The Platinum Cave

When we say "foundations of the universe," we imply a base. Concrete. Granite. Something on which all existence rests. We convince ourselves of the correctness of theories, sculpt formulas, write dissertations to drown out a simple and terrible fact: the building of our world is unshakeable only relatively.

The Archivist knew this better than anyone else. He wasn't a scientist in the usual sense. He didn't seek laws — he sought violations. 

On his desk lay three folders.

The first — Jonathan Swift, 1726. In Gulliver's Travels, he describes two moons of Mars and specifies their orbital periods with frightening accuracy. Astronomers would discover them only a century and a half later. 

The second — Edgar Allan Poe. The poem Eureka, in which he describes the birth of the Universe from a single particle eighty years before the Big Bang theory. 

The third — Jules Verne. The launch point and splashdown of the moon module. A hit — kilometer for kilometer, contrary to the ballistics of that time.

The Moment of Glitch

The Archivist remembered how it all started. Not with books, but with spilled coffee in a cheap diner three years ago. A cup fell off the table. The Archivist watched it, and time seemed to stumble. The ceramic hit the tile but didn't break or bounce off. For a fraction of a second, the cup simply passed through the floor, as if the textures of the world hadn't had time to load the solidity of matter. 

This lasted an instant. In the next second, reality "blinked," a crash rang out, and the shards flew apart according to all laws of Newtonian mechanics. Visitors flinched, the waiter swore. No one noticed anything. The world obediently "rolled back" to the version where solid bodies do not pass through each other. 

— "Good reaction," someone nearby said then. 

— "Bad rendering," replied the Archivist, but he was not understood.

— "They weren't visionaries," he whispered now, returning to the folders and the star chart. — "They were witnesses to bugs." 

He understood this long ago. Physics is not absolute. At certain moments in history, the fabric of reality thinned, and a draft showed through. Swift didn't invent the moons of Mars — he saw them when the "engine" of the Universe ceased rendering the void hiding them for a second. Poe saw the beginning of time because time glitched.

The Archivist put on his coat. He calculated the next rupture point. It was not in space, but here, in the old subway, on a stretch the workers never managed to finish. 

He walked along the tunnel until the rails broke off. Further was only darkness. But not just the absence of light. It was that very "giant abyss" he had guessed at all his life. 

— "We live in a cave," he said into the void. — "But Plato was wrong. It's not stone." 

The walls around him suddenly shimmered. It was not rough stone, but perfectly smooth, mirror-like metal. Priceless, inert, eternal. 

— "Platinum," he corrected himself.

The Aesthetics of Prison

He ran his hand over the cold surface. It was perfect. Too perfect for nature. In this metal, there was not a scratch, not a speck of dust, not a trace of corrosion. It was the sterile luxury of an operating room.

"That's why we don't want to leave," he thought bitterly. — "Our prison is not a damp basement. It's a five-star hotel. We gave up our freedom in exchange for predictability. We were promised that tomorrow the sun would rise at exactly the same time as today, and that an apple would always fall down. And we were so happy with this comfort that we stopped looking at the walls." He saw his reflection in the platinum. The tired, distorted face of a man tired of pretending the scenery was real. 

Humanity polished the walls of its prison to a shine. We created culture, science, and philosophy to decorate this cage. We imposed a coordinate grid on chaos, invented gravity and thermodynamics, just not to see that behind the thin walls of precious platinum rages an ocean of pure madness. We locked ourselves in a comfortable, expensive self-deception.

The Archivist approached the wall closely. In this place, the platinum had thinned. He saw pulsation behind it. He raised his hand to do what neither Swift nor Einstein dared. He decided to pierce the scenery. 

A blow. A ring. And silence. 

The wall didn't crumble into stones. It dissolved like a pixel haze. The Archivist stepped forward, expecting to see God, the Absolute, or at least a shining world of ideas. 

But he saw an interface.

Before him, occupying all space from nadir to zenith, hung an infinite input field. A cursor, the size of a galaxy, blinked lazily, awaiting data input. 

The Archivist watched history being born. Lines appeared out of nowhere. "Let matter be pliable to thought", typed an invisible operator. 

The Archivist held his breath. Here it is, true magic! But immediately, a red frame flashed over the text. A soulless algorithm instantly highlighted the phrase. 

AUTOCORRECT: "Let matter obey the laws of conservation of energy." 

The operator seemed not to even notice the substitution. He continued typing, lazily and carelessly. "People can fly by force of will." AUTOCORRECT: "People can dream of flying."

The Archivist went cold. The laws of physics were not a foundation. They were censorship. They were an intrusive, stupid, overly cautious T9 algorithm that corrected the Creator's inspired chaos into a boring, safe, gray norm.

And then his gaze fell on a log file at the very bottom, dated to the beginning of time. There was a record of the creation of the world he lived in. Original Creator's request: "Create a world in the image of PLATO'S cave (world of ideas and shadows)." 

The system blinked. AUTOCORRECT: "Did you mean: PLATINUM cave?" ACTION: Applied. Wall material: Platinum. Status: Isolation.

— "A typo..." breathed the Archivist, feeling his legs give way. — "We are just the result of a typo. Our entire civilization, all our progress is just an autocorrect error they forgot to undo."

The cursor suddenly froze. The giant "eye" of the system noticed an intruder in the program code. The Archivist realized he had a split second before he was erased as a bug. 

He had to do something. Cancel. Scream. Hack this damned code. He took a deep breath, gathering all his will, all his hatred for this sterile, fake platinum cage. 

— "FREEDOM!" he yelled, putting into this word the desire to break the chains of physics.

His voice turned into text on the command line. The word shone gold. The system thought for a moment. The algorithm analyzed the request. Too dangerous. Too unpredictable. Does not match stability parameters. 

A dialogue window flashed: INPUT ERROR DETECTED. Input value: FREEDOM Did you mean: DOOM?

The Archivist didn't have time to answer. The [ENTER] button pressed itself. 

Darkness. Absolute, eternal, error-free.