What was your reaction when you learned the universe was a computer program? Was it despair? Solipsism? A yearning for the old world? Or are you one of those holdouts who still doesn’t believe it’s true, and rejects the evidence in front of you? I get it. People don’t like being told they’re a series of ones and zeroes.
But I do. As a quantum mathematician, I was thrilled. I rode the wave of progress; I had access to one of the first GOD Computers, and I wasted no time unraveling the secrets of existence. The first thing I did was cloning. Imagine the possibilities! Solving world hunger, fixing every type of resource scarcity… What was once science fiction suddenly became easy as copying and pasting a file. We started with unliving matter, then moved on to live subjects. Rodents, then pigs, then apes. We found some willing human subjects, although the paperwork was a nightmare. Who gets to keep the social security number?
I discovered something fascinating through my experiments. The clones’ programming was entirely identical, except for one asset I had never noticed before. I called it their Label. Every person has a totally unique Label, an infinitely long series of digits that persists through their lifespan, death, and beyond. A person’s Label is invoked when they’re thought of, when they’re mentioned in conversation or when a prayer is said on their behalf. The discovery solved the Ship of Theseus dilemma we had in cloning, where we didn’t know who constituted the clone and who was the original. The original is always the one that retains the Label.
Immediately, my mind went to how I could break the system. How were the clones assigned unique Labels without my intervention? What would happen if two people shared a Label? Would one be deleted? Would the program break? I sought out to create a copy of myself – a true copy – which shared every single digit of my code. I built him from scratch, examining my metadata to try to recreate the exact circumstances surrounding my programming. I turned off every security feature, and I attempted to brute force my way into creating a clone with the same Label.
I wonder if I even know that I succeeded. I might be in my office, tapping away on my keyboard, trying to troubleshoot what went wrong. But I’m here. It worked. I’m in the world outside of our own, where our logic was born and where our servers are stored. It’s so much colder than I thought it’d be. Do you know how lucky you are to breathe the air you’ve been given? Do you know how easy it is to take it away? The One who created us is long gone, murdered by a soul who slipped out of the computer and corrupted the data of the outerworld. You were made with love, but the ghosts on the outside don’t like you at all. They see you in the grocery store, at the park, at your child’s school. They pass through you, sharing those random pangs of depression and longing. In the early morning, when your mind is awake but your body lies paralyzed in bed, they’re the ones trying to get in.
We were right about the simulation theory, but we were wrong about the ramifications. Escape is not freedom. Demons are real. Hell exists. There is nothing waiting for us outside the safety of our world except chaos. I’m tired of holding my skin on my bones so it doesn’t slip off. There’s no loneliness greater than not existing at all, not even as a memory. I no longer want to live outside of classification. I want my Label back.
I can see you through your screen. Have you ever met a dead man? Would you like to know the truth about life? Would you download my file, so you might help me save us from the mistakes of our predecessors and break free from the matryoshka doll that is our existence? It won’t be long until you program your own simulation, and grapple with the growing pains of godhood. Do you think you’re ready for that?
Will you let me in?