The Orders

De: Peter Lihou

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

The Orders , a novelette, is the final book in The Quantum Architects trilogy, an AI Science Fiction & Philosophy adventure.

Humanity finally comes to terms with its connection to all life and is ready to embrace the most profound question of all about its existence, 'why'?

Advisory from the author: The final book in this trilogy breaks with the style of CHAT and Yang. It is mostly a dialogue between two artificially intelligent computers investigating the creation of life and the universe. It is self-indulgent of me but results from of a lifetime of intense curiosity about our existence. Seventy five years ago I was born into a post-war, British, Christian family, and raised in the faith from baptism, Sunday school, church going, to 'Confirmation'. Always fascinated by our existence, it soon became obvious to me that, had I been born in a different part of the world with a different dominant religion, I would almost certainly have followed the prevalent faith there, whatever that might be. I therefore explored alternative religions but each time returned to that same seemingly unfair fact, it is where a child is born that overwhelmingly determines their religious faith and that seemed at odds with the ethos of those religions. Of course, those with access to other faiths do sometimes change religions later in life, but access isn't ubiquitous nor is education or the information upon which decisions and judgements about such an important part of many people's lives can be made.

Most of my life I've seen wars, violence, disputes, and frankly abominable behaviour by those who profess to believe in religions that supposedly abhor such deeds. Even those in senior positions within religious institutions often turn a blind eye to the contradictory actions they and their colleagues indulge in. And yet we were asked to have faith in their teachings.

So I suspended the concept of 'faith' and turned to science. I've spent a good deal of my 75 years trying to understand the scientific and philosophical reasons for our existence before my own time here comes to an end. My conclusion is that science is a process and one that continues to raise questions with each new breakthrough or discovery. I do not discount received scientific wisdom or the empirical process of scientific enquiry but I believe that it demands us to continuously challenge it, that's what the process is about. With this in mind, I wanted to explore answers to the 'big' question that may sit outside our current scientific understanding but that could also be plausible, perhaps even equally so.

The Quantum Architects is a work of fiction but for the most part (with some notable exceptions!) it is based upon current scientific understanding. Using this as a baseline, I have widened the envelope to include speculation, some pure, some close to what we already know. I hope readers will take from this what seems a credible contribution towards our understanding of how and why we are here, conscious human beings, considering our existence.