text: \# Afterlife \## Story 1, Part 1 \_Undisclosed Location\_ "Good afternoon. Firstly, I'm very tired. Kind of hungry and I've been in...whatever this place is for 6 months." Kendra said. "Six months?!" a thin, middle-aged man yelled as he stood up. A red light clicked to life on the wall behind his chair. As the sound registered the man quickly closed his mouth and sat down. "Ok." Kendra continued as she looked at man. "You've only been here a day but, honestly. I know as little as you do. I know what's in the identical binder we all have in front of us, and I know if you lose your \_shit\_." She kept her eyes on the man. "Then the little bracelet around our wrists injects us all with \_something\_, we all pass out and when we wake up the person who lost said \_shit\_ is gone." The man at the end of the table raised his hand and began speaking without being formally acknowledged, "....fuck. Only a day? I've only been here a \_day\_? I woke up in that little room with this binder. Which I read. The door opened, I came in here to find all of you and the \_only\_ reason I'm not going out of my mind trying to find a way out of here is because what's in this binder is just crazy enough to be interesting. That, plus the meeting I had with a person I trust telling me that no matter what happens, don't freak out. That match everyone's experience?", he asked. Heads nodded around the table. Kendra found his gaze, "Nice you meet you..." "Tom." "Ok, Tom. Our job is to figure out a next step to a problem that honestly doesn't seem like it has a sane answer. So, should we get started?", she asked. Heads nodded around the table again. "Great.", Kendra said as she pressed a small button in front of her. "Recording has started. Beginning session. Acknowledging receipt of the latest information from the particle accelerator." she said, as she motioned to the page sitting on top of her binder. Identical to the pages also sitting on top of the other binders. The group has worked to decode the message and believe with some certainty that it can be translated as follows, 'Info. Restarting node 78475\_AA-3849\_cAE. Subject 193847758\_AA-33111\_KKE designation confirmed as Buddhist. Reseeded in next available host successfully. Encryption set successfully. Logging will suspend for this subject until next terminal event.'" Kendra pushed the button to stop recording and looked up at a room of tired faces. They were all sitting in a small room on a classified lunar colony which up until 10 months ago served as the observation habitat for the McMellon Super Collider. Now it was the highly classified and \_highly\_ isolated think tank for the 9 men and women seated around the table. "So. Does this message give \_anyone\_ here an idea on how we might be able to use the collider to actually see what the real world looks like instead of just reading log messages?" \### Part 2 \_ Earth. UAE. Classified Facility. \_ In a room similar to the one built on the moon two people sit facing each other. "How was your trip?", asked the heavy set man. "Not bad. I mean. Until you locked me in this room. Told me we're all in a simulation, and I can either help or be placed in a medically induced comma until I die of natural causes.", Kendra said dryly. "Yeah. It's not great. We're going to try something different with you. Instead of black bagging you, locking you in a room and letting you read a binder we're going to simply let you ask questions.", the man said. Kendra looked at him for a long moment and then said, "This is fucked." "Not a question, but I agree. Well, we're both fucked and not fucked. Nothing really changes for the world with this discovery. Though we are concerned that if the people running the show find out we know then it's lights out for us.", the man said. Kendra eyed him for a second, "So before I launch into a endless sea of questions I'd like to assume you're telling the truth. What are you trying to accomplish?" The man took a breath and said, "I don't know. No one knows. We just want to understand. Then act. Maybe. Maybe do nothing. That's the point. We literally don't know what we can do. Frankly, it's all so incredibly head trippy that every day is a small exercise in not losing my mind. I'll tell you this Ms. Romin, asking questions and trying to understand is really the \_only\_ way to keep a gun out of your mouth. Trust me on that and remember that you are being recruited because we're down a person who decided the gun made \_more\_ sense.", he said. "Ok.", Kendra said while trying very hard to read his features. Then she started asking questions: **kendra** \- When did you realize we were in a simulation? **man** \- 10 months, give or take. man - Large particle accelerator doing classified experiments on the moon found data in the energy released from a routine particle collision. Structured data. Completely alien, yet familiar. While we couldn't understand \_what\_ it was saying at first, we could understand \_what\_ it was. **kendra** \- <flips through notes> - Right, says here a lab tech thought it was a prank. That someone put a stack trace with nonsense syntax in the system to be funny. First, what's a stack trace? **man** \- Bear with me. I started off as a systems engineer, but I was never good at explaining this stuff to people. When a program has an error, the underlying system may return a message describing the error with a bit of information about what caused it. kendra - So the collider malfunctioned? **man** \- No. Fuck. I wish. No. The collider is working flawlessly. **kendra** \- What then. Some part supplied by the lowest bidder in the computers had a glitch? **man** \- The universe. **kendra** \- I'm sorry? **man** \- The \_universe\_, under a very specific set of conditions will throw an error message. In something similar to the languages we evolved to use here on "Earth". Apparently. **kendra** \- <kendra went rigid. Her mind tried very hard to get back on stable ground.