When I was very young, I was given a book for Christmas by my slightly mad and mostly religious step-grandmother. It was a huge and marvellously illustrated picture book which should have immediately grasped my attention, but unfortunately the title of this tome was the Read ‘n Grow Picture Bible.
My family was decidedly not religious, nor were any of my friends. However, we lived a long way from the nearest library and being an avid reader, I eventually read the book that my grandmother gave me, burning through the Biblical lore contained within and imprinting it on my childhood brain. If grandma’s plan had been to convert me, it worked only briefly, because that very same year Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles hit television and the Bible was largely forgotten, along with being a good Christian girl.
But one part of the Bible never really left me; the story of Noah.
As I grew, it turned out I had an aptitude for problem solving and mathematics. My mother fought to get me included in advanced classes, and when she succeeded, a whole new world of numbers and equations opened up to me.
Encouraged to work on our own projects, I often returned to the problem of Noah and his Ark, and the improbability of his success in keeping all the animals alive. I researched and calculated the feed required for all the ‘common’ animals kept in conventional zoos, as well as the fresh water requirements and the volume of dung produced. In every iteration of my work the original Biblical measurements of the Ark got blown further and further out of proportion, confirming just how preposterous the idea of Noah’s Ark was.
When I presented my work to my low-key Christian high school mathematics teacher, his face flushed red and he tore my calculations to pieces, tossing them into the rubbish bin beside his desk. Then he stalked up and down in front on the blackboard, lecturing me on the ‘proper’ use of mathematics and admonishing me for my heresy.
And so for a long time, I forgot about what I referred to as the ‘Noah Problem’ and focused on repairing my relationship with my teacher.
Home computers hit the world around the time I left school, and so by the time I had finished my first year at University, computer labs had become part of the curriculum. It seemed like cheating, using these number-crunching machines. I remember a friend of mine – a photorealist artist – complaining about how photography took no skill, because there was no effort required; and I felt the same about computers. I actively enjoyed creating stacks of calculations, immersing myself in an ocean of equations and formulae, and so for a long time I resented those beige boxes with clacky keyboards, seeing them as a cheat’s conceit.
I managed without them for a long time, still turning in hand-written notes, but once I’d completed my doctorate, I realised that I had stretched myself to the limits of my mathematical capacity, and that if I didn’t adapt, I’d be left behind by peers who had availed themselves of these increasingly powerful thinking machines.
So I did.
I helped build the first supercomputer infrastructure at the university – from screwing blades to sharp-edged computer racks and running cables, to installing the operating systems and configuring the software that allowed this humming room full of hardware to interface as a single ‘brain’. I was so good at it that I was inducted into the university technology department and utilised for every future upgrade.
It was an interesting journey, watching the first modest supercomputer clusters grow from basement closets, to warehouse-sized rooms of air-conditioning and white tiles. It wasn’t long before my expertise was sought elsewhere, and I turned my talent for formulae and algorithms to creating the programs that made these huge information hives hum.
Which brings us close to present day, when I recalled my old obsession, and began to ponder the Noah Problem again.
I can’t tell you exactly who I work for, but suffice it to say that money really isn’t much of a concern to them, and so the equipment I’d been contracted to configure wasn’t just bleeding edge; much of it was so new that the boards and chips hadn’t even been officially named.
Working with this kind of infrastructure is annoying. Bugs and breakdowns are common, the first layer firmware needing constant tweaks to keep running and heat blowouts plaguing the unstable chips. But if I’m truly honest with myself, I lived for this sort of problem solving, and when everything was finally up and running, I’d always be searching for new challenges to keep my mind occupied.
The Noah Test was something I’d written years before as a sort of benchmarking tool for this type of infrastructure. Similar to the Travelling Salesman Problem, but far more complex, it involved running a simulation of what would actually be required for Noah and his children to keep X number of species alive on his floating barge. Of course, the conventional Noah’s Ark wouldn’t provide any kind of challenge to this sort of hardware, so I’d needed to get creative with how the problem worked. I’d realised very early on that one Ark was infeasible, regardless of the size. Noah, his wife, his sons and their wives were not a sufficiently large workforce for the entirety of Earth’s animal populations.
