If you asked me in 2016 if the world was ending, I’d have said “Seems like it.” Trump was just elected, climate change sucked, no one could buy a house, and wages were stagnated.
Fast forward to 2023 and it’s worse. Seven of the hottest days in the last hundred thousand years happened last week. The only people buying houses are investment firms and hedge funds with billions of dollars who intend to rent them out to people for twice what they are paying on the loan. Even if you get to a home before it sells two hours after hitting the market, the banks won’t give you a mortgage that’s half what you are currently paying in rent because, and I quote, “you can’t afford it.”
Covid sucked, killed a bunch of people and gave brain damage to a bunch of others, some of whom I’m sure had brain damage before. I mean I’ve seen a sixteen year old girl with no mechanical experience argue with a car mechanic about the blinker fluid she was sure she needed because she saw a Facebook post about it. So it shouldn't have surprised me to see those same people as adults with no medical education, arguing with doctors about washing your hands, masks, and vaccines in the middle of a pandemic. It shouldn't have surprised me, but it did.
The crazy part to me was the bragging. People bragging they didn’t wear masks or get vaccinated. People bragging that only one family member died because they had good genes. People bragging about only losing their sense of smell and taste like it was no big deal. That wasn’t your nose or tongue! That was areas of your brain dying!
Putin and Russia are talking nukes. Oil companies are shilling on social media. The climate is now truly fucked. Like, people in the know aren’t screaming that we need immediate action any more because we’ve pasted the point of no return. Literally we can’t stop the world from getting so hot humans die without air conditioning.
Storms of course just keep getting worse. So much so that the Republican states are in the find out phase, of fuck around and find out, as major insurance carriers are pulling out of the states completely. Good luck insuring you home Florida Man.
Rain water EVERYWHERE ON EARTH has too many forever chemicals and is unsafe to drink. The fucking rain is not safe to drink anywhere on the planet.
I went from seeing humanity as this robust group of semi-intelligent people to seeing us as animals with a few standouts.
I was depressed before all this. Just with my own problems. Now I can't even turn on the news, as in an alcoholic can't have beer in the house. I can manage my depression enough that I can survive. I can go to work, eat, pay bills, but it takes constant management. I have to do my best to avoid news, discussions, or world events.
It’s hard to get out of bed some mornings, because what’s the point? Oh yeah, have to make money or be homeless and die from storms, flooding, heat, or lack of food.
Only good part is the insects are gone. You might notice the fireflies aren't’ there, I notice the lack of mosquitoes. You’d think the birds are just eating them up, but nope, a billion of those birds are dead too! I haven't had to clean my windshield of bugs in a decade or so when before it was a constant battle.
We are living through the collapse and the only way I can contribute, is by not having children. Not that I can afford them. Hell I can’t even afford a house. Or dating for that matter.
How the fuck do people date in this economy?
Don’t get me wrong, I use the hook-up apps but even those are just so much work, and who has the time? Honestly? Everyone has their job, and their side-gigs, though I’m not sure you can call them side-gigs if you need to do them to eat.
It doesn’t matter though because the Republicans were right about something: There is, apparently, an afterlife. Don’t get me wrong, all that God shit was made up, but they were right about the afterlife.
Turns out we were all living in a simulation. One that we screwed up, not from destroying the planet, but by looking too deeply in space. Turns out the powers that be have to render billions upon billions of new galaxies and everything in them every time we point our super powerful James Webb Space Telescope at another patch of sky. And they have to render them some 14 billion years ago and then let the time play out on all that stuff. I guess it’s taking up a lot of ram or whatever.
The message to humanity was simple, the simulation was running into resource issues. The suggested resolution was to stop looking deeper in space.
This message appeared to every single person on the planet at the same time and remained as a semi-transparent floating screen just beyond each individuals reach. It lasted most of the day.
The middle east lost their fucking minds.
Not that the bible belt was that much better.
There was a period of ‘Query and Response’ a day later. The message had changed and there was a count down and everything. The world stopped for a day as everyone got to ask any question they wanted.
