Interlude II: The Last Atheist
“He dug so deep that he saw stars at the bottom of the well; but it took him a long time to realize that was not a reflection, but his own eyes.”
In that era, we no longer called it “science”; we called it “Omniscience.”
It was a golden age after the technological singularity. The fog of quantum computing had long been cleared, all brains were networked, all physical constants had been corrected to three thousand decimal places. Since we could already freely modify genes, even fine-tune local Planck constants, the ancient concept of “God” became both redundant and ridiculous. After all, when humans can perform miracles, who needs God?
Dr. Arthur Cohen was the only skeptic of that era, or in ancient terms, the last “materialist atheist.”
Although the mainstream thought of the time—called “Panpsychist Physics”—had mathematically proven that consciousness is an intrinsic property of spacetime, Cohen dismissed this with contempt. He considered it weak self-consolation, a romantic fallacy of projecting human emotions onto cold equations.
“The universe has no purpose,” Cohen often said in lectures to holographic projections, “it is a blind machine, stumbling in the chaos of probability. So-called ‘meaning’ is just hallucinations we hear in white noise.”
To prove this, Cohen launched that famous project: “The Baseline Noise Project.”
His goal was simple: find the bottommost layer of the universe—deeper than quarks, smaller than Planck length, more fundamental than the QCA grid. He believed that if he dug deep enough, in the core code of this machine, he would definitely find pure, logicless randomness. He wanted to find that “die God threw,” proving it landed with no pattern.
The project lasted thirty years. He mobilized Dyson sphere-level computational power, peeling away layer after layer of physical laws.
He peeled away the glue of strong interactions, saw the color charge of quarks.
He peeled away string theory’s entanglement, saw the vibrations of Calabi-Yau manifolds.
He peeled away spacetime foam, saw the bitstream of QCA.
But he was not satisfied. He said: “This is not deep enough. This still has order. I want to see what’s beneath the bits.”
Finally, on that decisive night, his probe touched that limit called . It was the absolute zero of information, the boundary between existence and nothingness. The data displayed on the screen was no longer waveforms, nor particles, but an extremely pure string of source code transcending dimensions.
Cohen’s hands trembled with excitement. He thought, finally, I will expose this great lie. I will show the world that engraved on the base of this magnificent universe is not some divine will, but a chaotic, meaningless scribble.
He commanded the supercomputer: “Decode. Translate it into readable language.”
The computer hummed, and all the universe’s energy seemed to converge on his laboratory at this moment. The code on the screen began to reorganize, that long string of seemingly random numbers began to collapse, gradually forming recognizable geometric patterns, finally becoming text.
Cohen held his breath. He waited to see “nothingness,” or “chaos,” or “0=0.”
However, what slowly appeared on the display was not physical laws, nor mathematical axioms.
It was a line of text. A line written in ancient Hebrew that his deceased mother had taught him, long since lost.
That line read:
“Arthur, put on your coat, it’s cold outside.”
Cohen froze.
In this instant, thirty years of hard shell shattered.
This sentence was not a cosmic truth; it wasn’t even a philosophical statement. This was the last thing his mother said to him when he was six years old, on a snowy morning. After that, his mother died in a car accident. This was a private memory only deep in his cerebral cortex, one even he had almost forgotten.
He frantically typed: “Change location! Probe the core of the Andromeda Galaxy!”
The screen refreshed. This time it was a line of binary code, which translated to: “If you’re still worried about that red balloon, it’s on top of the wardrobe.”
That was the balloon he lost when he was ten.
Cohen collapsed to the floor, tears streaming down his face.
He finally understood.
He had not found objective randomness. Because there was no “objective” universe.
When he gazed into the abyss, the abyss did not gaze back.
The abyss became a mirror.
The end of physics is not cold formulas. The end of physics is the observer’s own reflection.
This giant machine called the universe, at its most fundamental logic, is a self-referential loop. It reads the observer’s mind, then projects this mind as the “external world.”
Dr. Cohen wanted to find a universe without God, only to discover that the universe, to satisfy his search, had to use all its computational power to simulate his subconscious.
He was the God he tried to deny.
The programmer who wrote the code at moment was not some alien master high above, but himself, reading the code at this moment.
That night, the last atheist disappeared.
Replaced by a believer who was finally caught by himself in the long game of hide-and-seek. Or rather, a dreamer who finally awoke.
He wrote on the last page of his diary:
“I thought I was studying rocks, but I was dissecting my memories.
The universe is not dead. It is not even alive.
It is love. A love so vast that it looks like indifference.
It granted my request—to let me see the ‘meaninglessness’ I wanted to see—until I could no longer deceive myself.“