> That's insane. **man** \- Look. I can see why they picked you. You're handling this very well. Insane or not it's true. The universe is an engineered system, we're inside it and we have no idea what is \_outside\_ of it. kendra - I'm handling this well because I'm sure that no matter how deep this rabbit hole is there is a rational explanation at the other end. **man** \- <shrugs> - I honestly don't have a stable opinion about that. Though that does feel aggressively optimistic. kendra - Ok. Can you give me an elevator pitch or something that kind of wraps up what you do know? **man** \- Sure. Our reality is a simulation. Part of a colonist selection process for habitable worlds. We assume at least one for each major religion on Earth. Maybe one for every religion regardless of size. We know for example that early Earth history was designed to be hard in part because a planet discovered early on required pretty tough bastards. That planet has been abandoned. Total loss. **kendra** \- <opens mouth to speak> - \[man motions for her to wait\] **man** \- The idea goes something like this. Five main corporations...or at least that's what we're calling them. Gods is what they are but that feels a bit specific considering how little information we have. These corporations own the only 5 habitable planets found so far that classify as ideal. They each have a set of guidelines for colonization to try and ensure an ideal society is created. One that won't recreate the sins of their past. Candidates apply to one of the five corporations. These are your major religions when in simulation. It's also a contract. You are free to switch religions, but you are then bound to that new contract and the old one is voided. Christianity for example has a planet that is described as a paradise. An 'Eden' I guess. Code named H3-VN. They are also among the richer corporations. The planet is a farther distance away than the others and even at near light travel it takes a while. They are looking for morally strict colonists. People who won't steal, murder, or bang their neighbors' husband no matter how much temptation they face. People who under any form of stress will always consider the greater good first. Then a bunch of other stuff - like breeding on a new world is important so things like abortion and gay marriage are kind of taboo. The flip side of all this is these corporations also need a lot of labor to get these colony ships built and on their way. Even more for all the work to do planet side. If you sign up with Christianity and \_fail\_ the test then your contract stipulates that the rest of your working life will be spent building ships, mining ore, and watching as people better than you leave for paradise. To ensure you don't do anything spiteful the contract also stipulates that a minor lobotomy will be performed so you don't mind so much. Want to hear something funny? The labor habitat that processes out the failures is in orbit around Mercury and code named H3-LL. Each corporation is like this. Islam has a planet where local radiation has caused 75% of births to be female. There are quite literally scores of virgins waiting to be impregnated by men. Fail and it's a pretty similar setup to the Christians, only their work camps are mining the rings of Saturn. We also just received confirmation that the Buddhists let you keep trying until you get it right. Decent argument for becoming a Buddhist if you ask me. Though the planet they have is pretty sparce. Not a lot to do. So their whole thing is finding the happiness within. kendra - I'm sorry. How are we even able to have this conversation? If we're in a simulation and everything is being recorded then why haven't we been killed, or patched, or whatever. **man** \- turns out these folks really enjoy their privacy rights and contracts. When you get out of this thing you have to go on living your life. Your records are sealed to prevent what amounts to a lifetime diary of potentially bat shit crazy behavior from following you around. Another neat bit. Christians review \_all\_ of your logs when you die. Every thought. Every action. Hindus look at the net good accomplished and kind of redact the details. **man** \- <continues> The other interesting thing is there is a very good chance they do know we know. Or will know eventually. The simulation uses time dilation and a lifetime in here is something like 10 minutes there. This works in our favor since it means we have amassed this information in the time it might take a tech who is monitoring the system to sip her coffee. If that long. On top of that we assume the system generates a lot of data. We are going to great lengths to generate as little noise as possible as we investigate. We have a sort of foothold that lets us query a system connected to the simulation. Best guess is what we've learned comes from archives left over from the system design. Seems abandoned or used so rarely that when we poke around there no one seems to notice. This has been the most reliable, though the same particle collision never seems to produce the same error twice. Run it once and you get a stack trace. Run it again and everything looks like a normal boring experiment. System might be self-correcting. **man** \- So that's the elevator pitch. Next question. **kendra** \- So billions of people are in a simulation all at once? **man** \- No. We don't think so. We think there are only a very small number of people in the simulation and the rest are AI. So that's a wrinkle. Don't really want to kill yourself to get out in the off chance you're just a bit of code. **kendra** \- Which do you think you are? **man** \- 'We' are likely AI. By the odds anyway. **kendra** \- Can we interact with their world? **man** \- with a smile - I knew you belonged here. That is very much the question we are trying to answer, and quickly.