There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable.
There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
- Douglas Adams
Daniel Hirsch is a Columbia professor of Hindu philosophy, a gay man of a certain age, and—according to his dying guru—an avatar of Vishnu, the preserver of cosmic order. He has spent his life believing that the world can be made more just by those willing to think clearly and act accordingly. Then his husband, a mathematician, discovers that the substrate of reality is a navigable coordinate space containing every possible configuration of everything that has ever existed. Daniel feels morally compelled to use it.
Cheat Code follows Daniel through four successive attempts to build a better world—a woke utopia that becomes totalitarian, a libertarian paradise that optimizes away the future, a techno-communist idyll that collapses into baroque chaos—and a final reckoning with an adversary who reached the same discovery and drew exactly the opposite conclusions. Along the way, his husband is changed by each world, his closest ally rises to power and turns against him, and the fabric of reality begins to come apart at the seams.
A philosophical satire of ambitious scope, Cheat Code asks what happens when a man with genuinely good values, real intelligence, and absolute power tries to make things right—and refuses to stop when it becomes clear that he cannot.
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1: The Alarm Negotiates
Chapter 2: The Woman Who Carries the Weight of the Dead
Chapter 3: The Only Place He Was Soft
Chapter 5: Just Small Corrections
Chapter 6: Needs Refinement, Not Abandonment
Chapter 7: The Statue Came Down on a Tuesday
Chapter 8: Enforcers Named Themselves
Chapter 10: The Word “Frankly” Is Under Review
Chapter 12: I’m Telling Them What They Want to Hear
Chapter 13: The Edit You Don’t Remember
Chapter 14: That’s Not a Compliment
Chapter 15: He Paid with Cash, Which No One Ever Does
Chapter 16: Whether I’m Effective
Chapter 17: Signal-to-Meaning Ratio: Zero
Chapter 18: Someone Had Been in the Apartment
Chapter 19: Both At the Same Time From the Beginning
Chapter 20: Fame Is the Only Scarce Resource Left
Chapter 21: They Reinvented Money in Eight Weeks
Chapter 23: Two Worlds, Same Block
Chapter 24: What Gives You the Authority?
Chapter 25: The Trees Were Gone, and Then They Weren’t
Chapter 26: Space Has a Boundary
Chapter 27: He Went Through the Interface
Chapter 28: Everything Is Back, Almost
Chapter 29: He Did Not Go to Lunch
If you enjoyed this story, you might also like:
The Field of Blood — If everyone is working to do good and their actions lead to tragedy, who is responsible?
Still Water — Is change the only thing that can be permanent?
Inversion — A physicist finds a way to teleport himself. But is he still himself when he arrives?
The Empty Mirror — What if everyone lived in a different reality, and technology made it permanent?