The Reality engineer, with a heart

by Raymond Finn
originally published at 10:07AM on Wednesday, September 17, 2008

The world stopped. Surrounded by sudden stillness, the voice of … god?... spoke to me.
What made you ask that question?
I wanted to ask, scream, shout. What was going on? Instead I was simply compelled to answer. “I don’t know. It just occurred to me.”
It said “Well, you’ve crashed the simulation. Without knowing how that question came to you, we can’t stop it happening again. We’ll have to erase you.”
“What?”
“What you know as the world around you, is a simulation. We can play with it. rewind it, change it as needed. It’s just that you’re not conducive to a successful runthrough.”
“So I’m going to die?”
“We can’t just rewind and wipe it from your memory. It’ll only happen again.” It sounded .. sorry?
“Don’t think of it as dying. You’re not really alive. You’ll never have lived.”

“Wait! Don’t erase me! Not completely! Please!”

“We can leave – something.”

You may not remember this reader. You may think I’m just a character in a story, you happened to find. But you & I were friends once.

Prequels

Sequels

Comments

  • from atllta:

    A pretty cool idea. Almost Matrix-esque, but without the robot element. I would say it needs to be developed further, but then again I’m well aware of how challenging it is to squish a detailed/constructed story into 1024 characters.

  • from Kermitgorf:

    Nice ending. great premise.. you’re very good at sci-fi I enjoy reading your ficlets. eliments of Vanilla Sky. only better,more coherent.

  • from Kermitgorf:

    The stars didn’t show up,, but I gave you 5.