THE ( VIRTUALLY ) REAL LIFE

My companions and I are in some kind of a building and strange, inexplicable things begin to happen. Every time we open a door to some room, the room and the things in it have changed. People try to explore the building and find that it has an impossible structure. They enter the top floor, go into a room and suddenly find themselves in a room on the ground floor.



Then someone screams out: “Don't you see what is happening! None of this is real! This is all Virtual Reality! Someone is running this game and we are all its involuntary, unwitting participants. So we can do anything, break all of society’s taboos, take any risks, shoot one another, because it is all a fake game.”



At once I devise a way of putting this remarkable claim to the test. I speed off in my car and start driving along train tracks that ascend to a great height before they end abruptly in mid-air. My car goes for a graceful flight through the air, spinning and turning, soaring up on the warm air currents, then gradually descending, rising again higher and higher, then stopping and hovering in midair.



Finally, I get tired of flying and crash land on top of a high-rise building. “I wonder if I have sustained any injuries?” I think to myself. “If this really is a virtual world then I should be just fine!”



It then occurs to me that the fact that my life has been virtual reality all along would certainly explain a lot of things. I always thought that this world and my life in it never made any sense – things were just too absurd and incoherent. Horrible, unthinkably terrifying events like massacres, famine, persecutions, injustices that would never happen in the real world kept occurring, time after time after time.

Now I could see why certain things kept getting lost and disappearing in my life, why my life never worked out right, why something always got in its way and ruined its forward progress.



Now I could comprehend why I could never fit in anywhere and always felt at odds with the whole world, for this wasn’t an authentic environment, but an artifice of someone else’s mind, a degenerate, corrupt copy of the real reality.



Yes, this wasn’t the universe that the Absolute Being created, according to His flawlessly sublime and ideal specifications, but rather a creation of some devious, impious, immoral human being. And so it contained within its make-up all the faults, deficiencies and imperfections that every human construction possesses, as well as being coloured by the particularly nasty character of the cad running this Virtual Reality game.



It was also obvious that this contemptible creature held, for some reason or another, an intensely bitter grudge against me in particular. He obviously meted out the worst of his cruel tricks on me, judging by how my life has been just one senseless absurdity after another.



“What kind of person am I really like outside of this game?” I wonder to myself. “What is my life really like in the real world? Who is the wise guy that’s created this diabolically evil game? What’s he got against me? Wait till I find my way out of this virtual world and get my hands on him! I’ll make him pay for all that he’s done to my life!”



And just then, an even more devastating thought strikes me: “What if I am the evil genius who created and is operating this game? What if it is I who inflicted all this misery, pain, suffering onto myself and the whole world? But why would I do that? Why would I torment myself so?”