Noise on the Starry Sky

The night sky felt like a silent qubit counter; with every blink, Chen Si heard errors multiplying in the depths of the universe. He pressed Tianji’s start key; billions of virtual galaxies lit up like a tide, yet some irreducible noise lurked. The quantum cloud room dropped to 0.1 kelvin; the warning lights kept quietly flashing.

The Tianji array sat 3,000 meters under the Qinling Mountains. The National Deep-Space Engine Engineering Center had hoisted a meteorite-iron core as a super-cold shield; 1,024 topological superconducting qubits flickered with a ghostly blue.

Chen Si compressed the CMB, primordial gravitational-wave spectrum, and a billion-year galaxy-merger dataset into a 256-bit quantized tensor and fed it to the AI. In training, virtual spacetime poured like fine sand—thirty thousand complete universes per second—but the global error held at 10^-35, unable to breach the Planck redundancy limit.

The Euro-State’s “Kraken” cloud-quantum checker validated the same residual through a quantum-secure link. On the chat channel, an algorithm engineer wrote only: “Maybe we can’t replicate the noise of truth.”

To verify, Chen Si asked the Euro-State’s orbital solar network, the “Helios Ring,” to beam a ten-minute burst of pure gigawatt power down to Qinling. He stood in a blizzard at the elevator exit and watched a gold line slit the night. With the injection, the array stabilized at 0.01 K and decoherence fell again.

The simulation rate surged; virtual universes passed the trillion mark. On the screen the white error curve slid toward zero, then congealed at 0.000…1; more compute only made it tremble, never vanish. Chen Si seemed to hear a whisper, like dice jumping in a vacuum.

He finally understood: the quantum fluctuations of the real universe can’t be predicted by compressible algorithms. That irreducible noise is the universe’s signature of existence, the last gulf between an intelligent observer and a virtual image.

At four a.m., the surface temperature over Qinling fell to –18 °C. Chen Si shut the array and looked up. The cold stars were like indicator lights on a giant motherboard, countless yet never in phase. He smiled slightly: since we cannot erase the error, let us voyage within it.