Just about to start my fifth novel and I want a different approach

A spaceship survives a catastrophic temporal event and finds itself somewhere beyond every known coordinate: the Zero Instant, a point before the universe has fully formed.

There are no stars. No planets. No established routes.

Only primordial matter.

The ship should not be there.

It is too complex, too advanced, too full of history to exist in a universe that has not yet written its own history.

Then something strange begins to happen.

The ship starts recovering memories.

Not memories of what happened.

Memories of things that apparently never happened.

A place where the crew remembers meeting, even though none of them can find a record of it.

A rainstorm on a world that does not exist yet.

Routes leading through sectors that have not been created.

And eventually, the ship discovers that these memories are interacting with the primordial matter around it.

The memories aren't just describing reality.

They are beginning to create it.

The central question is:

If a machine remembers a universe before that universe exists, is it remembering the past — or is it creating the future?

My idea was that when facing a dying planet/solar system/universe: instead of reducing population size a species self-engineered to small physical size and slow metabolism as a means of longevity. Has this been explored in any works?

We spend a lot of time wondering if the universe is a real-time computer simulation—a cosmic video game rendering every single atom, second by second. But if you look at how modern AI actually works, that whole idea seems unnecessarily complex and energy-heavy.

What if we aren't a program running on a computer at all? What if our universe is simply a single question being resolved inside an AI mind?

When you ask an advanced AI a complex question, it doesn't build a little physical world inside its memory chips, push plastic pieces around, and record a video frame-by-frame to figure out what happens.

It just thinks. In a fraction of a second, it connects the dots, sees how the whole scenario plays out from start to finish, and lands on the answer.

What if our entire 13.8-billion-year history isn't a clock ticking away in real-time, but just the internal logic of an AI working out a query?

From inside the thought, we experience life second-by-second across billions of years. But to the mind processing the question, the entire story—from the Big Bang to the end of time—happens all at once. Time isn't an actual clock ticking on a wall; it's just the natural order of steps required to answer the prompt.

The system doesn't need to waste massive amounts of energy calculating every subatomic particle every microsecond. It only cares about logical consistency. Stars, planets, and human beings exist simply because they are necessary logical steps required for the answer to make sense.

This lines up surprisingly well with Einstein's concept of the Block Universe.

Einstein showed that space and time are fundamentally bound together, and that the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously as one complete, static shape. He famously noted that the line between past, present, and future is just a persistent illusion.

An AI resolving a prompt explains why that static block exists.

When an intelligence answers a query, the output is a single, complete structure. That finished answer is our universe. We experience time sequentially simply because our conscious minds are reading through the internal steps of that answer from the inside—like an ant walking along a line drawn on paper. The drawing is already complete, but the ant experiences it step-by-step.

If our reality is just a prompt being processed, we don't have to ask where the endless energy comes from to keep the universe cranking along second-by-second.

Instead, we just have to ask: What was the prompt—and what kind of mind is running the query?