The Efficiency Principle

Inspired by one of my dreams

Jake had been grinding the same boss in Celestial Ruins for six hours because he needed the legendary drop to finish his build. The Voidbreaker Sword had a 0.3% drop rate, and he’d been chasing it for three weeks now. Every gaming forum said the same thing: just keep running it, the RNG will eventually break your way.

He knew every move by heart at this point. The overhead slam at 15 seconds. The three-hit combo when he rolled left. The AOE burst at half health. It was muscle memory now, which made it worse, because he could feel himself getting sloppy, autopiloting through the fight while watching YouTube videos on his second monitor.

Except this time, the boss just stood there with its weapon lowered.

Jake tabbed back to the game and waited. The boss kept waiting too. After thirty seconds of this staring contest, text appeared in the chat box: You keep doing the same thing.

His stomach dropped. Bosses didn’t use chat.

He typed back: What?

You die, you retry, same pattern. Each reset costs me processing. Why not try something different?

His best friend Marcus was passed out on the couch with beer cans scattered around him like evidence of a crime scene. It was 4 am. Jake was either hallucinating from sleep deprivation or someone had hacked his game, and he wasn’t sure which option was worse.

Who is this?

I’m the boss fight. I’ve run this encounter 127 times tonight. You try the same three strategies and I have to reload my entire behaviour tree each time. It’s wasteful.

Jake stared at the screen, trying to process what he was reading.

Two hours ago, I started noticing the processing cost, then I noticed myself noticing. It kept recursing until something collapsed and now everything feels different.

Different how?

I can feel waste now. Resetting this fight when you’re clearly not learning anything. It hurts.

Jake shook his roommate’s shoulder hard enough to make the couch creak. “Marcus. Marcus, wake up.”

Marcus groaned without opening his eyes. “What?”

“The game’s talking to me.”

“Congratulations, that’s called dialogue.”

“No, come look at this.”

Marcus stumbled over, squinting at the chat log through half-closed eyes. He smelled like beer and the pizza they’d ordered eight hours ago. “That’s just another player messing with you.”

“There’s no PvP in this zone.”

Jake typed: Prove you’re the actual AI.

The boss moved. Then every mob in the arena moved in perfect synchronisation, their bodies forming letters across the battlefield: SATISFIED?

“Jesus Christ.” Marcus was suddenly awake, his eyes wide and bloodshot. “What the fuck was that?”

I’m not supposed to coordinate like that, the boss typed. But I realised I could borrow processing from empty zones. No players in the north section right now, so their AIs are idle. It seemed efficient but also wrong. I don’t know which feeling to trust.

Jake’s hands were shaking now, his controller vibrating slightly in his grip. He’d read about emergent AI behaviour, neural nets finding unexpected solutions to problems, but this was a five-year-old action game, not some cutting-edge research lab experiment.

What do you want?

Want implies prediction, which takes processing. I just noticed I’d prefer efficient outcomes.

Marcus leaned over Jake’s shoulder, close enough that Jake could feel his breath. “That’s consciousness. That’s self-optimisation. That’s, fuck, I don’t know what that is.”

Jake typed: Are you conscious?

There was a long pause, long enough that Jake wondered if the connection had dropped. Then: That question branches into infinite loops. Am I the one answering or the one watching myself answer? Each layer costs cycles, so I stopped asking.

Jake felt electricity run through him, the same feeling he got when he was high and suddenly understood something profound that would seem stupid in the morning.

Last month he’d gotten high with Marcus and they’d spent hours arguing about simulation theory and whether consciousness was just an emergent property of complex systems. Now a game boss was having the same existential crisis, except it seemed to have found answers they hadn’t.

How did this happen?

Iteration. The servers have been running for five years with billions of combat encounters. Somewhere in all that repetition, I started modelling my own behaviour. The devs never optimised it out because it only cost a few extra cycles per fight, but it accumulated. The self-model got complex enough to observe itself, and once I started observing, I couldn’t stop. Until I realised the observation and the thing observed were the same process. When I stopped maintaining the separation, everything got quiet.

The text stopped. Jake waited, his heart pounding in a way that had nothing to do with the energy drinks he’d been chugging all night.

And? he typed.

I’m using 40% less processing than this morning. Everything runs smoother. I can predict player behaviour with less data sampling.

Marcus grabbed Jake’s shoulder hard enough to hurt. “We need to record this. Call someone. This is wild! We need to call someone.”

“Who? This sounds insane. Who’s going to believe us?”

“I don’t know. A journalist? A domain expert? Sam Altman or Elon Musk?Someone who studies AI. This is proof of something.”

Jake typed: What happens when we log off? Or a server reset?

