In this deep-space detour from the grit and satire of earlier chapters, Mookie Spitz reads from the first section of Episode 3: The Band, as the narrative swerves into philosophical "hard" science fiction—and doesn’t look back.
Enter Kreo Bonzai: an arachnid genius scientist and misanthropic slacker who built “the Jar,” a 10-meter cylinder powered by the pulse of a magnetar and capable of instantiating everything that ever was, is, or could be. Not simulated. Not rendered. Instantiated—physically real, for as long as its Planck-scale code runs.
The Jar is Borges’ Library of Babel reimagined as a quantum engine, where every configuration of reality—every universe, every life, every lover—exists somewhere inside its bounded volume. Including, heartbreakingly, Kreo's own ideal soulmate, generated from algorithmic composites of past partners, teasingly perfect, yet untouchable. She's real... but only inside the machine.
Then Alice hacks inside, ransoming the Universe to deliver her true love.
A sentient anomaly wrapped in the form of a precocious girl, Alice takes over the Jar with an eerie jingle encoded with mathematics that hint she has the keys to the entire Infiniverse. She doesn’t just hijack Kreo's machine—she threatens Existence with a smile, deleting whole Universes as leverage to attain what no one expected: love. Her demand? That the one she wants be brought to her—not created, not simulated, but found, chosen, willing, and eager to court her.
Spitz layers the reading with postscript commentary connecting the dots—Planck units, simulation theory, Borges, Nietzsche, Joyce—making clear the stakes of the Infiniverse. This episode isn’t just a gear shift into physics, cosmology, philosophy and computer science—it’s the hinge on which the entire novel turns: between determinism and desire, recursion and rebellion, instantiated truth and the impossible wildcard of human longing.
The Novel
Jonnie Fazoolie & the Transfinite Reality Engine
First Reading
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