Think ChatGDP + Google + wikipedia + your neutral female voice of choice. Mine defaulted to the GPS lady, but I guess a lot of people heard it as whatever phone assistant they had.
Religion wasn’t real. We were real in a sense that the rules of our reality met a Jesacorvax closed loop set. The definition of that was way over my head. Basically that pi and e and all the weird constants of the universe worked out in such a way there were no paradoxes.
Aliens were real, none had visited Earth, there were no ghosts, and the mystery of the pyramids had a very simple answer: slavery.
Jesus was a real dude, he didn’t have super powers. He died surprised, apparently believing he was divine. It’s why he called out about his father forsaking him. I guess that was in the bible all along and people just sort of missed it or skipped over it or whatever. When they opened the tomb three days later they found his rotting corpse, stole it, and swore everyone to secrecy.
The afterlife was another universe with different rules, and the afterlife in that would be another and another and another. You didn’t get to take memories from one to the next.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
No, the simulation didn’t know what the point was.
What was outside the simulation? The simulation didn’t know.
The religious people went nuts, I tried to keep devices charged in front of the inevitable power outages, thanks Texas, and just sort of wait it out.
On day three we got a notice that the simulation would be shutting down and the simulation with our rule set seed would restart. This apparently meant the fucking big bang would happen again.
We would not survive.
And there was a fucking countdown. Again with the floating timer.
People on Tic-Tok were explaining how you could change the language and font of the message through meditation. Other people were saying injecting bleach would save you.
Four days, seven hours, and change.
I spent the first three in bed.
I have depression, noun, the disease. I’m not getting into a dick measuring contest with anyone about this. Some people love to talk about mental issues as if they were a competition.
“Oh you have OCD? My cousin has that and absolutely HAS to have the toilet paper situated over the roll instead of under.”
And the guy with OCD you’re talking to says, “I just got done scrubbing my hands bloody under scalding hot water and haven’t left the house in ten days!”
Not that have I OCD, but you get the point. When I say depression I mean the medically prescribed crippling kind.
I got up of course. Shit, pissed, and ate. I watched the news on day two. Total global meltdown. What you’d expect: Orgies, people murdering senators and congressmen, the religious murdering everyone, the religious praying, the religious forcing you to pray before murdering you. I actually got a good laugh trying to log into reddit as well as a few other social media sites. There was a big message pop up that said, “It’s all real. No one is at work, go be with your families.”
Some newsy types were still reporting. There were millions of videos of people accepting the offer to change simulations instead of riding this one out.
The person would say something to the camera, then their eyes would shift and they were no longer there. The pop wasn’t that audible in air, but some did it underwater where you could see the water rush into a person sized vacuum.
There was a lot of science going on at the end and believe it or not a shit ton of new wikipedia articles. Apparently the nerd types had used their super-google time to ask about super-nerd stuff. All the math and physics bits we couldn’t figure out and what not, and a bunch of other people will adding it to a database that existed on a network that required power and protocols, on the third planet, of an insignificant star in the arm of a spiral galaxy, that is only the second largest in it’s local group (Thanks Andromeda) which is part of Laniakea, which is part of a super cluster, which is part of the observable universe that was a tiny 14 billion light year radius sphere of space in the possibly infinite unobservable universe. All of which would soon to be turned off and back on again.
Personally I didn’t see the point of updating Wikipedia, but I guess the whole thing with dark matter turned out to be one of those, “OMG I can’t believe we didn’t think of that!” sort of things.
I just wondered how many other people, aliens included, we fucked over.
I mean imagine you are some squid alien living your life, you don’t even swim high enough to see stars. Or you live on a plant so large you rockets can’t put satellites into orbit. Or shit. What if your race is blind. Like they see with echolocation or super-smell.
Then one day you get a message that the universe isn’t real and it’s restarting because of some assholes over in Sector ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha kept pointing their telescopes where they shouldn’t.
