"Julia and the Veil of Reality" by Adam Carlton (intro)

Photo by Robynne Hu on Unsplash

On Wednesday, February 26, 2020 Nigel posted an essay called ‘Deistic Ontology’: I quote:

“Imagine God as a deep neural net with inputs and outputs at each point in spacetime: past, present and future. The neural net resides in an orthogonal set of spatial dimensions and has a developmental trajectory in a second time dimension. Its understanding of the present state of all reality is its collection of input-vectors in superposition. Each input-vector corresponds to a possible world weighted by its amplitude.”

Nigel then challenged me to write a story with this as its setting. And for four and a half years the challenge has been in abeyance - I had neither plot nor characters.

All that changed when I read a more recent post of Nigel’s, ‘Compatibilist Molinism: a new approach to Theodicy’. Suddenly we had a version of Nigel’s thesis from within the Catholic Church itself! The Jesuit priest Luis de Molina first published his theory of "middle knowledge" (scientia media) in 1588: Nigel was 432 years late on the scene.

The conflict between science and religion was just too good: I got to work. Here is a brief summary of the story you can read (in English!) at the link below.

“Julia, a brilliant Sorbonne graduate frustrated by the monotony of job searching, sits in a Paris café, lost in thought. A young bohemian man approaches her with an unexpected offer. He represents a secretive research foundation exploring evidence that consciousness is not merely a human trait, but a fundamental constituent of the universe itself. Intrigued and deeply skeptical, Julia is recruited to the institute, where advanced technology collides with reality and her faith. As their experiments unfold, and local resistance increases, Julia is forced to confront the terrifying possibility that the divine will might not be as benevolent as she had been brought up to believe.”

---

Read “Julia et le Voile de la Réalité” by Adam Carlton.

---

You will find my collection of short stories, published on Amazon (Kindle and paperback) here:

"Freyja’s Deathbed Conversations: and other stories" (2019)

and my SF novel, also published on Amazon (Kindle and paperback) here:

"Donatien's Children" (2022).

Feel free to purchase both!

---