7_Noise on the Starry Sky

The night sky was like a silent qubit counter. With every blink, Chen Si could almost hear errors multiplying out in the dark. He pressed Tianji’s start key. Billions of virtual galaxies surged to life like a tide, yet some irreducible noise still lurked. The quantum cloud chamber cooled to 0.1 kelvin, and the warning lights went on blinking in silence.

The Tianji array lay three thousand meters beneath the Qinling Mountains. The National Deep-Space Engine Engineering Center had suspended a meteorite-iron core above it as a supercold shield, and 1,024 topological superconducting qubits flickered with ghostly blue light.

Chen Si compressed the CMB, the primordial gravitational-wave spectrum, and a billion-year galaxy-merger dataset into a 256-bit quantized tensor and fed it into the AI. During training, virtual spacetime poured past like fine sand—thirty thousand complete universes every second—yet the global error stayed at 10^-35, stubbornly short of the Planck redundancy limit.

The Euro-State’s “Kraken” cloud-quantum checker confirmed the same residue over a quantum-secure link. On the chat channel, one algorithm engineer typed only: “Maybe we can’t reproduce the noise of truth.”

To push further, Chen Si requested a ten-minute burst of raw gigawatt power from the Euro-State’s orbital solar network, the “Helios Ring,” down to Qinling. He stood in a blizzard at the elevator exit and watched a golden line cut through the night. With the injection, the array settled at 0.01 K and decoherence dropped again.

The simulation rate surged; the count of virtual universes passed the trillion mark. On the screen, the white error curve crawled toward zero, then froze at 0.000…1. More compute only made it shiver, never disappear. In the hum of the machines, Chen Si almost heard a whisper, like dice rattling in a vacuum.

At last he understood: the quantum fluctuations of the real universe can’t be captured by any compressible algorithm. That irreducible noise is the universe’s proof of life, the last gap between an intelligent observer and a perfect simulation.

By four a.m., the air above Qinling had dropped to –18 °C. Chen Si powered down the array and looked up. The cold stars glimmered like status LEDs on a giant motherboard, countless yet never in phase. He smiled, just a little. If the error could not be erased, then the voyage would have to take place inside it.