I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility (2007)

A further short story by the same author, very short and very suspenseful, about a powerful AI facing an existential task: https://qntm.org/transit If you like longer stories, then https://qntm.org/ra. "Magic is real. Discovered in the 1970s, magic is now a bona fide field of engineering. There's magic in heavy industry and magic in your home. It's what's next after electricity." Magic as an abstraction layer.

This was a very well written discourse on the existence of different universes, and a bit of an intuition about how to think about them. It reminds me a lot (though it is quite different) of "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions" [0]. This book gave me the best intuition yet about what it would be like to experience a fourth spatial dimension. Having said that, I still don't quite know what to think about it. I definitely don't have…

Fun fiction, unfortunately missing the boat on quantum computing capabilities, the aims of quantum simulation, and the way quantum mechanics works. The current interpretation of quantum mechanics is completely at odds with the statement from the story: "'[the simulation] is still as accurate a simulation of the real universe as there can possibly be. Civilisation - indeed, all of history - should rise on this Earth precisely how it did in reality. There are no chances. It's all worked out…

I read this every couple years or so and enjoy it every time.