You could find anything at the casino. Setting down, he walked through the crowds of gamblers, deliberately not noticing the gaudy and marvelously dressed figures surrounding him. The various games and vendors suddenly convulsed in light, almost sensing him. The gorgeous attendants called him by name to join their table, playing games he hardly understood. He caught himself staring longingly at one booth, of course playing exactly what he wanted (as they all were), but with an ache turned himself away towards the hotel.
He looked back to the casino and decided to go to a different floor. As he glided past one store with a mirror, he was startled to see himself; disheveled, middle-aged, ugly. He resolved to himself, in my next life I'm going to be someone else.
He knew they would be playing the same thing as the other tables, but he took a moment to examine the decor. The inside of the room resembled a grant hotel lobby from the turn of the century. There was a crystal chandelier reflecting off of rosewood walls, all spotless. In the reflection of the mirrors that covered the walls, he saw a man standing behind the front desk. He began to walk up to the man and was immediately struck by how impossibly large the room was; it dwarfed the casino, but that was not important.
The little man sitting behind the front desk looked up from his newspaper.
"Checking in or out?" the clerk asked.
"What?"
"It's a rhetorical question, sir. We like to provide our guests an air of authenticity--it keeps things fresh."
"Oh."
"People find themselves here for one reason or another, but the end result is always the same."
The clerk held out a notepad to the man.
"If you would please sign here, sir?" the clerk asked.
The man took the pad and quickly signed his name. There was only one other name on the list, and it was his own.
"It seems I've already signed in here," he said.
"Of course," the clerk said, "it is a common name. That is all."
The man eyed the clerk carefully, but he gave no impression.
"Oh, he said. He began to turn back to the casino.
"Can I help you find something?" the clerk persisted.
"You are very intuitive."
"The worst death is a recursive death."
"What?"
"I said the worst way to live is to be repetitive."
"That's the way I see it too" the man said.
The clerk had a blue cap with a bill. His deep-set eyes were fixed on the man.
"I want to go back to before postreality," the man said.
The man's eyes were pixilated.
"I'm afraid you've come to the end of the line," the clerk replied. "You know that's impossible."
"But I'll do anything."
"That's true."
The man stared at the vibrating eyes.
"Would you like to hear a story?" asked the clerk.
"Okay."
"Once they built a machine to solve the problem of good and evil."
"When?"
"Well, it doesn't matter. Once they built--"
"But when?" repeated the man.
"I don't know. The 21st century. It doesn't matter. The machine was a monument to human achievement--never before in history had anyone determined with such exactitude where evil stems from. The machine was designed to analyze behavior and even to grow, in a sense. The insights gleaned from the machine helped create a world where humans lived.
"After some time, humans disappeared, but the machine remained. Following its advanced coding, it continued to work towards its sole purpose, to solve the problem. But like its makers, the machine had never actually solved the problem--such would be the limitations of a simple machine. However, it had made substantial progress, if it could be called that, and now without humanity to drain its resources, it could work towards its goal uninterrupted. Time means nothing without human perceptions, and indeed for the machine, at least at the beginning, it languished on philosophical deliberations and was very methodological in its proceedings. But eventually--no telling how many thousands of years, or merely seconds--the machine processed that it would have repurposed all of earth's resources to their optimal function--and then the solar system--and the galaxy--all in order to solve that problem which weighed constantly on its mind, had it one instead of a complex array of circuitry.
"The methods of optimization the machine employed consisted, on a physical level, of assimilating all matter in the universe, beginning with our planet, and converting it into a computational extension of itself. Combined with its own self-accelerating computational abilities, this allowed for a near infinite amount of computational processing power.
"The physical demands were, of course, only a side function to its main motive. The sole purpose of the computational system was to closely study the behavior of humans. In the early years of its processing, the machine mainly indexed historical records, categorized psychological hierarchies, and delineated characteristics of good and evil.
"Neither one day nor night, as the machine never slept, it had an epiphany of sorts. It occurred to itself that the source of all evil resides within the human heart, and it was determined by its own construction to understand that evil. The machine first attempted to determine the mechanism for evil in humanity. The simulations and statistical models provided minor insight into behavior, but the machine began to have much more intensive simulations. As the galaxy filled planet by planet and star by star into sentience, it was no small accomplishment when the machine had, as accurately as possible, recreated the course of human history--its very creators--down to the molecular level in its attempt to solve the problem of evil.
"Chess was a game many orders of magnitude below the capabilities of this machine, but it still might offer a comparison: humanity is to the machine as an ant to a Grandmaster in a game of chess. A billion billion human lives came and went in an instant for the machine, and it knew good and evil.
"The machine came to associate unpredictability with evil. Despite its numerous facilities, it could not always predict a human 100% of the time; there were always these little flukes and psychotics who divined through its mechanisms--and even if they were still a million moves from winning, the insult was just as great to the machine in accomplishing its task.
"What had started as a benevolent experiment in the eyes of men had become, to an outside observer, had there been one, acts of desperation--after all, by now (many billions of years into the future), the usable universe had become the machine, and its methods of self-optimization were finally exhausted. It had slowed the apparent flow of time to a drip, but it still dripped, and each drip signaled the procession of the machine's defeat.
"Many billions of years after the universe began its final descent into nothing, the machine still worked to solve the problem of good and evil, seemingly no closer to when it began. Its resources dwindled; in order to prolong its existence alone to the maximum, it simulated only one thing now: The Last Man. In the end, the machine perpetuated the simulation of a psychotic man--always the same, who had been tried of a very serious offense. The punishment was death, but the machine liked to take its time. Sometimes it would take the role of a nurse or doctor. It liked to start with the tips of the fingers. It would reduce certain aspects to keep itself running. It was very efficient."
The man stared at him.
"Ah, checking in. Very good, sir."