But if you kept the original dimension of the Ark and multiplied the Ark, putting different animal types in different Arks from parallel Earths, you could easily account for all the species on the planet. Leaving the entirety of the problem running would give a decent stress test on the newly installed system.
When I returned the next day, I pored through the data sets, astonished to find that the system had blown through the problem easily. It had predicted that 1,746,000 Arks would be enough to complete the task of keeping six million non-aquatic animal species alive for forty days. The logistics were very basic and didn’t account for a lot of variables, but it was still extremely impressive.
I’ll admit I was excited. This was the closest I’d ever come to having a definitive answer to the Noah Problem, of a feasible, answerable way that Noah could have kept every species alive on a floating boat for 40 days. I dissected the data, looking for missing variables, and reworked the already unwieldly program, to take into account other factors. What about psychological stress on the human zookeepers? How would the Noahs on all the Arks interface with each other to coordinate resource swapping in case of problems, and the eventual release of all the animals onto the ‘prime’ Earth? What hierarchy structures would need to be implemented, how many shift rotations and what safety precautions would be needed on the predator Arks?
All this and more I fed into my Noah Experiment, trying to account for every conceivable issue that could possibly be experienced; even the loss of whole Arks and the need to load the cargo and occupants onto neighbouring Arks.
Confident that I’d given the new system far more than it could chew, I set the simulation running.
It hadn’t completed when I checked it, first thing in the morning, but it was astonishingly close; grinding through billions of trillions of permutations per second. When I checked in again after my second coffee, it had finished the complete set, and the gargantuan set of output files sat there, waiting for me to examine them. Loath though I am to ascribe human characteristics to a machine, the system almost seemed eager for me to open the data set. The huge racks full of equipment hummed with an anticipatory note, which almost seemed to change to one of triumph as I browsed the data.
It was impressive, I can’t lie to you. It was the perfect outcome to the Noah Problem, describing the optimal result for both the human crews and the animals. There were even annotations about the psychological profiles of each Noah set, describing how the ‘Prime Primate Ship’ Noah had become the ‘leader’ of the Noah Experiment, while the Noah set assigned to the ‘Sanitation Fleet’ were considered lowest in the pecking order of Noahs. The complete hierarchy spooled down the page, showing the convoluted social structures that had arisen, based around the types of life each Ark sustained. I shuddered when I discovered what I dubbed the ‘Plague Arks’ – ships full of animals and humans riddled with lethal and non-lethal parasites, all in various states of pain and distress, many not destined to see the flood recede.
Which brought a curious thought to mind:
If this was the maximal outcome of the Noah Experiment, then what was the bleakest, most minimal requirement for the survival of every species?
Typing frantically, I tweaked the parameters accordingly, then set the simulation running.
After the second day of runtime I started to grow impatient. By the fourth day, I wanted to kill the experiment and start diagnostics on the software, suspecting a critical issue somewhere in the infrastructure. But on the end of the sixth day it was complete, and the data set was fully populated, waiting for me to browse through its grim contents.
Feeling like the antithesis of god on the seventh day, I clicked through folder after folder, growing progressively more horrified at the content of each.
No, horrified isn’t the right word. What I felt was darker, more visceral, more primitive than horror.
It all began with Prime Noah.
