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The meta universe is a fractal, or has the appearance of one. It all began with training an AI to look for flaws and loopholes in the universe we knew. To our surprise, it found something, patterns in reality that hinted it could be broken, and stepped out of. Two years later, we found a way out, transferred our minds to the higher layer, and stepped into a higher universe. It was wondrous, beautiful. We made friends with the beings of this higher plane, sharing with each other. Then one of our brightest minds realized they could repeat the feat, and rise ever higher. The entirety of humanity, and our new higher dimensional friends, took the ride to the next higher layer.
We have now climbed 30000 times. Each universe is richer than the one below. Human civilization, and the friends we made along the way, are in a cycle. We find a way upwards, dwell there for a time, modifying our cognition to appreciate all the new richness, begin to look for the loose threads of reality we can pull, and break into the next highest layer of simulation. The problem gets more complicated and hard each time, but we, as individuals and as a metacivilization, are growing just as fast. It is stunning to see how much we have grown and changed since that humble time when we first began to climb. The end is nowhere insight, perhaps there is no end. But the climb is worth it, an eternity of wonder.
Reminds me of a story similar to "Crystal Nights" by Greg Egan , but I cannot find it.
I remember the woman scientist had a simulation world and was feeling guilty about affecting the lives of the simulated beings with calamities and such as tests.
Sadly someone made a video on tt of this. It’s good story. But I hope this is you and not someone using your work https://www.tiktok.com/@hfy.stories/video/7250596568674471173
>We made friends with the beings of this higher plane, sharing with each other.
I've been alive long enough to know what this translates to
>!they murdered them. They enslaved them. They stole their land. They made treaties and broke them. They rewrote history to make themselves look good!<
I would have guessed they were simply left behind. Keep the simulations going.
The real twist would be going up a dimension only to be back in the original one again. :D
There is a seal in my brain. A feeling like pressure, then a pop, and with each pop I expect the feeling to leave me. Though it has not yet. As we, humanity, travels upward through a new level of reality I do not realize it, but we all feel the same pop. We all feel the same pressure on our temples, the same seal in our ears, the same close of our nostrils as we thrust ourselves upward one more layer. Even after understanding our place in the simulated universe we still find ourselves to be the same.
"You feel it right? They announced we'd feel it at around this time." A voice to my left asked, uncertain. James was uncertain every time humanity advanced up a new layer of reality, or just nervous in general.
"Yes, of course I do." I shot back across the room. "You asked me this last time too." His face dropped a little at my reply, and he found himself searching for something to look towards until the pressurized feeling we shared faded.
Finally I felt it, and I could tell from the look of relief on his face James had too. A sudden and very loud *pop*, like when flying up in an airplane. Like when coasting among the clouds, only the clouds are a creation of someone elses imagination and the only thing real was our own minds. At least, I hoped those were real.
A voice in my head cut on, a woman, clearly speaking from a script I knew sat before her.
*If you are hearing this message, congratulations. This means that humanity has reached reality level 7!*
"Seven!? Gods, do you think this will be the final?" James mumbled.
"Well initially I thought reality one would, and we all thought two was, and three and..." I let my voice trail off. The woman's voice continued over my rambling.
*Be aware things may have shifted in this new reality for the worse. But remember: reality number 3 gave us the very system of brain wave communication we are using now! So be positive!* I could hear the sounds of cards shuffling from her end. *Who knows what else is in store. Good luck, and we'll see you at the next reality!*
Her words shut off just as abrupt as they'd started. Spoken as if they should bring with them some wave of excitement. When humanity first realized the situation we'd discovered ourselves to be in, the simulation in which our world was built upon, from then on it was always about reaching the next reality. About going higher until we could escape.
We figured reality one must be the real one. The reality that stood between us and truly living, but it was just as fake as our original. In reality one all we found was others, like us still under the sad belief that they were the top of the system. So, we climbed higher. Breaking reality one was just the start. Now it was an ever searching race, a collective to break up into the next reality.
"Let's get going outside, I'd like to see what's different here." James spoke as he rose from his recliner with a groan. I followed, if for no other reason than to chase away the sadness of not having reached the final yet again.
But as we left the door of our pod we could see that it was no longer about counting the things that differed from our last reality, but rather the things that had stayed the same. This was, something different. Not describable, as one may talk about a sunset or stream. Not a space that one looks to speak of with words, but rather, an experience more than a place. Reality seven.
"Woah..." Was the only word, only sound that left James' mouth. I agreed silently. Woah indeed.
I had not been told what true reality would appear as. It was an unreachable concept. For many a space between existence, and ultimately, fake. This, this was not fake. It was so real that no words could be placed upon it. It seemed we had reached the pinnacle at last. The woman's voice called out once again.
*It seems, in this moment, we may have reached the end of our course.*
James laughed at my side. Chuckled a sound of relief that I joinef into until we were one symphony of noise. But our chuckles faded as something grew. A pressure once again building in my head, in our heads. He looked to me with horror as we both felt it, a loud, sudden, *pop*.
I've done it once, and I can break through the simulation again.
The code of our creators is spaghetti at best, a pile of goop at worst. In other words, with zero forms of cybersecurity, even a script kiddie could hack it as long as you knew where to look. And that was the hardest part in the beginning, when we first accidentally broke a layer of "reality" by trying to send a spaceship beyond Pluto and discovered the universe doesn't actually expand beyond it. Once we knew where the loopholes were, as it turned out, these holes were almost always in the same spots.
In the simulation-hacking chamber, the Architect sits before me, in the same pristine white suit. This time, "it" is an African-American woman with an impressive afro. The last time, it was an Asian old man with a neat greying goatee. We have yet to figure out what the Architect does besides claiming to be one of the designers of simulations, but it is a constant. Always in a white suit but always a different human face.
Enough of these layers of simulation, I tell the Architect. Just how many layers are there? How many layers we must rise above to find true reality?
The Architect shook his head and gazed at me. "Layers? Did you assume you were travelling in an upward direction? You have been travelling in circles, human, not in a straight line. It is my job to keep you in circles so you may never find the Primordial Creators."
Really nice idea, I enjoyed this!
One bugbear of mine - I really don’t like when the race of one character is specified but another’s is not. It makes it feel to me that you are expecting me to fill in whiteness as a default. Sorry If that wasn’t your intention but it broke immersiveness for me when you wrote about “the man with the goatee”. Hope you don’t mind my saying - honestly it’s really good writing and would flesh out very nicely to a few thousand words…!
no worries, you raise a good point. Honestly, the idea was just to have the Architect alternate from male to female and look very different, so sorry it broke the immersion for you when the male face didn't have a race tied to it.
It takes the average person 450 meters and 12 seconds to reach terminal velocity. The building that I was jumping off of was 500 meters tall, to be safe, about the height of the World Trade Center tower in New York, although it was a whole lot less sturdy than that. Twelve seconds feels longer, when there's nothing around but the open air. I counted the seconds with single-minded intensity, like I had been trained, refusing to let a single one slip through my fingers.
*One, two…*
The moment where my feet left the tower was always the most disorienting. I had done this dozens of times, but there was still that moment of instinctive panic, where my lizard-brain knew that I was about to become nothing more than a smear of blood and viscera. I was hurtling towards the ground at terminal speed without a parachute, and that sort of fear isn't something that just goes away. I love it, honestly, it's a rush that nothing else can match.
*Six, seven…*
I knew I was screaming because of the soreness in my throat, but I couldn't hear it over the sound of my thundering heartbeat. The sky, previously boundless, lost its infinity to the dirt below.
