To her right, the road, green with glistening yellow spots, was crowded with ordinary cars. Holding her breath, she saw a man and a woman, the woman much taller than the man, walking towards the door under the bright morning sun.

The image shifted, and she was in a room inside the house. The walls were covered with posters, which she recognized. The bed, unmade, was strewn with books and CDs. And, sitting in front of an all too familiar computer was a tall, slender girl with long, straight hair which appeared purple, wearing headphones and videoglasses: herself. Still holding her breath, she lifted her hand, and watched the image do the same, a moment later. She gasped and looked up, and the view followed her. She felt observed. The doorbell rang, immediately followed by a cracking buzzing noise coming from the headphones. She saw the figure --herself--turn around and back, throw her hands on the console and shake her head. The doorbell rang again. Without stopping to think, she reached behind the simulator and flipped a switch, turning it off. The image flickered and vanished; the simulated world was gone for good. She ripped the cord of her videoglasses and threw them on the table.

Almost surprisingly, the world around her still existed. She forced herself to pause for a second, took a deep breath, and slowly looked around the room. The bed, unmade, was strewn with books and CDs. The morning sun, shining through the window, made her realize she had been up all night. She felt hungry. And her parents--it was them, she had seen them--were standing outside, waiting. With a sigh, she rose from the chair, ran her fingers through her hair, and went to open the door.