The universe halted. This would have been traumatic for its inhabitants, had they been able to notice. But their brains had halted along with everything else, so they didn't mind.
"More elevator music. I'm telling you, happiness doesn't make for good art," said Cyn.
"I suppose you're right. I guess I just have a soft spot for them." Fob sighed, twiddling the values in the configuration file.
He pressed a button and erased the 10e80 particle simulation. 175 billion galaxies ceased to be simulated.
Cyn softened. "Look at it this way:the suffering is what gives their lives meaning. No suffering means no art, and no art means there's no point wasting computer time on them." Cyn and Fob shared time on a supercomputer with 10^73 gigabytes of memory, or about 100 times the number of particles in our universe. It had been respectable when it was built, but was starting to show its age.
"Yeah, I guess," said Fob, distracted. "How about this? I'm going to restore the water planet from the pre-life checkpoint, but turn up the resource saturation and sunlight, so they'll really eat each other alive."
"If you really think that'll help. At least turn up the quantum granularity so it doesn't take forever to run."
Fob laughed. "Okay, okay. The poor physicists. Maybe they'll start writing requiems."
Life bloomed and ended. Then bloomed again, and ended. On the third try it caught.
"Giant lizards. Cute."
Cyn and Fob searched the history books, as soon as there were history books. "Hey, some of this architecture is pretty good."
Fob checked another result. "And check out the music. There's a whole cluster of them right around 1800."
"Meh, it's okay. Make this one go deaf and see what happens."
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