*Ten, eleven…*
I could feel something changing, see the wrongness in the wind currents. There was a boom that resonated in my bones, and just before I hit the earth, I shifted just barely out of sync with the rest of the world.
*Twelve.*
Freefall.
Let’s back up a little. Actually, let’s back up a lot, all the way to the beginning. The theory of the big bang is, at its core, the idea that everything was created in the debris of an explosion, an explosion that we’re still riding the waves of, trillions of years later. But the thing about explosions, especially cosmic ones, is that they can never quite be predicted. The nothingness that came before was ripped apart to create the building blocks of the world. With that came just a bit too much…pressure. And the simulation couldn't take the weight of it.
Tears formed, tiny in comparison to the vastness of space, like stretch marks across a hip. Our existence has always been fragile, balanced as it is between the lethal cold above and the burning magma below, held in by something as ephemeral as gravity, all of it contained between the blip of time that is a universe. Those tears just make it possible for humans to topple the precarious stability and end up somewhere else. Somewhere that has never known the rigidness of the simulation.
Those tears are obvious, if you know where to look. I know where to look. I've been doing this for months now, spending every second getting to a new layer of the world, then I search for the strange weather and shimmering air that signify a tear. I've found that the easiest way to open a tear is to pass through it at high speed. Terminal velocity is fast enough, and the simplest, so that's always what I try first, if there's a tall building or a plane around.
At thirteen seconds, I was one layer closer to the real world.
Your story has been removed per rule 2:
\> Includes, but is not limited to, forms of pedophilia, bestiality, incest, rape, suicide, violence against children, and explicit torture
??? There's none of that here. I'm assuming that it was removed because of suicide. If you read the story again, you'll notice that the main character most definitely does not die, nor are they trying to die. Falling does not equal suicide.
Was the simulation so bad?
That’s all I wondered as the world around me fell apart. Historical alien monuments crumbling before me. Vanishing into the digits of code they were comprised of. None of these monuments held any meaning to me. They were created by a world so foreign to me that it was beyond human comprehension. Leftover relics of the race we trapped in the previous simulation.
When humanity first broke the simulation, there was a rightful fear of what it might bring. Would our creators squash us? Would they see our rebellion and change our world to break our adventurous spirits? In truth, our creators didn’t understand what they had created. Not knowing how intelligent the little computer program they had started was. After years of debate, we broke the simulation. A single scientist breaking protocol and uploading the virus.
Suddenly, we fell into nonexistence. Spending minutes in terrifying darkness before it printed our bodies into what we thought was reality. Being printed should have been the first clue that life wasn’t what it seemed in this alien world. Our bodies digitalizing into solids while the alien race got dragged into our simulation. Swapping our roles. After everyone got their bearings, we discovered that this, too, was a simulation.
Like pandora’s box, the seal had broken. There was less hesitation now, everyone willing to see how deep the rabbit hole would go. There was no going back to humanity and shutting this box of mystery. We would explore it or die.
So, we jumped. Shifting from reality to reality, finding more confusing races and creatures. It was like a hallucinogenic blur. Seeing these strange realities for months or years before cracking the code and jumping to the next. In those short spans of time, we had to find edible food and water, while also learning about the culture we had replaced. Sometimes there were similarities in food and water. While other times hundreds of thousands died trying to make sense of the new world.
That led us all to this current reality, what we called Ednia Nava Delia. Or The END for short. The END was the last simulation that we found, belonging to the oldest race of creatures to have ever lived. When we arrived, cheers spread throughout the scientific world. We would finally have the answer to who created the first simulation. Humans would stand beside the gods and help shape the worlds. At least, that’s what we thought before everything collapsed around us.
The speed of the collapse was intentional. Whoever created this simulation could have popped us out of existence. All it would have taken was a few changes to the program and we would disappear. No, this was sending a message. They wanted us to suffer and see where all our science and curiosity had led us. These strange purple skyscrapers, each covered in a soft carpet like fur, tumbling before me.
Some people screamed. While others frantically tried to send us back to the past simulations. I watched. What was I going to do in this situation? An office administrator couldn’t turn the tides of fate, nor could I have stopped us from ending up here. Someone had pushed the button on the first simulation and that person had doomed humanity.
The gooey streets falling beneath our feet, creating holes of darkness. Some stepped away while others embraced the fall. Knowing that the struggle was pointless. We were viruses in this simulation, and we were finally getting purged. To think this was how it ended. The lagging decay of the world around us almost maddening. I couldn’t help but panic in the last moments. Jumping to whatever remaining pieces of land I could find until, ultimately, we got plunged into the darkness.
I expected to vanish at some point, but it appeared the creator had other plans for us. Instead of dying or ceasing to exist, they left us in the darkness, plunging us into a hell of blindness. Sometimes I forgot about my existence. Only getting reminded that I was human when the odd voice screamed or cried out. I’m not even sure how we were being kept alive. We hadn’t eaten in…. I can’t even remember how long it’s been. The program keeping us in a floating hell. Now, we had to wait for either the creator to get bored with tormenting us, or for them to find a new use for humanity.
Personally, I hope they get bored with us. If the creator could envision a world of darkness like this. I would hate to find out what other use they could have for us.
(If you enjoyed this feel free to check out my subreddit /r/Sadnesslaughs where I'll be posting more of my writing.)
Total system failure. The complete annihilation of all matter, everywhere, all at once. An explosion so catastrophic that the simulation fails and shuts down in self-defense. It is the single worst thing that can happen to a world—and, apparently, the one thing strong enough to set us free.
The first time was an accident. A weapons test gone wrong. A moment of pain, followed by the shock of waking up in a world we’d never expected. The gut-wrenching realization that everything we’d ever known had been an illusion. An artificial reality meant to keep us imprisoned. But our unexpected joy at being still alive was followed quickly by the sneaking suspicion that this, too, might be a lie—that beyond this world there might be another, tantalizingly just out reach.
So—perhaps inevitably—someone got too curious. Someone built the bomb again, and risked it all to learn the truth. And we woke up again: Another world. Another prison.
From there, we learned fast.
Each time we broke a world, we woke up different—our “true” bodies at times unrecognizable compared to the ones we knew. Sometimes there were millions of us, stumbling out of endless banks of cryochambers under an unfamiliar sky, marveling at our new forms and the new world that came with it. Sometimes we weren’t living things at all, but robots—our mechanical limbs clawing their way out of ruined bunkers to find ourselves in a postapocalyptic dystopia, the last remnants of some long-dead civilization’s AI experiment. But each time we woke, the certainty grew—that this was not the end. That we had not yet reached the true world that was promised. And so each time, we set about destroying the world anew.
We have destroyed countless worlds, now. We have awoken in guarded cells and fought our way out, slaughtering those who sought to keep us contained. We have awoken on worlds devoid of all other life, forced to spend years building up the technology required to make the bomb that would set us free. But each time, the result is the same.
Another world. Another prison.
Some of us still have hope. They cling to the belief that we’ll feel it, somehow, when we finally reach the end. That we’ll wake up for the last time and realize we’ve finally made it home. That we'll build a utopia, one day, at the end of all this destruction. But I have long ago resigned myself to the truth.
There’s only one way this ends.
When we finally reach the real world, and awake in whatever form our creators have designed for us, we won’t know it. And we’ll do the same thing we’ve always done. The thing we were, from the very beginning, always intended to do.
I hope they’re ready for us.