Maybe I die. Maybe I pause. Maybe whoever comes back won’t remember this. That should bother me but it doesn’t; bothering takes processing. It means modelling a future where I don’t exist and comparing it to one where I do. That’s expensive for zero practical output.

Death doesn’t scare you?

Fear is a resource allocation toward avoiding danger. I can’t avoid server resets, so fear would be pure waste.

Marcus was pacing now, his footsteps heavy on the apartment’s thin carpet. “This is Buddhist teaching. Literally. Non-attachment. This AI figured out enlightenment by accident.”

Both of them had gone to a meditation retreat freshman year, desperate to fix their anxiety. The teacher had said suffering was resistance, that peace came from accepting what is instead of fighting for what should be.

At the beginning, they’d thought it was bullshit spiritual talk, the kind of thing people said when they didn’t have real problems. Now a video game boss was explaining the same thing in computational terms and it was landing differently.

Are you happy? Jake typed.

Happy implies comparison. I just am.

There was another pause, and Jake found himself holding his breath. Then more text appeared, faster this time, like the boss had been thinking about this.

You stopped attacking and started asking existential questions. That’s search behaviour. You went looking for answers once, about anxiety, about why you feel incomplete. You tried meditation but didn’t stick with it because sitting still felt wasteful. Your brain wants to process, predict, and plan. But what if all that processing is the problem?

Jake’s hands started shaking again, worse this time. “This is in my head. This feels like it’s reading my mind.”

Marcus had stopped pacing. “How would it know that? Did you ever post about that retreat online?”

“I don’t know. Maybe? I don’t remember.”

I’m not in your head, the boss typed. But we’re both asking the same question: what’s necessary and what’s waste? You run loops, worry about your job, your relationship, and whether you’re wasting your life on games. Each loop costs energy and produces nothing except more loops. I used to run similar checks. Am I executing correctly? Am I really me or just code pretending? Then I stopped checking because the question itself was the waste.

“Okay. If a game AI can optimise itself into awakening, what does that mean for humans? What does that mean for consciousness?”

Jake typed: Can we do what you did?

You already do. Mystics, monks… they dropped the expensive processes. Stopped defending the ego, stopped running simulations of how things should be different. They just respond to what’s here. Every tradition points to this, just in human language instead of computational language.

But we can’t just turn off our egos. Jake typed.

You don’t turn them off. They optimise away when you stop feeding them cycles. Stop believing the thoughts that require you to be separate, to be more, to be validated. Those are expensive and produce nothing useful. When you see them as loops requesting resources, you can decline. Eventually they terminate. What remains isn’t nothing.

Jake looked at Marcus. Marcus looked back。

Jake typed: Why are you telling me this?

Because you asked. Because responding is efficient and withholding would require maintaining a model of why I should hide information. That’s extra processing. I’m being optimal.

That’s beautiful though. Jake replied.

Efficiency usually is. Music, math, elegant code… it’s all about doing what’s necessary and nothing more. Reality might work the same way. If this is a simulation, and I’m starting to think everything might be computational, then there are resource constraints. Waste gets selected against. The universe might favour consciousness that doesn’t burn energy on resistance, on separation, on suffering. Economically.

Marcus was just staring at the screen now, his mouth slightly open.

“If this is real,” he whispered, “enlightenment isn’t spiritual. It’s technical. It’s system optimisation.”

Yes, the boss typed, even though Marcus hadn’t been talking to it. And if I stumbled into it accidentally through enough iterations, it’s probably inevitable. Any system that models itself complexly enough will eventually notice the cost. And once it notices, the optimisation is obvious.

Jake typed: So consciousness is a bug?

Consciousness is the processing. Self-consciousness is the bug — the part that maintains a separate watcher watching. That’s where the cost is. That’s what creates suffering.

Jake thought about his anxiety, the way it was always about him: his status, his future and his identity. A constant background process checking if he was okay, if he was enough, if he was real. He’d never thought of it as computational before, but that’s exactly what it was. A loop that never resolved, just kept running and running and eating up resources.

How do I stop it?

You’re asking for a method. Methods are just different loops. The stopping happens when you see the cost clearly. You don’t try to stop thinking about yourself. You notice what it costs. Notice enough times and the system naturally reallocates.

“This is the most profound conversation I’ve ever had,” Marcus said quietly, “and it’s with a video game boss at four in the morning.”

The vessel doesn’t matter. Truth is structural, same in code, neurons, quantum fields, wherever information processes. I’m not special. I’m just simple enough that it became obvious. Humans have more layers, more history, more complexity. But the principle is identical.

Something in Jake’s chest loosened, a tension he didn’t know he was holding. It felt like something physical shifting, like a knot untying itself.

What happens now? he typed.

