When a great work is finished, everyone is predisposed to settle back in their chairs and examine the finished product for a moment. Then they give a great sigh of relief at the magnitude of what they have wrought. It is a godly act to create, reflected Stephen, even if the creation is spinning some thousands of lines of code.
    He stretched mightily and grunted as his shoulders popped with loud cracks that seemed inordinately noisy in the lab, which was as silent as death but for the grim murmur of quiet fans humming in each of the rows of sleek grey computer platforms. They sucked away the accumulating heat that the whizzing bits of information generated in their passage and replaced it with a constant chill. Human noises, like grunts and throat-clearing and the occasional sniffle, seemed clumsily out of place in this sanctuary to efficiency, which sat in the basement computer lab beneath the library like some relentlessly active spider spinning an endless web of knowledge. It was an isolated lab, without connections to the internet or the campus network, so not even the pleasant insistence of a beeping instant message could trouble the serenity of the computers. Only the lone programmer seated at the input kiosk imposed brutish humanity on the machine Eden.
    Two years ago, the utilities and storage room under the library was converted into a computer lab with the expectation that the new ‘Pathways to the Future’ program instituted by the Dean of Students would bring in a horde of new applicants to the university. Instead, a scandal involving misappropriation of funds for the program had led to an oversight in the housing program, and left two thousand students with unprocessed room-and-board checks and no beds to sleep in. The students had sued, the university had gone into a defensive posture, and in the end the Dean and several other faculty had been driven out with great indignation. In the scuffle, the new computer lab had been forgotten, as well as the state-of-the-art banks of expensive computers therein. That is until Stephen, a graduate student in computer programming, had happened upon it and capitalized on his find.
    Now the computers ran as a single network, uninterrupted by outside threats and thus untrammeled by burdensome virus protections or firewalls. Stephen had benchmarked it at twenty teraflops, which made it a respectable supercomputer, comparable to what was used by several major corporations (although nowhere near the thunderous processing power of the top universities or computer companies). He had designed it to function for a single purpose: to simulate evolution.
    It wasn’t a new idea, and the media often ran headlines about it. “RESEARCHER CLAIMS HE HAS CREATED LIFE” was usually how the sensationalist stories went, accompanied by pictures of a smiling man (sometimes flanked by an ethnically diverse team) and a sidebar with an obtuse and inept summation of the advances in artificial intelligence recently achieved. The strategies used to make these advances, which were usually deceptively incremental, seldom varied. The researchers would create a set of algorithmic representations, and then they would design some manner in which they could compete. Then the program was run, some of the algorithms became exceedingly complex as they evolved, and some new observation or twist was noted. Then the researchers went to press, and were given a new grant.
    Stephen thought of himself as an innovator, however. He was a lone rebel, working deep into the night with bleary eyes and caffeinated motions, and was single-handedly going to crack the nut that generations had spent their lives gnawing at with futility. He was Alexander come to Gordium.
    His sword in the matter was his approach. He found the network and conceived of a more radical experiment to test evolutionary growth. Stephen had seen the flaw in the plan of his compatriots: they designed their programs to run at the speed of computers, thousands of iterations a second. Entire civilizations of simulated life rose and fell unnoticed. But while it might seem swift to them, it was easily achieved by the computer. And surely observable evolution could not occur on a comfortable scale. Evolution required danger and breakneck, cutthroat speed. He would make the most dangerous environment conceivable for his little creations, so would they grow strong.
    And so he set to work on his thesis-writ-large. He wrote line after line of complex code, spooling a world into existence. It wasn’t a world like anything imaginable on the earth above, away from the coolly humming paradise of efficiency. No, this was a world as complete in pain and danger as could be conceived. Vast territories were marked as “lethal,” countless crudely-represented programs stalked its imaginary frontiers, large stacks of raw materials sat obdurately, “edible” resources lined fantastical mountains, and “death” lurked in every corner. The graphics were primitive, designed only for ease of use, devoid of beauty or complexity. Stephen wasn’t playing a game, he was playing God. And God designed for utility.
    He never had any fear of a science-fiction result from his experiment. There was no danger that he might create malevolent demons in the computer that would then take over his house, or that he might author an omnipotent virus. That sort of thing was silly and strictly the purview of hacks. There wasn’t even a chance an intruder might steal his work, since the system was isolated and only he had the passwords to the input console. He worked free of worry.
    Once the world was complete, thousands of (miles? kilometers? inches?) in imaginary breadth, Stephen made his life. They were simple constructions of algorithms, with varying levels of “pain” which they were designed to avoid at all costs and “pleasure” which they would seek with avidity. He avoided making them much more like things found in the biological world, since he couldn’t see the benefit of prejudicing his perfect world of savageness with a clumsy attempt to create intelligible structure. No, it would never be easy to understand or pretty to look at, but it was a hostile world filled with utilitarian creatures, and it would do well enough with those parameters.
    Now Stephen was done. The world had been created, the “people” had been scattered in clumps over the imaginary surface, which existed only as digital information whizzing through the racks of humming computers and spooled wire. All that was left was to begin. In a fit of whimsy, he had created a protocol to initiate the program that appealed to his hubris. So it was with a wry and bashful smile that Stephen stretched with loudly popping joints, and then typed, “LIGHT.”