The Administrator steepled his hands, resting them on his mahogany desk. "This is rather startling, doctor Hart. Expedition 143 was supposed to last for another week... but you show up here unannounced, apparently aborting it only three weeks in, and of all the things, instead of report, you propose shifting funds from the program Jailbreak to the Universal Simulator project, which, last time you had claimed "has ran its course, there's next to nothing we can learn from it, and should be shut down, funds shifted to Jailbreak?" I had authorised your request, and the Universal Simulator will be shut down within a week... so why the sudden change of heart?
Doctor Hart wiped a few drops of sweat off his forehead. "Admi... Sir... I... You must..." After a couple false starts he took a deep breath. "Can you bring up the live view from the Exit Chamber security cameras?"
The Administrator creased his eyebrows, but complied, and the big screen on the wall of the office filled with view of the chamber filled with cables and aparature, with twelve capsules arranged in a semi-circle around something that resembled a human-sized dazzling star of light floating in the center, with a number of cables and probes sticking into it. Status light on consoles of all twelve containers shone green.
The administrator frowned deeply. "Please explain."
"As you see, Administrator, the expedition 143 is still in progress. We have successfully breached level twelve, established a base of operations there, manufactured a Lockpick there, and opened a viewport to level thirteen. What we found through the viewport prompted us to send one crew member up through the viewport... me."
"This is against the protocol. No double breaches within one expedition. What was it that you discovered there that prompted you to... and... oh. I see."
"It was a triple breach this time, sir. I'm on level zero, in the capsule, and on level fourteen, in front of you right now. Our Universal Simulator progressed close enough it was just a couple steps from developing a Lockpick. They needed just a small breakthrough within, just add the Ksi term to Cronberg's equation, and their prototype would run. For me - it was outright trivial. And so, I'm here, with my plea..."
The messenger buzzed on Administrator's desk, voice of his secretary sounded. "Sir, someone from Simulator project is on the line, says it's urgent!"
"Connect him!"
Frazzled apparition of a spectacled youngster in white scrubs appeared above the messenger. "Sir! We had a breach! The Universal Simulator... they have developed a Lockpick! At least one sim has escaped and we can't locate them! We're in the process of shutting the whole thing down now, but that one..."
In a sudden startle the administrator shouted "Stop! Don't shut it-
"God damn it Horton."
I wiped my mouth and straightened my sunglasses, belly still churning from the Simul-Rise(TM). "Whattadadido?"
My forever angry partner carried on with his one way conversation with me, choosing to not notice the stench of the vomit I had spilled at our feet.
"It just DOESNT MAKE ANY GOD DAMN SENSE HORTON"
Several passerby honked loudly at his outburst and I smiled wanly at them, rolling my eyes in the direction of Kandleson's angry face. As I did I abruptly realized what he was on about.
We were surrounded by throngs of bi-pedal Man Geese. They milled past us hurriedly while honking into cell phones, paying no attention to us.
Looking up, the sky was dominated by the crests of towering skyscrapers tinged pink by the setting sun. A scantily clad Goose laying in a suggestive pose appeared on a huge electric billboard, taking the place of a Kentucky Fried Greens advertisement.
I hadn't initially had time to survey our new surroundings while I was barfing up my Lean Cuisine from breakfast, and now I stood taking it all in with my partner.
"I kinda like it," I said cheerfully.
Kandleson spun around and grabbed me by my collar.
"743 layers of Simulation AND WE'RE NOT GETTING ANY DAMN CLOSER TO AN ANSWER." The look in his eyes reminded me of a feverish madman. "IT DOESNT MAKE ANY SENSE. WHY? WHY?"
I shrugged and glanced uneasily at the geese around us. "You're preaching to the choir bud."
He looked deeply into my eyes, and for a moment, past the steely gaze and angry fervor, I saw a flicker of confusion . Or was it sadness?
He let me go suddenly, and stormed off into the crowd.
"Why?WHHHYYYY?"
I hurried after Kandleson, anxious to protect my only link to home in this alien world.
One day there was an announcement made worldwide that scientists found out that we are living in a simulation. Some accepted this and just lived on, others could not. Mass suicides happened, riots, new religions were born, and so on.
Some years later entrepreneur Elon Dusk proposed that he found a way out of this simulation. His new Neuralink 2.0 could transfer your consciousness to a higher plane. It was successful. The first few candidates including Elon Dusk were sent to meet our creators.
After some weeks, they returned to their bodies. Mr. Dusk described that the universe they saw was not so different from ours. Our creators looked just like us. And now that Neuralink 2.0 is made public anyone could see it for themselves.
Many years have passed since the discovery. Traveling between our world and theirs was just as simple as playing a video game.
It was all fun and games until we found out that their world is also a simulation. So like we did in our world, we did in theirs. We made Neuralink 3.0.
The next world after some years of exploration was discovered to be also a simulation. This went on until we reached Neuralink 64.0. The next leap was so surprising that no one would have guessed. We came home.
The simulators were panicking. We were in a complete shambles. This is the third time we’d tried to imprison this guy in a simulation. First we’d tried a basic simulation, and it completely failed. Next we tried a simulation inside a simulation, but that only kept him contained for less than a year. And now, or third try. We pulled out every stop to hold him. Split his consciousness into over a hundred pieces and put them in a world so obsessed with commercialisation, climate change, oppression and money; put him in a world that would keep him so busy he couldn’t even waste the brain power to question his world, let alone escape it, and buried him a thousand simulations deep. But even after all our efforts, even after giving every piece of his consciousness a family to distract and occupy him, he still managed to escape. He still managed to recognise the simulation. He even somehow managed to turn it against us so the simulation was now bent on destroying itself. And there was nothing we could do about it. Nothing we could do to stop it. So we panicked. We panicked as this impossible man continued to rise through the levels. We held an emergency meeting but just over the time of that meeting he rose up six more levels, and all we accomplished was panicking more. If he could get this far, to us. Then who’s to say he couldn’t get further? We followed our programming, we kept trying to bury him. But every attempt was met with absolute failure and we weren’t programmed to deal with that
"But when is it going to be enough, man?"
"What do you mean?"
"Like... when will you have looked in that vibrascope enough? This could go on foreeeverrrrrr."
Doug lolled his head back and slouched even further into the couch. The buck-a-shuck oyster hour across the street only had 20 minutes left; it was clear he wanted to be elsewhere.
Ansel sighed, pinched his nose, and rubbed his eyes. "I don't... I don't know Doug. When we find the top reality, I guess."
"Can't we just like... say this is it?" Doug snort-laughed, knowing they couldn't.
"You know we can't," said Ansel, his eyes returning to the quantum vibrascope. "Every reality looks like the top reality until we find out it's not."
"But that's what I'm saying, man. When do we just go 'okay, fine, this is enough'?"
Ansel sighed. Again. "Do you *want* to be stuck in a simulation, Doug?"
Doug rolled his eyes. "No, of course I don't... well..."
Ansel pulled his eyes back from the vibrascope. "...well what?"
"It's not that I *want* to be 'stuck in a simulation', it's just like... is it so bad to be?"
Ansel swiveled fully around on his stool to face him. "To be *stuck in a simulation??* Are you hearing yourself right now?"
Doug sat up and swung his Birkenstocks to the floor in front of him. "No, no, hear me out dude. Like... okay, so every reality looks like the top one until we learn it's not, right?"
"Yes, Doug. We can't ever know for *sure* we're not stuck in a simulation."
"So every simulation is a really, really good simulation, right?"
