If I close my eyes long enough, I can still hear the sound of the exhaust dripping.

I can feel myself flinching with each drop. I know it’s my body rejecting the memory associated with it.

Do you remember where you were?

I still remember the horrified expressions of the people around me as they began to learn the truth. I can still see it, the struggle in their eyes. The look my parents had. All hope they once had slowly retreating from their body. That article ripped out who they were, and what I was left with were just their shells.

We all make our own choices.

I was too young to understand it then.

I ran around the house thinking we were playing hide and seek, yelling out for them. In the kitchen, their bedroom, down the stairs and into the garage. I could see the smoke before I could even see the car. I sat at the top of the stairs, leaning down to see them, their bodies cloaked in the dark gaseous entity holding them hostage. A dark translucent demon; a monster. I watched as the smoke grew darker. Like a child erasing a mistake, I saw the large black form slowly mark up against the car window, taking them from me. Even as a small boy I saw how it gave them the only peace they needed.

That's why I can still picture that headline perfectly.

Word for word.

Six words scrolling past the bottom of our screens. That was all it took for panic to set in, for the world to fall apart. A message so small that if you had blinked, you would have missed it.

To tell you that story, we have to go back to the beginning.

It started with Dr. Dennis Flemming, "The Man with a Thousand Dreams." It was his moniker, his given name. It was mostly used by those who read the article and didn't bite. The name came from a now-infamous article written by John Seaver for the New York Times covering Dr. Flemming's theory. The article, titled "A Thousand Questions, One Answer." It explained in depth what The Fourth Wall Theory was. It also made comparisons between Dr. Flemming and the prophets and philosophers of old; as a symbol of both impending doom and enlightenment.

Dennis Flemming was an obsessive man. A genius, both as a philosopher and a theoretical physicist. He believed real meaningful answers about life lay somewhere in between philosophy and science. He regarded himself as a man who understood that “human life and the earth are too well-crafted to be the result of chance.” Books would later be written on Dr. Flemming's obsessive tendencies, especially in regards to the scientists he monitored as a result of his study.

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At the peak of A.I technology, Dr. Flemming had a certain curiosity and fascination with it. Not just with the science, but also with the men and women behind it. There was one team in particular he had a certain fondness for. It was a rather small team outside of El Paso working for a now-defunct-video-game-company by the name of Rubixsoft. This is where Dr. Flemming met Dr. Saahir Nasar.

It was at Rubixsoft that Dr. Nasar made significant breakthroughs in A.I technology while developing what he called 'the greatest simulation of all time'. A large open-ended MMO called The Secret Life. Dr. Nasar understood that other players broke immersion. By pushing the limits of what the A.I were capable of, he hoped to create the perfect actors. Three-dimensional personalities to interact and play with. The extent of his team's breakthroughs caught the attention of the U.S Government, and their wallets. They funded his team in hopes that the technology they were working on could help improve infrastructure.

Dr. Nasar had created what we now refer to as Virtuals, sentient artificial life. Using our own neural patterns, Dr. Nasar essentially created the perfect A.I. The team implanted personalities, memories, and ideas onto them. Dr. Nasar and his team would fabricate intricate narratives and group the Virtuals in a simulation loop, hoping to test their emotional responses. They wanted to see the extent of their reactions.

There were some ethical questions being pointed at Dr. Nasar and his team at the time about the extent of these tests. With the U.S Government funding his research, the simulations he and his team were running were about as far as they were allowed to go with the experiments.

It was during this time Dr. Flemming joined the team, conducting his own research about the relationship between man and their creation. This is where The Fourth Wall Theory came from, through Dr. Flemming's keen observation about the treatment of Virtuals. This is also where he began asking the question: If there is a creator, why is it that we can't perceive him? It's also where he posited that there was no better way to understand God, than to play him.

To understand how Dr. Flemming came up with his theory you have to understand how we interacted with Virtuals. They, at their core, were comprised of data and commands, since Virtuals exist more or less as information, as data, as coding. In this sense we interacted with them in four dimensions, capable of observing the outer space they see as limitations. While we craft the trees, they see a sunny sky and road, but we can perceive the pitch black space that exists in spaces they can't see.

Dr. Flemming's theory proposed that if we ourselves create, then we were created. By multiple entities, perhaps another species that exists or did exist in the fourth dimension. Much in the same way we have created Virtuals and the way we interact with them in four dimensions.

Let me put it this way, we live in a transparent box, our world exists as an object sitting somewhere in a world much larger than our own. We live in a sandbox, a playground, a meticulously crafted environment that we'll never reach the end of.

"Scientists prove there is no afterlife." Those six words were all it took. Six words and an article by the New York Times.

The newspapers referred to the suicides that came as a result of finding the article as 'biting the apple', a callous reference to the story of Adam and Eve. Eating the forbidden fruit and realizing that they were both naked.

The full version of the article was purposely hidden in order to avoid causing a panic.

They were unsuccessful.