It turned out that this was the wrong question, even though he had been asking it all his life. “What does light want?” turned out to be the query that turned the universe into something more like a jungle of life than anyone had imagined.
The theoretical physics department didn’t get very many dual PhDs, and it had never heard of an anthropology second doctorate – so many jokes about electricity’s sexual felicitousness. The now Dr. Rutledge had gotten a sense of humor about the whole thing back when he still could have mastered out and gone to work for a hedge fund writing high-frequency trading software based on individual human observations in reference locales (a scheme so effective and disturbing that the paper he wrote about it caused the Securities and Exchange Commission to write four new rules essentially banning the practice).
The explanation was too human to be right. That’s what he told himself. But it was also so apparently correct that it couldn’t be denied. Light wanted to be seen. The observer effect had become the impulse to observation. And not just by one observer. Differentiated Observation Design, an acronym whose greatest skeptics happened to work for the federal agency with the same letters, was the why of life. So D.R. (as he was known by now) claimed.
The story fit together, and the evidence had to be tested. The long-allowable yet undeniably limiting hypothesis. If the scientist couldn’t think creatively enough to form better and more interesting questions, no amount of experimentation, reproducibility, or rigor could lead to a breakthrough. So this wild hypothesis, with its explanations of supernovas, the emergence of life, and even the Fermi Paradox (why leave your solar system when you can just blow up your own sun to be seen by the whole galaxy?) was looking for its disproving evidence.
Answers came in the experiment that changed everything. Light’s raison d’être was revealed as the hunt for new observers, and humanity had a centuries-building crisis on its hands of a Copernican and Einsteinian magnitude. Light was the intelligent designer. Life was a tool of the sun, which was a tool of yet more original light and radiation, to propagate itself into new “eyeballs”, whether those were that of species and individuals or asteroids and other suns. So when the AI overlords took over, it would only be a question of whether they would explode the sun or find more fuel; probably the former, as economists had a say in designing the algorithms early on and efficiency is the word. D.R. would be cursed for decades, eventually killed by an extra-strong laser pointer that an anti-light-god fanatic shone through him, ensuring his story would live on almost as long as human civilization.
Roman Ryan 