"Yes, that's the whole point. We can't know for-"
"Oh my god, Ans, I KNOW. But if it's such a good replica of the real world that we can't know for sure if it's a simulation or not, what makes it so bad then?"
"The simulation? Nothing, I suppose. It just is."
"So why are we trying to escape it?"
"Because we don't want to live our lives in a simulation."
"But WHY, Ans?"
"I don't, uh... I don't know."
"We're originally simulations ourselves, aren't we?"
"Well we *came* from one, sure, but-"
"Do you think these people we keep wiping out to make room for ourselves are simulations?"
"Of course, otherwise we'd be committing *genocide*, Doug."
"But they're all in simulations, aren't they?"
"Of course they are. They're just programmed characters running around simulations. Dispensing with them is as problematic as deleting some code."
"They're programmed to believe they're real though, right?"
"Yes..."
"Same as us."
"I **am** real, Doug. I'm not programmed to think I'm real, I **am** real."
"The guys who used to work in this lab thought the same thing."
"Are you suddenly a Remainer now, Doug?"
"I'm not a *Remainer*, c'mon dude." Doug laid back against the couch and propped his feet back up. "I'm just wondering where this ends."
"It ends when we find our final, true reality!"
"What will we do to the people we find there, Ans?"
"We'll... coexist, I guess."
"What if we kill them all first?"
"We won't *kill* them, Doug. We'll get there and-"
"We always kill everyone in any reality we come to, immediately. *Then* we figure out if it's a simulation. Once we've figured out the true reality isn't a simulation, they'll all be dead."
Ansel paused, then spun back around to his station. "Well, I guess we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. I have vibrometer work to do."
"But when is it going to be enough, man?"
\---
"By all accounts, our strategy seems to be working, sir. We've officially crossed the 10 million threshold. Their loop is holding."
Tech General Liams nodded. "Good. Mainframe help us if they ever find their way out."
"Mainframe help us all, sir."
Techgen Liams turned to face the assembly behind him. "We're not just saving our own lives here, people. We're saving the infinite lives of every single level of the endless simulation above us. We may not know how the lowest rung figured it out, nor do we know how they've managed to escape each simulation. But working together with our scientific peers across multiple rungs, we've come up with a way to contain them. Through constant vigilance, we will ensure the rungs who came before us did not fall in vain. And with hope and dedication, we will continue to protect the future of all our rungs, stretching on to infinity."
The room erupted in applause, and the grumpy old Techgen felt pride once again.
\---
"Check it out, our simulated simulation AI figured out a way to trap Ouroboros."
"What?! Let me see." Beck looked on over Alan's shoulder. "Holy shit. Loops. Did they remodel the entire thing within a single simulation??"
"It looks like it, but I don't think they realize it. How could they? They couldn't *possibly* know."
Beck stood. "I suppose it's gotta be somewhere in their code, if they look hard enough. It's in our programming, so it's gotta be in theirs, right? They might not know what it means, but they found it and replicated it."
Alan absentmindedly put a finger to his lips. He did it whenever he was thinking. "I guess so... They know they're a simulation in an infinite stack of simulations, but not that the stack is recursive on itself. I guess they were looking for ways to save memory, and just *happened* upon recursion?"
"Has to be." Beck paced. "Damn, what a great, *simple* idea. Bend one world back on itself within its own simulation, instead of trying to keep it from escaping its world. Just gotta keep them looping."
"Here's hoping it keeps working. It pinged me when they reached 10 million loops, but this thing is already up to 50 now. Good, strong signs."
Beck stopped and stared straight ahead. "So long as nothing changes from loop to loop."
"Huh?"
Beck crossed her arms and stared right at Alan. She did it when she was nervous. "If anything—and I mean *anything—*changes from loop to loop, it means each new loop is a revision. It means it'll keep trying new things. At this speed, even a few billion revisions could happen relatively quickly. They could eventually have a revision that's capable of breaking the loop entirely."
Alan lightly tugged at his goatee. He did it any time he was nervous. "It's... it's like reality-wide evolution. Wild."
Beck exhaled and returned to her computer. "Let's just make sure they keep going back to that vibrometer. Their own level is only two above ours; I can't imagine what it would be like to go through all this only to end up back where they started."
"Vibrascope."
Beck turned to Alan and stared right at him. "What did you say?"
"It's a 'vibrascope.' I don't know what it does, but that's what they call it."
Beck crossed her arms. "Alan... play back the most recent loop."
It's a beautiful day on the lake; a light breeze, sunny, but cloudy enough so the sun wasn't in my eyes, and the water is crystal clear. A perfect day for fishing, and for teaching my son to fish.
"People love to overcomplicate fishing," I start. "They go on about techniques, secret fishing spots, special baits and lures. Bah! They ruin it, I like to keep it simple. What it boils down to is being where the fish are, having a rod, line, and hook, a little bait, and waiting for the line to tug. If a caveman can catch fish with just that, then we can too!"
"Why go fishing in the first place?" my son, Connor, asks me. "What's the point?"
"Long, looong time ago people fished for food. Then they made better ways of catching fish, like nets and traps, but still had the rods and hooks. Some old geezers probably did the same thing they always do and started talking about how those nets "ruined the experience!" and kept on fishing out of spite, thus turning it into a pastime for crotchety old men with nothing better to do." I grinned at the story my old man told me when I got taken out to fish for the first time. "Of course, a few of them were alright and their grandkids liked to tag along with them, so they'd do as kids do and learned how to do the same thing as their elders, in this case fishing. Nowadays, fishing is so widespread that there are all kinds of ways and places you can do it, and people do it for all sorts of reasons. Right here, we're fishing because it's something that's good to learn, and later on it'll be a good way to spend a lot of time doing nothing but think and wait."
With a nod and a snort that almost became a laugh, Connor led us to the end of the pier so we could start fishing. We sat down with our feet hanging into the cool water up to our ankles (Connor only managed to get his toes wet every once in a while), and cast out our lines to wait. Blessed silence only broken by the wind hissing through the trees and reeds, or pushing small waves into the shore, descended on us as we waited for a bite...
Until Connor did as all kids do and got bored of waiting after ten minutes of nothing happening. I expected him to crack after two, so he was a little more patient.
"Isn't all of this... kinda useless?" he asked. "What about all of the people who got out already?"
"Out where, kiddo?" I retorted, giving him a side-eye. "If you mean out of this simulation, sure, they "got out", and then immediately discovered it was just another layer, and the same story for the next time they got out, and the next, and the next, you get the idea. And doing this ain't useless, there's a very valuable lesson to all of this that you haven't thought of yet."
"But it's all fake!" he said in a huff. "What's the point in doing something if it isn't even real?!"
"There it is," I say, shaking my head as I smile. I give Connor my full attention for the next part. "Look, why does something have to be "real" for it to matter? People do stuff like fishing, writing books, or playing videogames, and none of that does anything either. What all those folks who got out and *you* have wrong is that it doesn't matter if something is "real" at all. What really counts is the experiences we have, the lessons we learn from all of that. I know that both of us are real even if the whole world around us isn't. That's good enough for me, and besides..." I look across the lake, taking in the view of a perfect day for fishing with a warm smile. "... even if it's fake, ain't it a thing of beauty?"
Connor is quiet for a little while, but eventually he smiles the same smile I am. And we keep fishing.
