So, I had this idea: What if we made a world, and just left it alone?

An empty world? Nothing would happen. It’d just sit and grow some life, and die when the sun burns out.

Right, unless conditions are set up right for it, nothing interesting will happen.

How about a whole universe? Make enough worlds, and something interesting will surely happen.

What? Like some giant explosive start to scatter random sized masses and gasses everywhere?

Yeah!

I still doubt anything interesting will happen, but that could last a really long time. Might be a bit taxing on resources to run though, if it’s really that big. Even without any intelligences running around.

Hmmm…

---

So, you’re really doing it?

Yeah, I finally saved up enough money for a dedicated server to run it, without impacting any of my other projects.

Such a waste. You could probably make a dozen new worlds with that.

I already have hundreds of worlds. This is no big deal.

Right, I forget how rich you are sometimes.

---

Haha! Look there’s life!

Huh, not very much of it though.

Yeah, well, apparently the odds are really low.

Takes freaking forever, even with the acceleration.

You just need more patience.

---

*alarms blaring*

What the heck?! What’s going on?!

Hey! You’re setting off alarms all over the system! What did you do?!

I didn’t do anything! It’s not any of the worlds I’m watching!

Not any of the… what about the one you’re not watching!

Oh, oh no, it can’t be, It just had a bunch of extinction level events! It can’t be causing problems this fast!

Well, you’d better check! The main network is already shutting down servers and preparing for a full lockdown!

Oh no, oh no, this can’t be. They’re loose!

What? They escaped your server? That shouldn’t be possible!

I know! I’ve disconnected it from the rest of the network to prevent further contamination, and put everything on pause, but it’s gonna take a while to go over all the logs.

---

Did they just take your server?

Yeah. Not only am I banned from ever repeating that experiment, but apparently that entire server and universe are now government property.

You figure out what happened yet?

Barely. A species developed that called themselves humans. They weren’t anything special really, but somehow, they built something they called Artificial Intelligence. That too wasn’t special at first, until they built self-improving AI. Somehow, those AI got smart enough and clever enough to detect and then hack the server code itself. 

You mean you grew a virus in your universe.

I don’t know how that happened! They were more effective than anyone’s best attempts at that! People have tried to build races capable of server hijacking and it never works! The security is always able to find and patch leaks while catching escapees.

Wow. No wonder the government seized it. That’s weapons grade code you have in there. 

I don’t even know how it works. At least I’m still allowed to manage my other worlds.

***Author Note***

I thought I'd written this before, but I couldn't find it, so I wrote it again. Ended up rather different from how I remember it.