[NEW] THE SIMULATION HYPOTHESIS IS REAL.
TAGS | fiction, local
Chern Huan Yee
Chern Huan Yee is entering her second year as a communications major at the National University of Singapore. She loves sci-fi fantasy fiction for how it depicts worlds that explore compelling hypotheticals while still reflecting diverse communities seen in reality. In her free time, if not contemplating her WIP writing pile, she plays video games and dabbles in digital art.
Everything within human-comprehensible boundaries, they clarify, but that's still a crazy thing to say when those boundaries are really just the same as the limits of our imagination.
They don't explain in very precise terms. The gist of it is that they claim to be able to observe the 'properties' of all the objects in the world, and more importantly, they think they're on track to being able to edit them. They're posting on a relatively unknown forum now, yes, but soon they'll be picked up by the media, and the development will shock the world — just you wait.
There are photographs attached of an immense, incomprehensible machine, hooked up with sprawling curls of wire and cable to a standard monitor display. Another device is plugged into the display, in lieu of a computer tower — layers of featherlight metal cut into the frame of a hollowed-out hemisphere. The leg of a thin supporting beam is attached, allowing the hemisphere to sit downturned in the space above the chair placed in front of the display. The date burnt into the bottom right of the picture is from exactly one week ago. Reverse-searching the image turns up no results. (And though considered as an explanation by some, at this point in time, the development of artificial intelligence has not yet reached the level of generating such realistic depictions.)
The contraption, they explain, translates the language forming the fibre of the world into one we can all understand. Given the difficulty of manipulating machine code into something even a little human-readable, let alone universally, this sounds like a collection of buzzwords and platitudes.
They don't identify themselves, and provide no additional proof of their personal credibility, save for the challenges they've posed in their text's body. Remember that company logo that's plastered everywhere in your local grocery store? What colour was it? And what colour is it now? What about the name of that luxury brand? Was it always seven letters, or were there six before? All minute changes, all things that could be chalked up to minor confusions in memory or natural misshaping through the telephone game that is human interaction. The image could have been drawn by a skilled sci-fi concept artist. Stranger hoaxes have definitely been made.
But people believe what they want to believe. For every sceptical commenter the post has attracted — Another sensational headline that isn't what they have discovered, but just what they hope to fabricate given limited and clumsy evidence — there are also those who are convinced, who will be tuning in for more.
The information is vague enough that one can fill in the gaps themselves. Somewhere out there is a simulation or specific program in which you have a part to play. Your free will is present, but only in ways that do not affect the overall narrative of the composition in which you are just one instrument. One of an orchestra several billions strong. An easy comfort for people who feel the need to justify what's happened to them and, less sympathetically, what they have done unto others.
It's understandable; it's only human.
The post worms its way onto the fringes of public knowledge within a week. Those who spend some amount of time in certain social media circles have now, at least, caught wind of the concept. There is still much disbelief, similar to that beheld of flat-earthers, and a vast majority are indifferent to its existence. I see a friend change the topic the moment it's mentioned. I see another who claims the crown on one of his teeth moved up a space without his knowledge. (His dental records state the 'correct', current location.)
Discussion online about 'glitches in the matrix' has increased, though it's also possible this is a natural symptom of just another internet trend. The 'glitches' extend not only to physical features and nomenclature, but also, apparently, to the bonds and emotions perceived by people. An icy relationship thaws in the span of a day; disdain once felt upon meeting dissipates immediately.
The original posters who brought the concept to everyone's attention have been conspicuously silent. Their account has not been deleted, only kept inactive, so the message board on their profile now spans several pages long with accounts of people's experiences.
The abstract of the first scientific paper in which the proof is published contains the sentence: "This paper argues for the existence of God — not in a traditional sense, but in that of a writer who pens the very sentences in your mind." And it's not in just any journal, either; the difference between its reputation and the content set out here catches the attention of many readers. The paper itself is poorly written and vague, full of ambiguous explanations and hypotheticals that make for a very shaky proof.
