It has been said that it is turing complete, the universe that is. They say that with enough computational power, the right set of equations and the right starting state you can recreate reality itself inside a machine.
For many decades, few believed this bold claim, believing that quantum mechanics makes the neat little systems of equations break down - that a computer system can only simulate a universe dominated by classical Newtonian mechanics and the quantum will never be accurately simulated by a machine.

They were half right, and my god how I wish they were completely right. If they were, I would still be alive.

You may ask how a dead man can write this message, indeed it would seem at first impossible. But what if death was unwritten from reality? What if the rules were changed?

If you are reading this in the early 21st century you almost certainly have had exposure to primitive simulations designed for entertainment value - in other words games. Imagine if you will that I am a video game character, killed in the first level but with this event later hacked out of the game, a mod of sorts. The reality is far more complex, and I am not sure if earlier humans such as yourself will be able to grasp it, but this analogy will work for now.

Now, let me tell you a story of how your world will come to end.

I'll write the next part later today, but feedback on the opening would be appreciated.

Our story starts in a lab, to be more precise - it starts in the computing division of Maxwell-Bohr Industries, an R&D thinktank that was founded in 2014. MBI were funded by the usual crowd of silicon valley venture capital firms and angel investors, the deal being that they would attract the brightest minds from various disciplines to develop cutting edge technology which would then be licensed to commercial firms under a licensing agreement, ensuring a healthy return on investment while also advancing the cause of scientific knowledge.

MBI's computing division had been studying the problem of how to accelerate parallel computing workloads by trying to work around the bottleneck induced by network latency. In laymen's terms, they were studying how to build supercomputers where the slow connection speed between the different parts of the supercomputer would not be a problem. Logically, the only way to guarantee this was to reduce the number of nodes in the cluster - as a by-product this would also make the computers physically smaller.

Quite often, MBI's engineers would propose out of the box solutions to known problems that few believed could actually work. Most famously, one engineer proposed a solution to the halting problem that involved time travel - while his paper on the subject was good and rigorous from the computational theory perspective it left out the crucial element - how to actually send information back in time. Nevertheless, MBI still funded his research to the point where they had a full software platform with hooks where information received from a future point in the timeline would need to be inserted. Multiple engineers reviewed the work and concluded that the software would indeed solve the halting problem if one could receive information from the future.

There is a reason for me telling you of this failed project - while unknown at first, the theoretical breakthroughs involved would be crucial in the development of the QLI (Quantum/Linear Interface) platform on which we are all dependent - the system which allows a "dead" man to speak.

Shouldn't this be "Turing computable", rather than "Turing complete"?  I.e., whether a Turing machine can simulate the universe, rather than whether the universe can simulate a Turing machine.

It's both - a turing machine could simulate the universe (if you forget quantum mechanics) and the universe can simulate a turing machine - this allows for nested simulations, which was a plot point in my other story.

The QLI, while being rather a mundane system was brilliant for precisely that reason - it was a mundane piece of technology, a combination of hardware and software, that linked traditional linear computers with quantum computers. I was one of the team that worked on it, a basic code monkey and sysadmin who worked on the very mundane side of things. My job was essentially that of a janitor for software - I would audit logfiles, run backups, maintain source control repos, all the usual stuff. Every now and then I would fix one of the less exciting bugs in the software - stuff like user interface bugs and so on, anything that dealt directly with the quantum chips was only worked on by the scientific team - I was administration and clerical.

Even so, my role allowed me a lot of insight into the breakthroughs as they occurred. I saw and overheard amazing things, often doubting my own sanity at times - as the project took off, the bizarre notion came into my head that MBI was to the laws of nature as filesharing networks were to copyright law. While natural laws were still technically there, we kept breaking them and the universe would sometimes randomly enforce them but we'd often get away with breaking the law so often that it ceased to have meaning.

The scientific team would often give complex-sounding explanations as to how they were able to pull off their miracles using nothing more than an information processing device - the phrase "retrocausal event" became commonplace as they sent subatomic particles backwards in time.

The first fully working quantum chip was created during the mid part of the 21st century - due to data corruption (you will understand soon), I do not remember the precise date the first chip was successfully tested, my episodic memory is patchy, but my semantic memory is intact.

One of the key breakthroughs needed was the microscale particle accelerator - a microscale cyclotron within the core of the chip would accelerate photons to relativistic speeds, sourcing them from entangled pairs. By holding one of the entangled pair stationary while accelerating the other, time dilation effects allowed for a form of retrocausality - the "spooky effect at a distance" functioned not only across space, but also across time. By tieing 1000s of these accelerators to small RISC cores, it was possible to develop a massively parallel computing system that could execute code and obtain a result before the code had finished executing - the only downside being that the chips must be kept in place and powered up for however long the program would run.

This led to the famous retrocausal events - if one was to simply write a program that runs a busy loop and does nothing for a decade and obtain the result today then the computer would be guaranteed to survive no matter how bizarre the circumstances for at least one decade.

A second breakthrough was what we jokingly called "Schrodinger's byte" - we placed a register with a width of 8 bits onto every single chip, each of the bits would correspond to a single quantum-level event fed from one of multiple sources, starting with a geiger counter and a radiation source until we managed to scale down the technology and fit everything within the one chip - once this was achieved each single chip could receive 8 bits of entropy from quantum level noise. Tieing this into the RISC core's instruction set we were able to have programs that branched depending on the state of Schrodinger's byte.

The end result of these 2 breakthroughs was the first computing system capable of calculating any problem - a true universal computing device unbound by physical limits.

One of the components I was responsible for implementing was the scheduler - my code allocated jobs to any of the available chips and tried to minimise the length of time any one chip would be tied up for by making use of schrodinger's byte - along with a new kind of compiler the system was able to automatically turn any traditional computer software into something that could run on our platform - an abomination against natural law looking back.

We had access to literally infinite resources, anything that could be calculated in any conceivable universe, we could calculate. It was thought this obscene power would herald a new golden age for humanity, and I and my colleagues honestly believed that together we were doing something that would eventually eliminate all human suffering. In truth, we had created the second manhattan project - a weapon of mass destruction with capabilities far exceeding all the military force of all the nations of man through all of human history.

Stopping here for now, please give feedback.