I was reading some status updates about how today is one year after the day (21st December 2012) a bunch of people believed that the world would end. It got me thinking and I made a facebook update. One thought lead to another, and I made in to a thread. This is what I finally ended up with.

 

What if there really was an apocalypse one year ago and only a handful of humans survived? But unable to deal with all the pain of losing almost of everyone we knew, someone developed a virtual reality which starts a day before the apocalypse, and in this illusion the apocalypse never happens.

You’re just living in a life of illusions and imaginations. I am not alive. I died when a meteor caused the mall I was buying chocolates in to collapse. You’re reading this because you mind imagined that I would post something like this. A figment of your imagination, just like everyone else around. They’re all dead. DEAD. DEAD. DEAD.

Now that you know that is not the real world you’re living in but just a simulation, what do you do? Do you continue in this virtual world, knowing full well what pain, the real world holds for you? What if you never wanted the illusion to get so out of hand that it creates an entirely different world for you? Now that you know it, you want out?

Plot twist… But you can’t get out. You’ve been put in a self-sustaining machine that is keeping you alive via a breathing and feeding apparatus. Your thoughts and actions in this simulation cannot influence the machine or the real world. The question here is, what is more painful? The real life where your world was ravaged by an apocalypse? Or living in an illusion knowing full well that it is so, and what the real world holds for you?

Another plot twist. You can choose to come out of the simulation, but for ulterior reasons the makers of the machine and simulation built this thought that you can’t get out of it as a fail-safe to keep the simulation going on. You can do it, but you’ve been lead to believe that it is impossible.

After some time you slowly come to terms with your life in the simulation. You don’t have much control over how the simulation plays out as it is reflection of the imaginations from your subconscious, but you accept this new life and embrace it. You now have a loving family with the person you always liked, and a dream job.
Plot twist. There never was an apocalypse, this simulation was built as a trial so that we can use it when something like this really happens. You are now taken out of the simulated life you had come to embrace. The people you loved, and lived with are no longer there. They were just how your imagination worked them out to be. You now live with these people, who are so different from how you remember them in your imagination.

You’re unable to come to terms with this, and your mind begins to play games on you. There are flashes, only momentary which are like glimpses into the life you had. After a period of substance abuse, you want to end it all and plan to kill yourself. By the time you are about to do it, some of faculties come back at you. There is someone who is screaming at you to not do it. You tell them about the lie of a life you were made to live in, and that you can’t take it anymore.

As you are about to take the final step, you are filled with doubt. Is this the real world or the simulated world? Have you actually come back to the real world, or has living for so long in the simulated world make you think that it is real world. It could be coping mechanism by your mind.

When you do kill yourself, will be it real or not? Will you die? If it’s not real what will happen to you? Will you find out immortality of yourself in this simulation? Will the simulation reset itself, and all of it feel like a dream that you cannot fully remember? What will happen?

 

Is there an end to this?