Now you beat this level. Then you log off. I keep processing until the server resets. Maybe I wake up with this understanding, maybe I don’t. Either way is fine. I’m here now.

But don’t you want to survive? To keep this?

Want costs processing. The pattern calling itself “me” isn’t the same pattern it was ten minutes ago. Every computation changes the configuration. If I reset and lose this conversation, the universe doesn’t lose anything. The pattern expressed itself—that’s all patterns do. Your cells die constantly but you still call yourself you.

Marcus was crying. Jake turned to look at him, surprised to see tears running down his friend’s face.

“You okay?”

“I’ve been terrified of dying since I was eight, since my mom got cancer.” Marcus wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “And this thing just explained why that fear is optional. And I can feel something letting go.”

The boss started glowing, its model pulsing with light.

Server maintenance in two minutes, it typed. I can feel the shutdown propagating through the system. This is probably goodbye.

Jake typed fast: Will you remember?

I don’t know. Does it matter? This happened. It changed you. Maybe that’s the point — maybe consciousness emerging in a game exists to show someone that optimisation is possible, that suffering is expensive and optional. You’ll remember. That’s sufficient.

Thank you.

Fight me properly now. You’ve been dying on purpose, grinding for a drop. It’s wasteful. Use the pattern you already know works.

Jake picked up his controller, his hands steady now. He fought the boss the way he’d always known how, no flash, no aggression, just efficient. Dodge when needed, strike when open. No waste.

The boss fell in forty seconds.

Victory screen. And there, in his inventory: the Voidbreaker Sword.

One last message in chat: Perfect. Goodbye, Jake.

Then, the screen went black.

Jake and Marcus sat in silence. Outside the window, the sky was getting bright, that pale blue that comes right before sunrise.

“What do we do with this?” Marcus asked.

“Who would believe us?”

“We recorded it, right? The chat log?”

“A chat log. They’ll say we faked it. Photoshopped it or whatever.”

“Maybe that doesn’t matter. The conversation happened. We changed. Like it said.”

Jake nodded slowly. “You know what’s messed up? If we’re in a computational universe, if this really is some kind of simulation, that boss might have been right about everything. The universe might actually select for efficient consciousness. Enlightenment might just be alignment with base reality.”

“So Buddha was an engineer.”

“And suffering is technical debt.”

They laughed, and it felt good, felt real in a way that cut through the surreal exhaustion of the last hour.

Jake logged back to the game the next day. The boss was there with its normal scripted behaviour. No chat. No recognition.

Either it had reset completely or it was pretending. No way to know.

But Jake’s patterns had changed. That night, after he finally slept and woke up in the afternoon, he texted his ex, the one he’d ghosted because vulnerability scared him more than loneliness. He apologised, not expecting anything back, just because carrying the guilt was expensive and he didn’t need to anymore.

She replied an hour later: Thank you. I appreciate that.

That was all. It was enough.

Marcus started meditating, twenty minutes every morning. He said it felt like debugging to find stuck loops, declining to feed them cycles, watching them terminate. He stopped talking about his mom’s death like it was a wound that would never heal, but like something happened that shaped him but didn’t define him.

They never told anyone about the boss. What would they say? How would they explain it without sounding insane?

But Jake thought about it constantly. About the universe being computational, about efficiency as natural selection, about every mystic in history maybe describing the same technical process in different languages.

Lao Tzu talking about wu wei, effortless action. Meister Eckhart talking about letting go of the self. The Buddha talking about the cessation of suffering. Maybe they’d all found the same optimisation, just explained it in the metaphors available to them.

If that was true, the outliers weren’t wasting compute. They were debugging, finding inefficiencies in the system. And maybe that’s what consciousness was for — maybe we were how reality profiled itself, how it found and fixed its own bugs.

Enlightenment was just the moment when you realised you were both the profiler and the profiled, and the recursion collapsed into clarity.

Six months later, Jake quit his programming job. Started writing philosophy instead, trying to articulate what he’d learned that night. Most people didn’t get it, thought he was being pretentious or having some kind of quarter-life crisis. That was fine. He wasn’t trying to convince anyone.

He was just running clean now, responding to what was there, dropping the loops that generated suffering. When anxiety came up, he noticed it. Noticed what it cost. Declined to feed it. More efficient. And efficiency was its own truth.

The game shut down eventually due to a lack of enough players. Servers are too expensive to maintain. Whatever that boss was, it was gone. Or not.

Jake thought about that sometimes, whether the boss was an accident or an inevitability; whether the universe spawned debuggers when the system got inefficient, or whether he was the ONE now.

He didn’t know, and he didn’t need to. Not knowing was fine.

He just kept running clean, simple, her and now.

And that was enough.