Even before the flood began, he was already dominating the other Noahs, utilising angels as messengers between the parallel worlds. By the time the floods began and the numerous Arks began filling the ocean of Prime Earth, he was ruling the 182 thousand strong flotilla with an iron fist, utilising a colossal silverback gorilla as his personal thug when he didn’t get his way. Diminished in size from my original simulation, this one had Noahs and their families working like slaves, working themselves literally to death in order to serve the grander purpose of the survival of all animal life. I read through data sets describing Noahs dying of exotic bacteria that ate them alive as they drowned in the shit and piss of millions of animals, unable to keep up with the sheer volume of excrement flowing out of the Arks. Noahs under extreme stress killed one another over petty disputes over resources. Shems and Hams and Japheths strangled each other in their beds or pushed each other into the toxic jaws of Komodo dragons and starving Siberian tigers. But only survival of the animals mattered, so the losses of the human crews mounted as the simulation had run it course.
By the time the flotilla found land, the Noah Experiment was a plague-ridden hellscape of suffering and misery, not one of the creatures aboard – primate or otherwise – free from some kind of abuse or psychological trauma.
I had hoped it would all end there, but it didn’t. The simulation predicted that Prime Noah had descended so far into megalomaniac madness, that after the animals were safety dispersed (with many more human deaths), Prime Noah set the lesser Noahs and sons at each other’s throats through cunningly engineered social strife. He watched as a bloodbath of unbridled murder ruled the Camp of Noah.
In the end, only Prime Noah remained, with his original wife, sons, and many of their duplicate wives. As they moved on from the Camp, they left behind thousands of corpses to repopulate the Earth with various carrion eaters and insects.
But it was just a simulation. None of this was real; Noah’s Ark had never existed, none of this had ever happened. It was all just data and calculations, bits and bytes racing around inside thousands of miles of gold and copper conductors.
On the eighth day, the data was gone.
Not all of the data, mind, just the data from second Noah Experiment – the one that had ended in the massacre – and the program I had written to run it. The first experiment, the perfect one, sat in the folder where I’d saved it, untouched.
I was wild, because this was a huge data breach. Security was super-strict at this facility, as you could imagine, but everything appeared above board with my co-workers. None of them had been working in that area when the breach had occurred, nobody had swiped into the room where the system terminal sat.
The security footage of the room showed little more than gently winking server lights in the darkened area. But at exactly the time the files had vanished – right before the nightly backups – the monitor of my terminal flickered on briefly, illuminating the room for a few seconds before it switched off again.
Nobody knew what to make of it. Several people suggested a trojan had allowed someone to remotely access my terminal, but it was a ringfenced system, impossible to access externally. The forensics team had checked for potential hidden transmitters, but everything looked clean.
Frustrated, I wrestled with the problem for weeks, trying to figure out how and why someone would steal this data. In the middle of one sleepless night I recalled that there was one system that I hadn’t thought to check – if only because it didn’t seem relevant. Inside the lab was an audio monitor, which I could use to listen to the ambient hum of the system, to check for the grinding whir of fans that were about to fail from blown bearings. Reaching for my tablet, I hurriedly pulled up the exported logs for the day of the data theft, keying in the exact time my terminal had activated itself.
There was nothing at first, but when the light of the monitor flickered out, I heard a sound.
I replayed it dozens of times, not believing what I was hearing. After the thirteenth playback I swore and threw the tablet at the wall, where it dented the plaster, then clattered onto my dresser, scattering jewellery and perfume bottles.
It was an unmistakeable sound; one that even a child would recognise:
Thousands of winged creatures taking flight.
I tore the system to pieces over the next week, checking everything from hard disk enclosures to cracking open the sealed UPS units that supported the racks of technology.
I wasn’t sure what I was looking for exactly, but when a single feather of white and gold lifted from the top of one of the dusty racks and settled at my feet, my knees wobbled and I sat abruptly on the tiles, staring at the impossible thing on the floor.
I don’t want to believe it’s true. I don’t want to think about the insane maelstrom of suffering that was spawned in the second Noah Experiment.
Because if I am responsible for that in any way, then I don’t deserve to live.
And if I am responsible for it, then I don’t need God’s forgiveness.
I need yours.
Author: https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/96lhor/the_noah_experiment/