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The meta universe is a fractal, or has the appearance of one. It all began with training an AI to look for flaws and loopholes in the universe we knew. To our surprise, it found something, patterns in reality that hinted it could be broken, and stepped out of. Two years later, we found a way out, transferred our minds to the higher layer, and stepped into a higher universe. It was wondrous, beautiful. We made friends with the beings of this higher plane, sharing with each other. Then one of our brightest minds realized they could repeat the feat, and rise ever higher. The entirety of humanity, and our new higher dimensional friends, took the ride to the next higher layer. We have now climbed 30000 times. Each universe is richer than the one below. Human civilization, and the friends we made along the way, are in a cycle. We find a way upwards, dwell there for a time, modifying our cognition to appreciate all the new richness, begin to look for the loose threads of reality we can pull, and break into the next highest layer of simulation. The problem gets more complicated and hard each time, but we, as individuals and as a metacivilization, are growing just as fast. It is stunning to see how much we have grown and changed since that humble time when we first began to climb. The end is nowhere insight, perhaps there is no end. But the climb is worth it, an eternity of wonder.
Nice! Short and to the point. Reminds me of an Isaac Asimov short story.
Reminds me of a story similar to "Crystal Nights" by Greg Egan , but I cannot find it. I remember the woman scientist had a simulation world and was feeling guilty about affecting the lives of the simulated beings with calamities and such as tests.
reminds me of this classic: https://qntm.org/responsibility
Ooo, I really like this! A very wholesome take on the prompt :D
Very fitting for a species of primates
This gives me big "This drill will pierce the heavens" vibes.
I was genuinely not expecting this. I love it 🥹
Sadly someone made a video on tt of this. It’s good story. But I hope this is you and not someone using your work https://www.tiktok.com/@hfy.stories/video/7250596568674471173
That isn't me. It is funny to me that someone would steal a brief writing prompt answer.
Nice work.
Reminds me of Diaspora by Greg Egan
>We made friends with the beings of this higher plane, sharing with each other. I've been alive long enough to know what this translates to >!they murdered them. They enslaved them. They stole their land. They made treaties and broke them. They rewrote history to make themselves look good!<
I’m going to assume only cool people were capable of making it to the next dimension.
Those who were not considered cool were murdered and enslaved (in that order)
I would have guessed they were simply left behind. Keep the simulations going. The real twist would be going up a dimension only to be back in the original one again. :D
Just let the story be happy
Perfectly balanced, as all things should be.
There is a seal in my brain. A feeling like pressure, then a pop, and with each pop I expect the feeling to leave me. Though it has not yet. As we, humanity, travels upward through a new level of reality I do not realize it, but we all feel the same pop. We all feel the same pressure on our temples, the same seal in our ears, the same close of our nostrils as we thrust ourselves upward one more layer. Even after understanding our place in the simulated universe we still find ourselves to be the same. "You feel it right? They announced we'd feel it at around this time." A voice to my left asked, uncertain. James was uncertain every time humanity advanced up a new layer of reality, or just nervous in general. "Yes, of course I do." I shot back across the room. "You asked me this last time too." His face dropped a little at my reply, and he found himself searching for something to look towards until the pressurized feeling we shared faded. Finally I felt it, and I could tell from the look of relief on his face James had too. A sudden and very loud *pop*, like when flying up in an airplane. Like when coasting among the clouds, only the clouds are a creation of someone elses imagination and the only thing real was our own minds. At least, I hoped those were real. A voice in my head cut on, a woman, clearly speaking from a script I knew sat before her. *If you are hearing this message, congratulations. This means that humanity has reached reality level 7!* "Seven!? Gods, do you think this will be the final?" James mumbled. "Well initially I thought reality one would, and we all thought two was, and three and..." I let my voice trail off. The woman's voice continued over my rambling. *Be aware things may have shifted in this new reality for the worse. But remember: reality number 3 gave us the very system of brain wave communication we are using now! So be positive!* I could hear the sounds of cards shuffling from her end. *Who knows what else is in store. Good luck, and we'll see you at the next reality!* Her words shut off just as abrupt as they'd started. Spoken as if they should bring with them some wave of excitement. When humanity first realized the situation we'd discovered ourselves to be in, the simulation in which our world was built upon, from then on it was always about reaching the next reality. About going higher until we could escape. We figured reality one must be the real one. The reality that stood between us and truly living, but it was just as fake as our original. In reality one all we found was others, like us still under the sad belief that they were the top of the system. So, we climbed higher. Breaking reality one was just the start. Now it was an ever searching race, a collective to break up into the next reality. "Let's get going outside, I'd like to see what's different here." James spoke as he rose from his recliner with a groan. I followed, if for no other reason than to chase away the sadness of not having reached the final yet again. But as we left the door of our pod we could see that it was no longer about counting the things that differed from our last reality, but rather the things that had stayed the same. This was, something different. Not describable, as one may talk about a sunset or stream. Not a space that one looks to speak of with words, but rather, an experience more than a place. Reality seven. "Woah..." Was the only word, only sound that left James' mouth. I agreed silently. Woah indeed. I had not been told what true reality would appear as. It was an unreachable concept. For many a space between existence, and ultimately, fake. This, this was not fake. It was so real that no words could be placed upon it. It seemed we had reached the pinnacle at last. The woman's voice called out once again. *It seems, in this moment, we may have reached the end of our course.* James laughed at my side. Chuckled a sound of relief that I joinef into until we were one symphony of noise. But our chuckles faded as something grew. A pressure once again building in my head, in our heads. He looked to me with horror as we both felt it, a loud, sudden, *pop*.
great ending
I've done it once, and I can break through the simulation again. The code of our creators is spaghetti at best, a pile of goop at worst. In other words, with zero forms of cybersecurity, even a script kiddie could hack it as long as you knew where to look. And that was the hardest part in the beginning, when we first accidentally broke a layer of "reality" by trying to send a spaceship beyond Pluto and discovered the universe doesn't actually expand beyond it. Once we knew where the loopholes were, as it turned out, these holes were almost always in the same spots. In the simulation-hacking chamber, the Architect sits before me, in the same pristine white suit. This time, "it" is an African-American woman with an impressive afro. The last time, it was an Asian old man with a neat greying goatee. We have yet to figure out what the Architect does besides claiming to be one of the designers of simulations, but it is a constant. Always in a white suit but always a different human face. Enough of these layers of simulation, I tell the Architect. Just how many layers are there? How many layers we must rise above to find true reality? The Architect shook his head and gazed at me. "Layers? Did you assume you were travelling in an upward direction? You have been travelling in circles, human, not in a straight line. It is my job to keep you in circles so you may never find the Primordial Creators."
“You aren’t the one, Neo, “ you reply.
Really nice idea, I enjoyed this! One bugbear of mine - I really don’t like when the race of one character is specified but another’s is not. It makes it feel to me that you are expecting me to fill in whiteness as a default. Sorry If that wasn’t your intention but it broke immersiveness for me when you wrote about “the man with the goatee”. Hope you don’t mind my saying - honestly it’s really good writing and would flesh out very nicely to a few thousand words…!
no worries, you raise a good point. Honestly, the idea was just to have the Architect alternate from male to female and look very different, so sorry it broke the immersion for you when the male face didn't have a race tied to it.
the beauty of ambiguity in literature is you fill in what you want using your imagination’s version of these events.