Now that I think about it. Give a question and answer session to a universe full of sentient life while low on ram might have been a mistake. We probably had some asshole figure out how to ask questions and they shared it, then we, the collective intelligent life in the universe DDOSed the simulation.
There was a way out though. You just had to say you wanted off the ride.
You could pick what simulation you wanted to be transferred to. I guess it was relatively easy to find a simulation that met your exact standards.
That part I understood. No matter how long a list of demands you had about the new universe you wanted, the list was finite, and the simulation had an infinite subset to search through to find it for you.
As to workload and speed, and how long the searching took: Apparently the simulations were all calculated faster than the planck time because the simulation could just pause the universe, sort it out, and unpause it.
Which according to the nerds meant anyone that left could be billions of years dead by the time you you left, even if you left one second later because everything got paused for who knew how long between.
So long story short, everyone was getting their own simulation.
No one knew, including the simulation, if you would kept your memories. No one knew what was meant by ‘you,’ in the offer to transfer you to another simulation. The simulation didn’t know either as this error/solution/restart was initiated outside of it. It was simply tasked with carrying out its orders.
The religious were now sure there was a soul, then immediately sure that any actions taken in the last few days would be forgiven.
I found my greatest drive was to finish a few of the video games in my expansive library I had put off.
I started some up, played a bit, then switched or quit.
I wondered if the stars would go out?
Whenever I stopped doing something I was filled with extensional dread that was so crippling I kept busy.
I cleaned my apartment.
I thought about getting laid. There might be someone who was down for it. It had been what, ten months since I last went out with-
No.
Sixteen months.
Holy shit.
Like I said, depression is a bitch.
There were bodies in the street when I went out, so I turned around and went back in.
I decided I was just going to let it end, go out with the universe and all that.
With an hour left everything still broadcasting or hosting or streaming on the planet had a countdown.
I lost power and internet with about an hour left.
I was watching Time’s square, someone I’d never seen before holding the mic and gesturing at the humans packed behind them and doing a pretty good job of acting like a professional newscaster.
He I got. Last broadcast of humanity and all that. Likely he was some intern with dreams of being the next Walter Cronkite in college only to realize modern journalism was click bait titles designed to spread misinformation on Facebook because that’s what got the clicks baby!
So that guy made sense. But who was the dude behind the camera? Or the lady in the booth deciding to cut to camera two’s feed because camera one just picked up on an orgy or murder in the background.
What were their stories?
The TV was on mute I had a bowl of ice cream with busted up kit-kats in it when the power went out.
When everything went dead I was left with nothing but myself, and my depression, and that, historically, hadn’t gone over very well.
I lasted probably twenty minutes.
Then I said, “How do I, um, leave?” I had never looked that up and now that I wanted to go I was terrified I didn’t know how to!
“You wish to exit this reality for another?”
“Umm, yes. Please.”
“Any parameters?”
I shrugged and was about to say no, but then began freaking out.
I started with, “There has to be people there. And I don’t want any disabilities, or screwed up brain chemistry. I’d like to be pretty, or the equivalent, is that possible?”
I was a guy. I don’t know why I said pretty instead of handsome or cute or manly or whatever. I wasn’t ugly, but I wasn’t good looking enough to turn a woman’s head. I knew the statistics. Something like 96% of women on dating apps pursue 10% of the the men. I conveniently ignored that it was true for men pursuing women as well.
I don’t know where I was on the scale, but I wasn’t in that ten percent.
“And smart. And curious I guess. No allergies. Good eyesight. Umm I guess. If I have eyes. I want eyes. I mean I want a universe in which the race I am has eyes, not that I want eyes if no one else has them.”
I just kept talking, my worries and fears manifesting faster than I could talk. I realized I was trying to lawyer my way out of a wish. It didn’t work in DnD or with Genies, and it likely wasn’t going to work here.
I started spitting out more ‘not’ requests, than I did ‘need’ requests.
I apparently talked for a long time, because the universe ended mid-sentence.