At the very bottom is the simplest computer program you can imagine; not “hello world”, but instead far simpler, a meager “move this byte from here to here.”
Above that, though, is “hello world”, or maybe “echo”.
Above that is the lowest-level programming languages, only the smallest step above the pure x86 architecture.
Above that is Rust, C; higher-level languages with lower-level control.
Above that, most other programming languages.
Above that is Unity, Godot, Excel; engines that operate programmatically and yet are not, themselves, pure programming.
Between, below, and above all of these are every video game every developed.
Pong or Spacewar almost below the level of Assembly; your latest triple-A releases existing in frameworks and scaffoldings high, high above even something like Unity.
Above that, then, is all of human civilization, the abstractions we’ve built such that these sparks of electricity in a board of silicon somehow have value.
Above that, what-- psychology? Sociology? Biology? Chemistry? Atomic physics?
They seem below us, as they are the studies of how we work, and yet they are the reasons we operate in the ways we do, the quantum decisions each of our atoms making somehow determining the courses of our lives.
Above that: god, perhaps?
Some higher deity that built the rules the way they are, to align with some bizarre and imperceptible sense of taste or desire.
Or, perhaps, another programming language, a computer vaster and more complex than any we could imagine, idly running our entire world in the background.
Above that, the loop must then repeat: civilization (whatever that means for a society so vastly advanced compared to us), the substrate of the universe, a meager simulation, and then civilization once again.
There is no top to the tower.
There is no bottom to the abyss.
We are in the middle; but, so are the rest of them.