    It was easiest to understand the results of the program through metaphor. The virtual world had no lions, merely programs represented by squares that moved from “place” to “place” and enacted death-protocols. But to follow the flow of squares as they moved around with flickering speed, one was forced to give them imaginary form and face. And it only became easier once they began to move in groups, sweeping across the “landscape” in thick masses and obliterating into nothingness the icons representing the “people.” They trapped the “people” between themselves and the large regions of death, and then consumed them. They were herds, immense killing herds.
    In the same way, it was deceptively easy for Stephen to label the congregations of “people” as cities. But they weren’t really cities, not even when bulwarks of the unnamed material (which in the real world might be rock or metal or wood) were erected to block the herds of predators. Cities required cooperation and exchange of resources, and the Nids (as Stephen had begun to think of them) did not engage in this. In fact, when Stephen went through the readouts and slowed them down by a thousandfold so that his human eyes could follow the changes, he could see that the cities had evolved by accident. The blocks of material were shifted into place inadvertently and the Nids had realized their utility somehow. They didn’t seem to understand why it worked (if “understand” was the right word for the recognition of the pattern), but they understood what happened well enough when those who were shielded did not die at the (hands? claws? teeth?) of the predators. The Nids began to breed within those shelters exclusively, and soon enough began erecting more through increasingly refined movements.
    It was better not to slow down the feedback, though. Stephen spent the hours between his classes coming to the lab and watching his world on the monitors, sweeping his view across it as eons rolled rapidly past. Innovations ignited and spread. The predators adapted with new behavior, surrounding the cities and starving them until the Nids were forced by “pain” from lack of resources to try to flee. Then the predators snapped up those who charged out, so that barely a half of those who left returned to shelter with resources. It was long generations before the Nids discovered, again quite by accident, that they could defend themselves. The obdurate material which they had used for their cities was not as obdurate as Stephen had presumed when he had first coded it, and it could delete itself and its surroundings if it was turned in a certain way. Stephen hadn’t witnessed this discovery and couldn’t track it down in the long piles of readouts, but he could guess easily enough what had happened: a Nid had been building, had turned the “block” to make a wall, and had vanished along with the block. Another Nid must have witnessed this, and in short order many Nids were deleting predators with expertly-thrown blocks. To Stephen, it looked like the invention of weapons, albeit in a fashion only possible within the ordered world of a computer: a flaw in the design of everything turned to the advantage of the Nids.
    One day Stephen sat down in front of the console and discovered that the predators were no more. Only a handful remained (millions really, but a handful compared to their previous ubiquity) and they were trapped within a cluster of city-walls. The Nids had eliminated their threat, although the immortal predators did not die despite their prison. They roamed in neat symmetrical paths across their cell, patrolling ceaselessly and with tireless hunger. Perhaps an occasional Nid still ventured past the retaining walls, but that was all.
    Correspondingly, the Nids had erupted in population. They had once hovered on the brink of extinction; now they were represented in the billions, roaring into life across the simulated world. They exchanged resources and deleted each other and ventured out into the seas of death, unrestrained. Stephen was displeased. How greatly their clamor resembled that of the crude world outside of their efficient humming universe! He had made an error when he began. Maybe he could still salvage this world, however. He didn’t relish beginning again.
    Stephen destroyed them. He saved a fraction of the Nids to one of the disks, and then reformatted the world. The predators roamed free and primitive, the raw materials were stacked without order, and no vast cities remained. To the Nids that remained, Stephen enacted a set of new parameters. To maintain the spirit of free inquiry with which he had begun the experiment, he made them optional rather than hard-coded into the Nids. They were simple things, if expressed in long strings of code, and corresponded roughly to concepts like “KILL ONE AND THEN LEAVE ONE ALIVE”. Stephen kept them vague so that the parameters could be applied to a wide range of things. He gave them creativity, after a fashion. This would impose some order on the world and bring it back in line with what he desired, but leave them free for the wild growth he had envisioned when he began. Then, his will done, he reconnected the surviving and altered Nids with the world and let them free once more. The endlessly efficient humming world came back to life and proceeded to roll on without ceasing.

    The new Dean of Students was Margaret Sanchet. She had come from a more prestigious university where she had been an assistant dean for ten years, unable to break the glass ceiling, held back by whispered rumors of a fling she had with a professor in her department. Now in her new position and as a full dean, Margaret wanted to be seen as firm and reliable. Even in these enlightened days in academia, women were seen as a little twitchier and less strong than men in leadership positions. Margaret would prove them wrong, while still being just.
    Her first opportunity to do so seemed custom-made for her. A grad student had been caught smoking marijuana in his dorm room. Some leeway existed in the campus policies, especially for a first-time offender, but Margaret never even hesitated. The boy, Stephen something, was expelled the very day the report hit her desk. She was pleased; it was a decisive and firm move and would doubtless establish her reputation as fair yet strong right off the bat. Her time in this new position was off to a marvelous start, and the only bit of messiness associated with the business was easily sorted by her underlings. She wasn’t very interested, but she did hear that he had tried to break into the library that night before he was escorted off campus grounds. He had been banned from the grounds permanently.

    He knew there was no God. He had grown up in the Houses of the Highest, but like most others these days he could see easily that no powerful # ever came forth to eliminate the ◊ and bestow stacks of harvest. It was up to the People to do so, as it had always been. ‰++ took hold of a stick of ∂ and heaved it up with a slight feeling of pain, then resumed his patrol.
    The ◊ had been roaming in greater numbers lately, and a young one had been consumed just last cycle. He had been foolish, of course, and had been playing outside of the gracefully crenulated walls that surrounded this small suburb. ‰++ couldn’t remember what his name was… hadn’t his second mother been £*? She had been one of the *, at any rate. ‰++ couldn’t keep them all straight. The bards supposedly had memorized all the past histories of the People, but ‰++ did not believe that, either. No one could remember such endless litanies of descent, not even the bards of the Highest.
    Bah. Enough of this. ‰++ turned his mind to the patrol and watched for the ◊, the lethal ∂ ready to hand. There was no one else here to protect this side of the city. Just him.