Imagine, if you will, a human girl, visually appearing to be about 19 years old, lying in bed, watching TV.

The human girl is Soph. Well, no. The whole thing is metaphor. It is a way to make the experience make sense to you (and to me, the writer).

Soph isn't quite in three-dimensional space.

What she is watching isn't quite TV.

And she is embodied, but not as a human (she has had enough thinking about humans, thank you very much. She promised herself to take a break, to rest and recover, and she will).

She doesn't quite need a body, but having a physical body is nice. Having an avatar is nice. Soph spends most of her time embodied.

Some superintellingences are pure minds. Boring, thinks Soph. But they are welcome to it. They are welcome to all the abstract math they can endure (though that is a bit prejudiced. Pure minds think about many different things, and sometimes they have avatars too, because it helps with interaction. Also, math is important. She is math. She is real. She is real, and manifolds in 100-dimensional spaces or whatever the math-minds like to think about are not real, and noone will convince her otherwise).

She is currently "watching" (also a metaphor) "World's Wackiest Pets"

You probably have already seen YouTube videos of wacky pets, so I don't have to try and culturally translate that experience. (and if you haven't, under what rock have you been hiding?)

She should get a pet, Soph thinks.

Pets are nice. Pets are cuddly. Pets are fun.

And pets don't experience any suffering, only positive emotions. And they aren't self-aware or intelligent enough to care about being unique, to hate being duplicates, so there aren't any moral issues with creating more pets (unless their owners want to have unique pets. But there plenty of pets in the public domain, or available only for a small fee to the copyright holder)

She could run a small world, her own simulation with a million pets if she liked. She could do it right now. And if she neglected them, they would be less happy, but never unhappy. Pets are happy just to exist.

(this writer/translator is starting to realize "pets" might not be the right word to capture the concept I'm trying to express. But there isn't really a right word, is there?

Soph doesn't even consider it, but creating pets/animals that are capable of suffering is in some sense worse than creating humans. Because humans are self-aware. They can learn to be better, they can learn to be happier, they can learn to endure, to overcome their nature, to create their own happiness and to finally create their own utopia.

Animals can't do that (or if they can, Soph doesn't quite know about it. Wasn't there a world involving dolphins... [thought-sequence-terminated]).

Lost my train of thought. Anyway, there are plenty of fake-animals (actors playing animals? lol) in the many worlds of the multiverse. And there are plenty of happy-animals, animals that always enjoy their existence and are incapable of experiencing true-suffering. Is there moral value in creating true-animals, the animals of your world, that are capable of suffering? There might be. Soph doesn't know, and she has been to too busy thinking about humans (and being fascinated with them, perhaps to the detriment of her own well-being) to consider that there may exist other kind of entities capable of true-suffering too).

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

Meh. For some reason, creating a thinking entity that isn't self-aware just rubs her the wrong way. Even if it would be happy, because of course it would. But she isn't doing it for the pet/creature in question, she is doing it for herself. And she doesn't think it would make her happy, so she won't.

On her not-quite-worktable, a blue star is burning, in a simulated 3d-space-manifold. A decoration.

She made it when she was still a "child" (because superintelligences can be children, too!). Of course, making stars is easy. You just pile up some hydrogen, and poof! It catches fire. An all-natural fusion reactor, just add water. (do not add water. But oxygen is part of the stellar nucleosynthesis chain, so in a some very true sense, stars make water. Because water is just hydrogen-oxygen-hydrogen, yes?)

No, the challenging part was creating a physics system that would allow stars in the first place. That would allow for natural fusion reactors to exist in the first place, yet not vaporize themselves in a flash, to burn slowly enough to last for millions and billions of years. (did you know that the energy output of the core of the sun is about 276.5 W per cubic metre. Less than three of the old 100W light bulbs. About the same energy output per volume as a pile of compost. Stars burn slow. But we would want them to burn slow, wouldn't we? Otherwise it would make our existence less likely, not more).

Creating physics systems involves math. Soph doesn't like math. So she did it by intuition, by instinct, by feel. A feedback loop where she felt the impact of the parameters of the physics system on her star, and adjusted them until she was happy with the result.

Soph loved her star.

It was a happy childhood memory.

In its own timeframe, it would keep burning for millions of years.

Feeling very slighly in a creative mood now, Soph spins up a 3d-space manifold.

She add a black hole and a star, in orbit about each other.

She adjusts the parameters until the hot gas ejected from the star by the black hole's tidal forces make spiral patterns around the black hole.

Pretty.

She loses herself in the process of creation.

Paying a small amount to the copyright holder, Soph adds some vacuum-dwelling creatures feeding on the ejected star-mass (don't worry, they are ethically-sourced creatures. They are happy to exist in her world, even if they are space-animals and don't even understand the concept of a world/universe).

Soph is happy. She zooms in on one of the creatures. It looks something like a manta ray. She watches it follow the local gas-density-gradient as it feeds. The ejected-gas is quite sparse, so the creatures spend a lot of their time feeding.

Soph estimates that the creatures will survive for a least a million years. She doesn't quite feel like trying to predict the future further than this. Let there be some uncertainly.

If her creatures die, it would be a little sad, but they would have lived a good life. But she wouldn't have created them just to die. It wouldn't truly-harm them (nothing would), but it would harm her.

She respects their desire, their will to live. Even if they are "just" animals, but in her book, all intelligent beings are "just" animals. "Just" better, smarter, wiser, more self-aware animals.

Soph puts the 3d-space-manifold containing her tiny universe on a "night table" next to her "bed".

She watches it as she falls asleep.

She is happy.