text: I guess since I’m the guy that started it all, I’m the best person to document it. Maybe I can amass a huge fortune and leave it to my family some day (ha!). I certainly haven’t gotten anything good out of it otherwise, aside from my fifteen minutes of fame and a lot of sleepless nights. Am I supposed to be writing this? Did I make the choice, or did someone make it for me? Is this what happens every time? For a guy with no answers, I sure have a lot of questions.TM (That trademark symbol isn’t a joke, BTW, my attorney suggested I trademark it since I was saying it so much. It never sold any T-shirts, but my lawyer probably got a nice boat). OK, future family of mine, or maybe some Papua New Guinea tribesman who still hasn’t heard the news, let’s start at the beginning. February 3rd, 6:43 PM. That’s what my search history said, and that’s what Wikipedia says now, too. Wikipedia doesn’t mention that I was looking at porn thirty minutes earlier, and neither do I, except I feel like I need to put some things in here that everyone doesn’t know yet, you know, for the sake of historical accuracy. I won’t say what kind of porn because even I’ve got limits, plus what if my mom reads this someday? Hi Mom! The Awakening is what they call it now. More like The Confusining, because that’s how it started and that’s what it still is. Fucking confusing. And now even more so. But I’m jumping ahead. I was browsing Imagazine, as one does after a good fap fest, and while swiping through pictures of cats doing stupid cat shit and people doing stupid people shit (all of it all the more stupid now) I found a picture of me as a kid. *WTF*, I thought, *who is posting pics of me online? *But it wasn’t a picture I’d seen before. This kid was spraying a dog with a hose, and we didn’t have a dog. Heck, we didn’t even have a hose, since I grew up in an apartment. I put my name into the comments voicing my indignation and demand for royalties (even in my pre-attorneyed state I knew that I was entitled to my fair share of stupid shit money). The picture taker responded that it wasn’t me, it was his younger brother. Well I’ll be damned, I said, we look exactly alike. Maybe he’s my long lost cousin or something. Maybe, he agreed, and we started exchanging some details in the comments--not a lot, it’s a public forum and all, but I ain’t got much to hide (aside from my search history, sorry Mom). For whatever reason it got a little attention, and that’s when someone (WizardLick418, historians take note) said, ‘gee, isn’t that funny, I recently found a picture that looked just like me as a kid, too!’ He posted a couple links and sure enough, the resemblance was uncanny (when is it ever canny?). Then the floodgates opened. Seemed everyone was seeing people who looked just like they did as kids. It didn’t take long before people started really searching. Videos were posted of people confronting their younger selves. It got on the news (although Fox declared it to be a scam by the Democrats to somehow allow immigrants into the country as relatives). A few children were abducted by parents of kids who’d gone missing years before, and who could blame them? Some nutjobs online started called for violence, which thankfully was a pretty unpopular opinion, but probably only because they were all kids. The internet is the only thing that allowed us to figure it out. Maybe it’s been going on forever--plenty of people are arguing over that idea, but no one really knows for sure. I think most people are too scared to look too deeply into it at this point. A woman named Melissa tracked down her *doppelkinder* (as they called them) and persuaded her parents to allow her to undergo some testing. Tests were done. Genealogy was geneaologied. People way smarter than I am scienced the shit out of it. Turns out they were the same person. Not twins separated at birth, or cousins. They had identical DNA. They had the same mannerisms. Confusingly and terrifyingly, *doppelkinder* almost always had the same name as their older counterparts, although the parents didn’t have anything in common. To say the world shat itself would be an understatement. People stopped going to work almost immediately. The Imagazine servers collapsed under the weight of people searching among billions of photos looking for themselves (it didn’t take long before some nerds automated that, which only made the problem--every problem--worse). The stock markets tanked worldwide, which is apparently what they always do when something unexpected happens, and if anyone had noticed it sooner maybe this wouldn’t have taken so long to figure out. It’s estimated that several million people committed suicide for Gods-only-know what reason, although they’ll almost certainly be back. It’s weird how you can go through life and not notice all of the things that happen over and over again without giving it any thought. Fractals used to just be a trippy thing you’d look at on your computer when you were buzzed out of your mind on Jolt cola at one o’clock in the morning. Scientists figured out they applied in nature somehow with nautilus shells and trees and sunflowers, but it wasn’t until I saw myself squirting a dog with a hose that people started really considering the ramifications. Turns out *everything* was some sort of fucking fractal: Traffic lights. The patterns your coffee makes when you stir it. Probably the sound waves of all of the farts in Notre Dam are some sort of repeating pattern that we could figure out if we had enough sample points. I think that’s what did it, really: sample points. All the data of eight billion people living on a planet and having lives. Going to jobs populated with people named Kristi (always with an i), making stir fry for dinner but forgetting to buy leeks, obsessing over what color leather to put into the dream car you keep configuring on a website, but can never afford. You know, doing stupid people shit. We overwhelmed the system and fucked up some data buffer and overwrote some protected memory and suddenly people were repeating. The system was conserving resources. The fact that we’re all living in a simulation is now mostly accepted as reality (that sounds so strange), although a certain percentage of the population denies it (8.473333333 repeating as it turns out). Theologians and philosophers are going to spend an eternity trying to figure out the ramifications of it all. Things are getting back to normal now, and people are back to chatting with Kristi about what it all could mean. Meanwhile, in what is almost certainly not random chance, I, the man who first brought about The Awakening, made another discovery yesterday morning as I made my coffee: there is no longer milk.