Simulation Theory

The story is told through several short pieces, each following a woman called Creation. In each life, she’s torn between the world of the present and memories of the past, from actual reality versus her perceptions of reality. In the first sequence, as a Department of Health worker, Creation inspects a virtual reality company dedicated to giving the homeless, the disabled and disenfranchised a second life in a virtual world. Seeing how realistic the VR world can be makes her question the reality of her life once unplugged. As an aerospace engineer, she finds herself drifting through space, seemingly dead. But somehow each moment of her life is still accessible, as if they were frozen in time, ready to be re-lived through memory - or perhaps existing in that moment for all eternity. As a blind woman, she undergoes an experimental surgery to get a second chance at sight. She discovers she alone is able to see the invisible threads of life and energy that connect every living thing in the universe. She searches desperately to find the meaning behind it, and finds an answer that isn’t an answer. As a psychologist, she is given the rare task of trying to keep an A.I. from deleting itself. The usual replies to console a human won’t work, so she needs to craft a “universal” solution. As a professor, she breaks down the illusions of what it means to be “the same person” over time. As a woman mourning the loss of her mother, she tries to reason through grief, and turns inwards, toward nostalgia. She has a growing sense that something is not right, and the border between what is real, and what is not, becomes increasingly blurred. In the final story, she experiences life as a programmer, trying to simulate the life cycle of a universe using both the laws of classical physics and quantum mechanics. The neural network she’s created, more powerful than any in existence, successfully creates a simulated universe. Analyzing the simulation’s data, she finds our own universe perfectly replicated inside the program, complete with a planet identical to Earth, and a simulated person, just like her, living there. Running more iterations of the simulation, she views the many lives she’s experienced, including others where she’s a programmer creating simulations, and she realizes she herself must be one of many simulated realities. She grapples with the implications of living a life that’s not “real”, merely a predetermined program that has already run its course. The lessons about the nature of our world, and of all Existence, come together at the end. The epilogue is an allegory for acceptance of our Existence, bleak and meaningless as it seems from our tiny, human perspective, and leaves the audience with a shred of hope.