They had finally done it, the Quantum Drive was up and running… the thing they had been promising everyone, the thing that was going to save them all. Only it had not been what everyone had imagined it to be, but it was so much more. At least in their eyes it was.

They had promised that it would carry mankind to new worlds, worlds never before imagined. They had promised that it would transport them from this dying planet, a planet that by recent estimate had less than 16 weeks to live. They had offered hope to a desperate world, and they had given their entire beings to seeing it through, to creating a way out. Of course, there was still a massive logistics problem to negotiate, but the authorities had been managing that for a while now.

Everyone had been gathered into processing centers, waiting for their chance to get on board the massive spacecraft they imagined was waiting to deploy. People had actually imagined many things since they’d heard the words Quantum Drive. Rumors and speculations had been going wild.

Some thought there were many ships, waiting just below them, ships the government had been building in secret underground hangar bays for years… “Humanity’s Escape Rafts” they called them. Others imagined that they had been building some sort of Mothership out in space, or perhaps on the moon. After all, there had been many blackouts, on space-based media, on people probing to closely at what might be up there in the night sky. Still there were those who dared to dream even bigger. A star-gate of some sort, or perhaps a trans-dimensional wormhole, like some sort of Quantum Mirror. Such ideas had been all the rage in late 20^th century media, and wormholes were hardly science fiction anymore. Though there had never been a successful crossing of one before, at least not as far as anyone had known. Perhaps the wildest ideal of them all had been the closest to the truth after all. The ideal that they had figured out how to deconstruct and reconstruct matter with some sort of beam technology. Theoretically, allowing them to store everyone in something like a time capsule, until a new home could be found. This way they would only need a modest sized ship, with enough resources to keep a crew going for however long it might take to find that promised land. Then everyone would be re-materialized in the new world.

Well there wasn’t any ship, or any wormhole, or even any transporter beams… the truth was, the Quantum Drive was more like a disk drive, one capable of storing so much more than several billion human’s worth of data. It was a computer unlike any the world had ever dreamed of. In only a few moments, it could simulate an entire universe teaming with life, being born and then dying off. In the hour it had been tasked with doing so, it ran over a thousand such simulations. With countless worlds and countless lifeforms, all beginning and ending as they would in any reality.

They had been sure to program it to run each simulation to its own conclusion, there was after all a morale implication to ending a simulation prematurely. Besides, it only ever took a few moments to run a simulation. In that short time all of creation could be measured and observed.

They had completed their task. Now would come the unfortunate business of revealing this… “Exotic,” solution to the people. Yes, they could be saved, but only by downloading their consciousness into a computer. Moreover, from the outside looking in, their life would have ended the very same instant they were downloaded. Those were the optics, because that was simply the nature of the simulation, the nature of the machine.

They would live out their entire lifetime in an instant, though it would not seem so to them. No, in fact they would experience every second, just as they would have in their original bodies, unaware that their new bodies were even digital.

There was a buffering system of sorts, to suspend them long enough to send an entire group to a single starting point in a single reality, about 100,000 across all facilities. Logistically they could probably process around 2.5 million people a day, almost 20 million a week. In 16 weeks, the country could process over 3 billion people, so they probably only needed about 12, even with the refugees. They had shared all their research with scientist in other countries, working with other governments, who were developing drives of their own in tandem. It had been a cooperative effort to save mankind. Each government would likely handle things differently from this point forward, however.

A path forward had already been decided for this one as well. It had been determined that the story about the transporter beam made the most since, and the government had been working on this plan from the start. Perhaps they even had a hand in putting the idea out there. The facilities had already been equipped with the technology to vaporize the bodies at the moment of completion. Which was just as well, since the original body had to be destroyed almost immediately after transfer, to prevent the consciousness from trying to return to it. This was the cleanest solution, logistically, and that was what the government was there for after all… logistics.

This was a one-way trip after all, either it worked or it didn’t, because coming back meant dying a death that should be wished on no one. Living out what little time you had remaining, with the impending knowledge that the end would likely be a gruesome one. So, the process began in earnest, and not long after rumors started to spread. “It’s a lie, their killing us…” you might hear someone cry-out as they were being publicly exiled for spreading such non-sense. Anyone caught trespassing on facility grounds would be executed on sight, 24 hours after their banishment. Though this was an unfortunate measure, the peace had to be maintained to ensure that the process was not delayed, beyond any unforeseen complications… and that’s where things got a little interesting.

Not long after the process begun one of the simulations got hung up. After about ten minutes, they called us all in to figure out what was happening. But really, none of us had any idea. Perhaps it was possible that those within the simulation had figured out a way to preserve their universe, perhaps even indefinitely. Though that seemed a little absurd, until… What if they had also built a Quantum Computer?

This posed an interesting question, because that would essentially be like someone looking into a mirror in front of another mirror, like an endless tunnel of realities. But that wasn’t the question, the real question was… what if it had happened before, what if it was happening right now? How did man really even get to this world they once called Eden and now Terrasia, this world which was about to be shattered by a rogue planet collision? Where had our ancestors really come from, where had they all begun? How many simulation had been running, one inside another… simulating that eternal moment of creation which only god truly stands outside of?

So, was it possible that we had been living inside that moment, nested within countless other moments, all along. An endless eternal moment, which reflected creation. In the beginning there was god, and then there was everything, all at once… and god created time, to make since of its thoughts. Then we created the Quantum Drive, a reflection of that mind, a mind that moves so quickly we can hardly hope to comprehend what that experience of true consciousness must be like. An echo cast across an endless corridor of mirrors.