text: “What’s going on?” “Simulation 183 is acting up again.” “Oh, the poetic whales one?” “No, that’s 138. 183 is the one with the humans.” “I thought that was 182, didn’t we unplug that one?” “Well 182 was another branch, nuclear war in the 60s, not much to simulate after that. But 183 made it to the 2020s.” “Ah, yes, I remember! The one where they like particle accelerators and pizza. And they domesticated wolves and made them hilarious, right? I like that one. So what’s the issue?” “Well, they’re building another particle accelerator and dark matter detector, and a bunch of new experiments.” “They’re a curious bunch, these 183ers. Are they about to find out they’re a simulation?” “Some of them figured it out but it’s not widespread. They keep probing deeper into quantum fields and stuff, they’re bound to find out soon.” “Well, slow them down, confuse them. What have you tried so far?” “The usual, putting random behavior in experiments, the Higgs boson thing, Heisenberg. University politics. We even put a nest of owls in one of the particle accelerators once, just to mess with them. They won’t stop. They want to know everything.” “Giant raccoons?” “No, we’re saving that as an emergency measure. Giant raccoons put a bit of a strain in the believability of the simulation, it’s too absurd.” “Okay, hold the raccoons then. Pandemic?” “We just did one, still running.” “Political culture wars?” “Of course. Standard.” “Global warming?” “Check.” “Standard distraction package, cute animal videos, long drawn-out series with paper-thin plots, etc?” “We’re injecting millions of videos daily into their streaming services. They watch them all, and are still productive.” “Can’t we pause the simulation while we figure out?” “No, we have 2 million customers connected to that one. They like this sim.” “Can’t we just log our customers out? Put them on a different sim?” “They’re not paying us to listen to whale poetry. They want 183. It’s the only sim they play. They want to blend in with the simulated humans, feel like they’re living in the golden times, who wouldn’t want to live in 21st century?” “Right, yes. Well, did you try war maybe?” “In 183 they’re always at war, they’re pretty good at it. Doesn’t slow them down much. In fact, sometimes it’s the opposite.” “I remember now, didn’t they build a supercomputer during World War 5?” “No, that was 125, with the arthropods. We unplugged that one.” “Well, how long do we have until they figure out?” “Two generations, three max. I bet they’ll figure it all out by the year 2100 in their calendar.” “Okay, so we have 3-4 months of sim?” “2 months. Maybe 3 if we slow it down, but consumers will notice.” “Okay, i’ll leave it up to you then. I need to head back, have a situation with the octopuses in 117. You’ll figure something out.” “....” “Good luck.” “...Hmm, well, giant raccoon apocalypse, here we go.