...And Everything
#4 of By Bear-Paws
"...Sir, we've lost a thread."
"WHAT!? How's that even possible?"
"We're still investigating the issue, but it seems our modeling software is vulnerable to cosmic rays, and the process attachments can on occasion lose connection. The estimated probability is one in forty thousand billion billion."
"Where's the thread now?"
"We assume it is still running, but without regulation - race condition. There's also no mainframe connection, so the 'verse is without any process control. In short, anything can happen."
"What are you going to do about it?"
"We believe the thread should collapse within itself by Midnight. Some of our staff says it will simply spread out into a near-zero entropic state, by which all interactions will cease. In either case, we can garbage collect its data."
"OK then. Any idea of resource utilization and process between then and now?"
"Apparently, Mephistopheles was correct. It is forming its own biological systems, evolving and extincting species as we speak. We caught a memory fragment we believe was recently discarded by the process."
"What did you find?" he asked, leaning forward in his chair, curiously.
"A dominant species that calls themselves 'Humans.' They appear to be accelerating the eclipse of their ecosystem, so should help the process self terminate on schedule."
"Thank goodness for small favors. Out of curiosity, what does the lifeform look like?"
"Strangely enough, like our own. We have a suspicion the original genetic pattern was reverse engineered by the modeling software based on some discarded photographic data that it had captured at the moment of thread separation."
"Weird."
"Definitely. Can we just brush this under the rug for now?"
"I'd not have it any other way!"
"Agreed."