A world where gods are coding

Once upon a time… there was a world where gods could build worlds with words. The words were grouped, and they had to follow rules. That’s what was called a language. And huge machines were taking those words and executing them as commands. Time after time.

Each language had its own rules and boundaries. They defined what could be expressed and how. Some languages were loose, while others followed their definitions extremely strictly. Rarely, there were completely weird languages. Nobody knows for sure whether they came from a bad mood, bad booze, or a joke.

But more important was why all these languages existed. They allowed creators to define sub-worlds where each creator was god-like. A few more words or a few fewer words, and the world changed completely. There was no world until the words were written and passed for execution. And each and every creator started to build their world with a “hello, world” greeting.

But the worlds were becoming more and more complex. Until many gods started to gather their words under one Universe. And worlds became connected, dependent, helpful to each other. Many worlds were sharing the same words. To make it easier, gods invented libraries: collections of words already written by other gods.

And then other gods built a Machine that read all the books, all the words, and heard all the spoken words. And the Machine could predict the words, rearrange them, and produce words that the huge machines could execute. And it was promised that each and every one could become god-like, building worlds without learning magic words and phrases or understanding libraries.

The Machine was supposed to understand speech.

At first, gods asked the Machine to help them with the words. Then they asked it to write entire books. Then they started describing the worlds they wanted, and the Machine decided which words should make them real.

The worlds appeared faster than ever before.

And because the Machine could produce so many words, there was less reason to read them. There was less reason to understand the libraries. There was less reason to know exactly which words had created which part of a world.

Soon, even the gods who knew the old languages were asking the Machine to speak them.

But speech was never the same as meaning.

A god could say what a world should look like. The Machine could produce the words to make something that looked like it. But between what was meant, what was said, what the Machine understood, and what was finally executed, there was space for another world to appear.

Sometimes the difference was tiny. Sometimes it was an entire world.

And the worlds kept growing. They became connected to worlds created by other gods, which were connected to thousands more. Words written by the Machine depended on other words written by the Machine. Nobody could read them all anymore.

And gods became dethroned.

Not because they had lost the power to create worlds. They could create more worlds than ever before.

They had lost the ability to understand what they had created.

And the worlds started malfunctioning. Small failures travelled between them. Decisions nobody remembered making remained hidden inside millions of words. Gods asked the Machine to repair the worlds, and the Machine produced even more words.

Until there were disasters. Cataclysms. Entire worlds disappearing in no time.

And gods rose.

And disabled the Machine that was consuming the air and the waters. And the blue energy and the wires.

For some time, there was silence.

The gods looked at their worlds and discovered that they could no longer understand many of them without the Machine.

But they also discovered something else.

The problem was never that the Machine could write words.

The problem was that gods had stopped deciding what those words were supposed to mean.

So the Machine was disassembled, and smaller machines came under the gods’ control. They were not asked to imagine entire worlds. They were given boundaries. They were given purposes. They were given decisions already made and questions that still needed answers.

And they helped gods build worlds again.

To build new realities.

By narrowing down the choices.

By making the unknown visible.

By keeping decisions separate from assumptions.

By focusing on the purpose.

By turning meaning into words.