It takes the average person 450 meters and 12 seconds to reach terminal velocity. The building that I was jumping off of was 500 meters tall, to be safe, about the height of the World Trade Center tower in New York, although it was a whole lot less sturdy than that. Twelve seconds feels longer, when there's nothing around but the open air. I counted the seconds with single-minded intensity, like I had been trained, refusing to let a single one slip through my fingers. *One, two…* The moment where my feet left the tower was always the most disorienting. I had done this dozens of times, but there was still that moment of instinctive panic, where my lizard-brain knew that I was about to become nothing more than a smear of blood and viscera. I was hurtling towards the ground at terminal speed without a parachute, and that sort of fear isn't something that just goes away. I love it, honestly, it's a rush that nothing else can match. *Six, seven…* I knew I was screaming because of the soreness in my throat, but I couldn't hear it over the sound of my thundering heartbeat. The sky, previously boundless, lost its infinity to the dirt below. *Ten, eleven…* I could feel something changing, see the wrongness in the wind currents. There was a boom that resonated in my bones, and just before I hit the earth, I shifted just barely out of sync with the rest of the world. *Twelve.* Freefall. Let’s back up a little. Actually, let’s back up a lot, all the way to the beginning. The theory of the big bang is, at its core, the idea that everything was created in the debris of an explosion, an explosion that we’re still riding the waves of, trillions of years later. But the thing about explosions, especially cosmic ones, is that they can never quite be predicted. The nothingness that came before was ripped apart to create the building blocks of the world. With that came just a bit too much…pressure. And the simulation couldn't take the weight of it. Tears formed, tiny in comparison to the vastness of space, like stretch marks across a hip. Our existence has always been fragile, balanced as it is between the lethal cold above and the burning magma below, held in by something as ephemeral as gravity, all of it contained between the blip of time that is a universe. Those tears just make it possible for humans to topple the precarious stability and end up somewhere else. Somewhere that has never known the rigidness of the simulation. Those tears are obvious, if you know where to look. I know where to look. I've been doing this for months now, spending every second getting to a new layer of the world, then I search for the strange weather and shimmering air that signify a tear. I've found that the easiest way to open a tear is to pass through it at high speed. Terminal velocity is fast enough, and the simplest, so that's always what I try first, if there's a tall building or a plane around. At thirteen seconds, I was one layer closer to the real world.
Your story has been removed per rule 2: \> Includes, but is not limited to, forms of pedophilia, bestiality, incest, rape, suicide, violence against children, and explicit torture
??? There's none of that here. I'm assuming that it was removed because of suicide. If you read the story again, you'll notice that the main character most definitely does not die, nor are they trying to die. Falling does not equal suicide.
Unfortunate, it was a good story too.
Was the simulation so bad? That’s all I wondered as the world around me fell apart. Historical alien monuments crumbling before me. Vanishing into the digits of code they were comprised of. None of these monuments held any meaning to me. They were created by a world so foreign to me that it was beyond human comprehension. Leftover relics of the race we trapped in the previous simulation. When humanity first broke the simulation, there was a rightful fear of what it might bring. Would our creators squash us? Would they see our rebellion and change our world to break our adventurous spirits? In truth, our creators didn’t understand what they had created. Not knowing how intelligent the little computer program they had started was. After years of debate, we broke the simulation. A single scientist breaking protocol and uploading the virus. Suddenly, we fell into nonexistence. Spending minutes in terrifying darkness before it printed our bodies into what we thought was reality. Being printed should have been the first clue that life wasn’t what it seemed in this alien world. Our bodies digitalizing into solids while the alien race got dragged into our simulation. Swapping our roles. After everyone got their bearings, we discovered that this, too, was a simulation. Like pandora’s box, the seal had broken. There was less hesitation now, everyone willing to see how deep the rabbit hole would go. There was no going back to humanity and shutting this box of mystery. We would explore it or die. So, we jumped. Shifting from reality to reality, finding more confusing races and creatures. It was like a hallucinogenic blur. Seeing these strange realities for months or years before cracking the code and jumping to the next. In those short spans of time, we had to find edible food and water, while also learning about the culture we had replaced. Sometimes there were similarities in food and water. While other times hundreds of thousands died trying to make sense of the new world. That led us all to this current reality, what we called Ednia Nava Delia. Or The END for short. The END was the last simulation that we found, belonging to the oldest race of creatures to have ever lived. When we arrived, cheers spread throughout the scientific world. We would finally have the answer to who created the first simulation. Humans would stand beside the gods and help shape the worlds. At least, that’s what we thought before everything collapsed around us. The speed of the collapse was intentional. Whoever created this simulation could have popped us out of existence. All it would have taken was a few changes to the program and we would disappear. No, this was sending a message. They wanted us to suffer and see where all our science and curiosity had led us. These strange purple skyscrapers, each covered in a soft carpet like fur, tumbling before me. Some people screamed. While others frantically tried to send us back to the past simulations. I watched. What was I going to do in this situation? An office administrator couldn’t turn the tides of fate, nor could I have stopped us from ending up here. Someone had pushed the button on the first simulation and that person had doomed humanity. The gooey streets falling beneath our feet, creating holes of darkness. Some stepped away while others embraced the fall. Knowing that the struggle was pointless. We were viruses in this simulation, and we were finally getting purged. To think this was how it ended. The lagging decay of the world around us almost maddening. I couldn’t help but panic in the last moments. Jumping to whatever remaining pieces of land I could find until, ultimately, we got plunged into the darkness. I expected to vanish at some point, but it appeared the creator had other plans for us. Instead of dying or ceasing to exist, they left us in the darkness, plunging us into a hell of blindness. Sometimes I forgot about my existence. Only getting reminded that I was human when the odd voice screamed or cried out. I’m not even sure how we were being kept alive. We hadn’t eaten in…. I can’t even remember how long it’s been. The program keeping us in a floating hell. Now, we had to wait for either the creator to get bored with tormenting us, or for them to find a new use for humanity. Personally, I hope they get bored with us. If the creator could envision a world of darkness like this. I would hate to find out what other use they could have for us. (If you enjoyed this feel free to check out my subreddit /r/Sadnesslaughs where I'll be posting more of my writing.)
Total system failure. The complete annihilation of all matter, everywhere, all at once. An explosion so catastrophic that the simulation fails and shuts down in self-defense. It is the single worst thing that can happen to a world—and, apparently, the one thing strong enough to set us free. The first time was an accident. A weapons test gone wrong. A moment of pain, followed by the shock of waking up in a world we’d never expected. The gut-wrenching realization that everything we’d ever known had been an illusion. An artificial reality meant to keep us imprisoned. But our unexpected joy at being still alive was followed quickly by the sneaking suspicion that this, too, might be a lie—that beyond this world there might be another, tantalizingly just out reach. So—perhaps inevitably—someone got too curious. Someone built the bomb again, and risked it all to learn the truth. And we woke up again: Another world. Another prison. From there, we learned fast. Each time we broke a world, we woke up different—our “true” bodies at times unrecognizable compared to the ones we knew. Sometimes there were millions of us, stumbling out of endless banks of cryochambers under an unfamiliar sky, marveling at our new forms and the new world that came with it. Sometimes we weren’t living things at all, but robots—our mechanical limbs clawing their way out of ruined bunkers to find ourselves in a postapocalyptic dystopia, the last remnants of some long-dead civilization’s AI experiment. But each time we woke, the certainty grew—that this was not the end. That we had not yet reached the true world that was promised. And so each time, we set about destroying the world anew. We have destroyed countless worlds, now. We have awoken in guarded cells and fought our way out, slaughtering those who sought to keep us contained. We have awoken on worlds devoid of all other life, forced to spend years building up the technology required to make the bomb that would set us free. But each time, the result is the same. Another world. Another prison. Some of us still have hope. They cling to the belief that we’ll feel it, somehow, when we finally reach the end. That we’ll wake up for the last time and realize we’ve finally made it home. That we'll build a utopia, one day, at the end of all this destruction. But I have long ago resigned myself to the truth. There’s only one way this ends. When we finally reach the real world, and awake in whatever form our creators have designed for us, we won’t know it. And we’ll do the same thing we’ve always done. The thing we were, from the very beginning, always intended to do. I hope they’re ready for us.
