Bewilderment

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WE SAW SIMILIS FROM A LONG WAY AWAY. It was a ball of perfect indigo, glinting with the light of the nearby star it captured.

What’s that? my son asked. People must have made that.

“It’s a solar cell.”

A solar cell that covers the whole planet? Crazy!

We made a few rotations around the globe, confirming him. Similis was a world trying to capture every photon of energy that fell on it.

That’s suicide, Dad. If they hog all the energy, how do they grow their food?

“Maybe food is something else, on Similis.”

We went for a look, down to the planet’s surface. It was as dark as Nithar, but much colder, and silent aside from a steady background hum, which we followed. There were lakes and oceans, all frozen under thick ice. We passed underneath scattered, blasted snags that must have been thick forests once. There were fields of nothing, and grassless pastures of slag and rock. The roads were abandoned, the towns and cities empty. But no sign of destruction or violence. Everything had fallen into decay slowly, on its own. The world looked as if all the residents had walked out and been taken into the sky. But the sky was covered in solar panels, pumping out electrons at full tilt.

We followed the hum down into a valley. There we found the only buildings still intact, a vast industrial barracks guarded and repaired by ever-vigilant robots. Great conduits of cabling channeled all the energy captured by the solar shell into the sprawling complex.

Who built this?

“The inhabitants of Similis.”

What is it?

“It’s a computer server farm.”

What happened to everyone, Dad? Where did the people go?

“They’re all inside.”

My son frowned and tried to picture: a building of circuitry, infinitely bigger on the inside than on the outside. Rich, unlimited, endless, and inventive civilizations—millennia of hope and fear and adventure and desire—dying and resurrecting, saving and reloading, going on forever, until the power failed.