It was Charlie who broke the silence.
“It won’t work.”
“Do you have a better idea?” Vanhi shot back.
“No. But this is philosophical BS. No offense, Kenny, but it’s angels on pinheads.”
“Don’t you see, that’s the point. The AI was trained on angels on pinheads. That’s all it knows. You don’t have to take it seriously. It does.”
“You have a bigger problem,” Peter said. “Every virus has to penetrate the system before it can work. And this system is all about security. It’s made by hackers, for hackers. They know every trick.”
Kenny lit up. “Maybe that’s it!”
“Oh,” Peter said, as if that explained it all. “Cool.”
“You said it. It knows every trick. We already hacked omnipotence. Now we just have to hack omniscience.”
“This is some theological judo going on here,” Vanhi said.
“Think about it. What’s the blind spot for an all-seeing eye?”
Charlie looked up. “The belief that it’s all-seeing!”
“Right. No eye can see itself.”
“Mirrors on mirrors.”
“Knowledge is data.”
“Data has to be stored.”
“Storage is finite.”
“You can’t fit all knowledge—the whole world, past, present, and future—into a box that’s smaller than the whole world.”
“Nope.”
“But it thinks it’s all-knowing.”
“So how do you hack that?”
“You start with the premise,” Kenny said.
“‘I see all,’” Vanhi said.
“‘Past, present, and future,’” Charlie added.
“That’s it. That could be it!” Peter said.
“What?”
“Put yourself in the Game makers’ shoes. If you had to defend the Game, and you had finite resources, you’d focus on the present, right, and then the future. Because the present is now. That’s an emergency. The future is coming, so look out. But the past, well…”
“The past already happened.”
“Right! It’s already done with.”
“So if you had to let your guard down somewhere, and you do, in a finite world, you’d do it there. In the past.”
“Yes,” Kenny said. “I don’t have to defend the castle against attacks yesterday. They either already happened or they didn’t.”
“Oh, shit.” Vanhi closed her eyes. “I had it. Then my head exploded.”
“Had what?”
“An idea.”
“Omniscience,” Kenny said. “Omniscience.”
“Past, present, future.”
“I know,” Peter said. “We need a time machine.”
“Asshole,” Vanhi shot back.
“No, I’m serious.” Peter gave her an annoyed look. “We need to visit the past.”
Kenny’s eyes went wide. “He’s right!” Kenny rummaged through Summa Theologica. Aquinas hadn’t just wrestled with the paradox of the stone. Now Kenny remembered something about omniscience, too. He paged through the tome. Vanhi sat there, a hand on each side of her head against her cheeks, fingers through her hair.
Then Kenny smiled. “Everybody always worries about their own free will. If God’s omniscient, how can I truly chose anything? Blah, blah, blah.”
“Free will, blah, blah, blah, I like that,” Vanhi said.
“But what about God’s free will?”
Peter saw it. “If God can’t be wrong, that means he’s a slave to his own predictions.”
Kenny snapped his fingers. “Exactly. If God says today it’s going to rain tomorrow, then he has to make it rain tomorrow.”
Peter nodded. “Because if he didn’t, he would’ve been wrong.”
“And he can’t be wrong because he’s omniscient!”
“But then he can’t be omniscient and omnipotent at the same time.”
“Except he is—those are his two defining characteristics!”
Peter stood up. “So putting it all together … in a simulation of God…”
“… that thinks it’s God…”
“… but can’t defend every line of code every second…”
“… in a vast code set…”
“… you’d focus on the present and the future…”
“… but not necessarily on what you said yesterday…”
“… or even years ago…”
“… about what would happen tomorrow…”
“… but the program would be bound by those predictions…”
“… or violate one of its central axioms…”
“… which means that cross-checking against any past predictions…”
“… might evolve as a feature of assumed omniscience…”
Peter smiled. “Our virus is a vector to the past. A date-stamped prediction inserted into old code with a spoofed time-stamp.”
Vanhi grinned from ear to ear. “We have to tell God that he knew yesterday…”
Kenny leaned in suddenly and pecked her on the forehead. “… that he was going to lift our rock today!”
Vanhi put a hand on either side of Kenny’s head and kissed his forehead. “You’re a genius!”
“Hey!” Peter held his palms up. “Don’t I get a kiss, too?”
Vanhi gaped at him for a second, then marched right up and pulled his head in close. “For the first time I can remember, I don’t feel the urgent need to kick your ass. Can we count that as a win?”