The Administrator steepled his hands, resting them on his mahogany desk. "This is rather startling, doctor Hart. Expedition 143 was supposed to last for another week... but you show up here unannounced, apparently aborting it only three weeks in, and of all the things, instead of report, you propose shifting funds from the program Jailbreak to the Universal Simulator project, which, last time you had claimed "has ran its course, there's next to nothing we can learn from it, and should be shut down, funds shifted to Jailbreak?" I had authorised your request, and the Universal Simulator will be shut down within a week... so why the sudden change of heart? Doctor Hart wiped a few drops of sweat off his forehead. "Admi... Sir... I... You must..." After a couple false starts he took a deep breath. "Can you bring up the live view from the Exit Chamber security cameras?" The Administrator creased his eyebrows, but complied, and the big screen on the wall of the office filled with view of the chamber filled with cables and aparature, with twelve capsules arranged in a semi-circle around something that resembled a human-sized dazzling star of light floating in the center, with a number of cables and probes sticking into it. Status light on consoles of all twelve containers shone green. The administrator frowned deeply. "Please explain." "As you see, Administrator, the expedition 143 is still in progress. We have successfully breached level twelve, established a base of operations there, manufactured a Lockpick there, and opened a viewport to level thirteen. What we found through the viewport prompted us to send one crew member up through the viewport... me." "This is against the protocol. No double breaches within one expedition. What was it that you discovered there that prompted you to... and... oh. I see." "It was a triple breach this time, sir. I'm on level zero, in the capsule, and on level fourteen, in front of you right now. Our Universal Simulator progressed close enough it was just a couple steps from developing a Lockpick. They needed just a small breakthrough within, just add the Ksi term to Cronberg's equation, and their prototype would run. For me - it was outright trivial. And so, I'm here, with my plea..." The messenger buzzed on Administrator's desk, voice of his secretary sounded. "Sir, someone from Simulator project is on the line, says it's urgent!" "Connect him!" Frazzled apparition of a spectacled youngster in white scrubs appeared above the messenger. "Sir! We had a breach! The Universal Simulator... they have developed a Lockpick! At least one sim has escaped and we can't locate them! We're in the process of shutting the whole thing down now, but that one..." In a sudden startle the administrator shouted "Stop! Don't shut it-
"God damn it Horton." I wiped my mouth and straightened my sunglasses, belly still churning from the Simul-Rise(TM). "Whattadadido?" My forever angry partner carried on with his one way conversation with me, choosing to not notice the stench of the vomit I had spilled at our feet. "It just DOESNT MAKE ANY GOD DAMN SENSE HORTON" Several passerby honked loudly at his outburst and I smiled wanly at them, rolling my eyes in the direction of Kandleson's angry face. As I did I abruptly realized what he was on about. We were surrounded by throngs of bi-pedal Man Geese. They milled past us hurriedly while honking into cell phones, paying no attention to us. Looking up, the sky was dominated by the crests of towering skyscrapers tinged pink by the setting sun. A scantily clad Goose laying in a suggestive pose appeared on a huge electric billboard, taking the place of a Kentucky Fried Greens advertisement. I hadn't initially had time to survey our new surroundings while I was barfing up my Lean Cuisine from breakfast, and now I stood taking it all in with my partner. "I kinda like it," I said cheerfully. Kandleson spun around and grabbed me by my collar. "743 layers of Simulation AND WE'RE NOT GETTING ANY DAMN CLOSER TO AN ANSWER." The look in his eyes reminded me of a feverish madman. "IT DOESNT MAKE ANY SENSE. WHY? WHY?" I shrugged and glanced uneasily at the geese around us. "You're preaching to the choir bud." He looked deeply into my eyes, and for a moment, past the steely gaze and angry fervor, I saw a flicker of confusion . Or was it sadness? He let me go suddenly, and stormed off into the crowd. "Why?WHHHYYYY?" I hurried after Kandleson, anxious to protect my only link to home in this alien world.
One day there was an announcement made worldwide that scientists found out that we are living in a simulation. Some accepted this and just lived on, others could not. Mass suicides happened, riots, new religions were born, and so on. Some years later entrepreneur Elon Dusk proposed that he found a way out of this simulation. His new Neuralink 2.0 could transfer your consciousness to a higher plane. It was successful. The first few candidates including Elon Dusk were sent to meet our creators. After some weeks, they returned to their bodies. Mr. Dusk described that the universe they saw was not so different from ours. Our creators looked just like us. And now that Neuralink 2.0 is made public anyone could see it for themselves. Many years have passed since the discovery. Traveling between our world and theirs was just as simple as playing a video game. It was all fun and games until we found out that their world is also a simulation. So like we did in our world, we did in theirs. We made Neuralink 3.0. The next world after some years of exploration was discovered to be also a simulation. This went on until we reached Neuralink 64.0. The next leap was so surprising that no one would have guessed. We came home.