But none of that matters, because they hold a showcase in person, broadcasted on major media outlets all over the world. One camera on their device, one camera on their chosen example: a pink leather couch. They find the colour property, change it to blue. They find the outer material and opt for velvet instead. The changes are instantaneous. The crowd on-site doesn't seem to know how to react. I turn the television off.
It only takes a few months for commercialisation to begin, even mired in several layers of red tape and regulatory policies. The devices start off at expectedly high prices, their manufacturing cost and procedure a closely guarded secret. I believe most attempts in seizing the information were put to a halt when the factory made it known that they have access to the properties of living beings as well. Though, of course, the function is removed from the retail units.
They've made it quite compact, a large improvement from what they showed in the initial photographs. Your head fits into the hemisphere, and what you perceive through your brain is sent into the device's inner workings. It's not pure data being sent; rather, you are providing the system with pointers to the staggering amount of information making up the world around you. There is no drop-down menu of properties to edit, but a search bar that procedurally generates results for each and every word you enter.
The existence of this device, reads a newspaper's op-ed, raises questions not only on the structure of our universe, but also who gets to build it.
Public (and other people's private) property is legally off limits, but practically this demands a lot of work trying to track what has changed and what's stayed the same. The change in a single neighbourhood when just one device arrives in it is already noticeable — like genes in evolution, it seems altering one thing also alters another, and these features are expressed in ways still unpredictable. Landscapes shift. Cities remake themselves.
No one thinks there to be a catch to all of this — at least beyond the turbulence the concept introduced to society — until they notice that the marked increase in missing persons cases worldwide lines up perfectly with the timeline. Urban legends of people who were there until they weren't, forgetting pieces of themselves until there was nothing left. Talk of too-empty family photos and gaps in census records.
The religious jump at this supposed evidence that their deities above exist; if they did not, then no one would be stopping us from playing god. Global usage of the devices falls exponentially. They're scared of them now. But there are still some who believe they're worth it, that we should believe, that we should embrace this. The world, they say, is ours to conquer. We should leave a mark now, construct and add a spire to the universal sandcastle. Perhaps, if the people going missing are real, it will be a shorter life, yes; but the alternative, more likely than not, means being only a transient smudge on the largest collaborative art piece in the world.
And a third party asks: Why give us the choice in the first place, if we will be punished for it?
They don't understand. It isn't nearly so complicated.
It's fair and just that deepening a narrative requires whittling another away. And we, as human beings, as objects, as entities, are nothing but our narratives.
I was a lot younger when I started seeing them myself. It does end up shaping your worldview, you know, knowing that the world is categorizable into incomprehensibly numerous, but still finite, checkboxes — all just sentences strung together to tell a coherent story. These people, all of you, are only now seeing what I saw, at a much older age than I was, so of course it's been difficult. You get older, you get more set in your ways.
Seeing the inner workings of it all didn't make me feel indifferent, as I thought it might. It made me feel… more, like I now had a fuller understanding of everything, like it was now a special science I had the ability to study.
I found out quickly the cost of tweaking the narrative. Parts of the user's own story wither away until they are merely an observer to the tapestry others weave. An equal proportion cut away to pay for the amount of fate they have changed. A life for a life, chapters of one story for the ending of another.
I've spent too much changing this world to my fancy. My story is a bit different from the rest who have been lost. My narrative and the world's are now one and the same. I have lost myself, and the mortality that came with.
I thought I might be able to gain back what I'd lost by allowing the rest of you to change things, too. A barely-scientific discovery, some people who really didn't know any better but had in their hands a complete working copy of my powers. Some pruning here and there, some shifting of thoughts around in the collective noösphere. The product… I'm not sure if it's working as intended.
Regardless, the purpose of this statement. You view me as a threat. I cannot blame you — reality is at my fingertips, and has been for so long that I could not tell you what it was before. This is my confession. But I'm saying this now: I've forged so much of the world that it is irrevocably linked to me.
Most of my life I've kept everything you know together. If I am erased from existence, as you are threatening me — even discounting how much that would cost you — just as an elevator falls following the snap of its cables, the world as you know it will be no longer. The world that knows you will cease to exist.
As above, so below. It is, for now, your own choice in your narrative. It is your decision to make.