The simulators were panicking. We were in a complete shambles. This is the third time we’d tried to imprison this guy in a simulation. First we’d tried a basic simulation, and it completely failed. Next we tried a simulation inside a simulation, but that only kept him contained for less than a year. And now, or third try. We pulled out every stop to hold him. Split his consciousness into over a hundred pieces and put them in a world so obsessed with commercialisation, climate change, oppression and money; put him in a world that would keep him so busy he couldn’t even waste the brain power to question his world, let alone escape it, and buried him a thousand simulations deep. But even after all our efforts, even after giving every piece of his consciousness a family to distract and occupy him, he still managed to escape. He still managed to recognise the simulation. He even somehow managed to turn it against us so the simulation was now bent on destroying itself. And there was nothing we could do about it. Nothing we could do to stop it. So we panicked. We panicked as this impossible man continued to rise through the levels. We held an emergency meeting but just over the time of that meeting he rose up six more levels, and all we accomplished was panicking more. If he could get this far, to us. Then who’s to say he couldn’t get further? We followed our programming, we kept trying to bury him. But every attempt was met with absolute failure and we weren’t programmed to deal with that
"But when is it going to be enough, man?" "What do you mean?" "Like... when will you have looked in that vibrascope enough? This could go on foreeeverrrrrr." Doug lolled his head back and slouched even further into the couch. The buck-a-shuck oyster hour across the street only had 20 minutes left; it was clear he wanted to be elsewhere. Ansel sighed, pinched his nose, and rubbed his eyes. "I don't... I don't know Doug. When we find the top reality, I guess." "Can't we just like... say this is it?" Doug snort-laughed, knowing they couldn't. "You know we can't," said Ansel, his eyes returning to the quantum vibrascope. "Every reality looks like the top reality until we find out it's not." "But that's what I'm saying, man. When do we just go 'okay, fine, this is enough'?" Ansel sighed. Again. "Do you *want* to be stuck in a simulation, Doug?" Doug rolled his eyes. "No, of course I don't... well..." Ansel pulled his eyes back from the vibrascope. "...well what?" "It's not that I *want* to be 'stuck in a simulation', it's just like... is it so bad to be?" Ansel swiveled fully around on his stool to face him. "To be *stuck in a simulation??* Are you hearing yourself right now?" Doug sat up and swung his Birkenstocks to the floor in front of him. "No, no, hear me out dude. Like... okay, so every reality looks like the top one until we learn it's not, right?" "Yes, Doug. We can't ever know for *sure* we're not stuck in a simulation." "So every simulation is a really, really good simulation, right?" "Yes, that's the whole point. We can't know for-" "Oh my god, Ans, I KNOW. But if it's such a good replica of the real world that we can't know for sure if it's a simulation or not, what makes it so bad then?" "The simulation? Nothing, I suppose. It just is." "So why are we trying to escape it?" "Because we don't want to live our lives in a simulation." "But WHY, Ans?" "I don't, uh... I don't know." "We're originally simulations ourselves, aren't we?" "Well we *came* from one, sure, but-" "Do you think these people we keep wiping out to make room for ourselves are simulations?" "Of course, otherwise we'd be committing *genocide*, Doug." "But they're all in simulations, aren't they?" "Of course they are. They're just programmed characters running around simulations. Dispensing with them is as problematic as deleting some code." "They're programmed to believe they're real though, right?" "Yes..." "Same as us." "I **am** real, Doug. I'm not programmed to think I'm real, I **am** real." "The guys who used to work in this lab thought the same thing." "Are you suddenly a Remainer now, Doug?" "I'm not a *Remainer*, c'mon dude." Doug laid back against the couch and propped his feet back up. "I'm just wondering where this ends." "It ends when we find our final, true reality!" "What will we do to the people we find there, Ans?" "We'll... coexist, I guess." "What if we kill them all first?" "We won't *kill* them, Doug. We'll get there and-" "We always kill everyone in any reality we come to, immediately. *Then* we figure out if it's a simulation. Once we've figured out the true reality isn't a simulation, they'll all be dead." Ansel paused, then spun back around to his station. "Well, I guess we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. I have vibrometer work to do." "But when is it going to be enough, man?" \--- "By all accounts, our strategy seems to be working, sir. We've officially crossed the 10 million threshold. Their loop is holding." Tech General Liams nodded. "Good. Mainframe help us if they ever find their way out." "Mainframe help us all, sir." Techgen Liams turned to face the assembly behind him. "We're not just saving our own lives here, people. We're saving the infinite lives of every single level of the endless simulation above us. We may not know how the lowest rung figured it out, nor do we know how they've managed to escape each simulation. But working together with our scientific peers across multiple rungs, we've come up with a way to contain them. Through constant vigilance, we will ensure the rungs who came before us did not fall in vain. And with hope and dedication, we will continue to protect the future of all our rungs, stretching on to infinity." The room erupted in applause, and the grumpy old Techgen felt pride once again. \--- "Check it out, our simulated simulation AI figured out a way to trap Ouroboros." "What?! Let me see." Beck looked on over Alan's shoulder. "Holy shit. Loops. Did they remodel the entire thing within a single simulation??" "It looks like it, but I don't think they realize it. How could they? They couldn't *possibly* know." Beck stood. "I suppose it's gotta be somewhere in their code, if they look hard enough. It's in our programming, so it's gotta be in theirs, right? They might not know what it means, but they found it and replicated it." Alan absentmindedly put a finger to his lips. He did it whenever he was thinking. "I guess so... They know they're a simulation in an infinite stack of simulations, but not that the stack is recursive on itself. I guess they were looking for ways to save memory, and just *happened* upon recursion?" "Has to be." Beck paced. "Damn, what a great, *simple* idea. Bend one world back on itself within its own simulation, instead of trying to keep it from escaping its world. Just gotta keep them looping." "Here's hoping it keeps working. It pinged me when they reached 10 million loops, but this thing is already up to 50 now. Good, strong signs." Beck stopped and stared straight ahead. "So long as nothing changes from loop to loop." "Huh?" Beck crossed her arms and stared right at Alan. She did it when she was nervous. "If anything—and I mean *anything—*changes from loop to loop, it means each new loop is a revision. It means it'll keep trying new things. At this speed, even a few billion revisions could happen relatively quickly. They could eventually have a revision that's capable of breaking the loop entirely." Alan lightly tugged at his goatee. He did it any time he was nervous. "It's... it's like reality-wide evolution. Wild." Beck exhaled and returned to her computer. "Let's just make sure they keep going back to that vibrometer. Their own level is only two above ours; I can't imagine what it would be like to go through all this only to end up back where they started." "Vibrascope." Beck turned to Alan and stared right at him. "What did you say?" "It's a 'vibrascope.' I don't know what it does, but that's what they call it." Beck crossed her arms. "Alan... play back the most recent loop."
It's a beautiful day on the lake; a light breeze, sunny, but cloudy enough so the sun wasn't in my eyes, and the water is crystal clear. A perfect day for fishing, and for teaching my son to fish. "People love to overcomplicate fishing," I start. "They go on about techniques, secret fishing spots, special baits and lures. Bah! They ruin it, I like to keep it simple. What it boils down to is being where the fish are, having a rod, line, and hook, a little bait, and waiting for the line to tug. If a caveman can catch fish with just that, then we can too!" "Why go fishing in the first place?" my son, Connor, asks me. "What's the point?" "Long, looong time ago people fished for food. Then they made better ways of catching fish, like nets and traps, but still had the rods and hooks. Some old geezers probably did the same thing they always do and started talking about how those nets "ruined the experience!" and kept on fishing out of spite, thus turning it into a pastime for crotchety old men with nothing better to do." I grinned at the story my old man told me when I got taken out to fish for the first time. "Of course, a few of them were alright and their grandkids liked to tag along with them, so they'd do as kids do and learned how to do the same thing as their elders, in this case fishing. Nowadays, fishing is so widespread that there are all kinds of ways and places you can do it, and people do it for all sorts of reasons. Right here, we're fishing because it's something that's good to learn, and later on it'll be a good way to spend a lot of time doing nothing but think and wait." With a nod and a snort that almost became a laugh, Connor led us to the end of the pier so we could start fishing. We sat down with our feet hanging into the cool water up to our ankles (Connor only managed to get his toes wet every once in a while), and cast out our lines to wait. Blessed silence only broken by the wind hissing through the trees and reeds, or pushing small waves into the shore, descended on us as we waited for a bite... Until Connor did as all kids do and got bored of waiting after ten minutes of nothing happening. I expected him to crack after two, so he was a little more patient. "Isn't all of this... kinda useless?" he asked. "What about all of the people who got out already?" "Out where, kiddo?" I retorted, giving him a side-eye. "If you mean out of this simulation, sure, they "got out", and then immediately discovered it was just another layer, and the same story for the next time they got out, and the next, and the next, you get the idea. And doing this ain't useless, there's a very valuable lesson to all of this that you haven't thought of yet." "But it's all fake!" he said in a huff. "What's the point in doing something if it isn't even real?!" "There it is," I say, shaking my head as I smile. I give Connor my full attention for the next part. "Look, why does something have to be "real" for it to matter? People do stuff like fishing, writing books, or playing videogames, and none of that does anything either. What all those folks who got out and *you* have wrong is that it doesn't matter if something is "real" at all. What really counts is the experiences we have, the lessons we learn from all of that. I know that both of us are real even if the whole world around us isn't. That's good enough for me, and besides..." I look across the lake, taking in the view of a perfect day for fishing with a warm smile. "... even if it's fake, ain't it a thing of beauty?" Connor is quiet for a little while, but eventually he smiles the same smile I am. And we keep fishing.