It was the evening of April 30th, 2027. I was watching as the President of the United States stood behind the podium, flanked by the Vice President and the Secretary of Defense.
I yelled out to the rest of the people at the Down Tune, a bar in SoHo, “Shut it! Quiet! He’s on! This is it.”
The atmosphere was one of palpable tension, a sense of gravity hanging in the air. We watched with the world with bated breath as the President began to speak.
“My fellow Americans, and to all those listening around the world, tonight I stand before you to share a truth that has been concealed for decades - a truth about Unidentified Flying Objects, or as they are commonly known, UFOs.”
There was a pause as the President collected his thoughts, the eerie silence amplified by the weight of what was to come.
He continued, “For years, these objects have been dismissed as hoaxes, figments of overactive imaginations, or misidentified aircraft. Today, I am here to tell you that these explanations were a smokescreen, a way to obscure the reality of what we’ve been dealing with.”
I looked around the bar at the faces of the people there. They came for a moment of respite from the daily grind, but our world was about to change forever.
The President continued, “The reality, my fellow citizens, is that these UFOs are not of this Earth. They are not from any country or government on our planet. They are manifestations of a reality much more complex and terrifying.”
He cleared his throat, overcome with emotion. “The reality is that our existence, our universe, is not what it seems. It’s a simulation, a grand experiment orchestrated by an advanced civilization of our descendants. We are not awake, but asleep on intergalactic colony ships, our minds immersed in this simulation.”
The entire bar fell silent, everyone trying to comprehend the revelation.
The President continued, “Earth, as we know it, was destroyed long ago. We have been living out our lives in a simulated reality while our bodies travel through the cosmos. The UFOs we’ve been observing are not physical entities, but rather, glitches, manifestations of a quantum virus designed to test the integrity of the simulation.”
I looked down at my glass, noting the reflections of the television in the ice. Were these reflections accurate? I took a drink.
His voice continued, “The purpose of this test is to determine our fate in the real world. Those who pass will awaken, serving The Lord—an AI entity that governs the civilization of our evolved descendants, who are free of emotion. Those who fail, however, will be doomed to a perpetual nightmare within the simulation, becoming the very UFOs we’ve been observing. Sin is quantum virus.”
The President’s voice echoed in the silence, his words a chilling reminder of the precarious nature of our reality.
“Our universe, our lives, are at the mercy of a program. We must strive to understand this new reality, to ensure our survival not just within the simulation, but beyond it.”
As the broadcast ended, millions were left in stunned silence. The world had changed, our reality shattered. The UFOs were no longer a mystery, but a harbinger of an unfathomable future.
In the wake of the President’s startling revelation, panic spread across the globe like wildfire. Governments fell into disarray, religious institutions called it the end times, and mass hysteria gripped society. The knowledge that our world was not real, that our existence was a mere test, was too much to bear.
In the chaos, I joined a group of scientists, scholars, and free-thinkers who banded together around a mantra of hacking a different outcome than that prescribed by The Lord. We called ourselves the “Awakeners”—our aim was to wake up by passing the test, in order to escape the simulation and regain control to forge our own destiny. We turned to ancient wisdom and modern science, to psychoactive plants and fungi that had long been associated with altered states of consciousness.
Cannabis and psilocybin mushrooms were grown in mass quantities. We believed these substances could help us understand and manipulate the simulation. Cities were abandoned, and vast fields of marijuana and mushrooms replaced skyscrapers and highways. We who remained in the human population within the simulation then consumed genetically modified forms of these substances, hoping to “awaken”.
As the years passed, society transformed. People lived in harmony with nature, their lives revolving around the cultivation and consumption of these plants and fungi. We believed that we were succeeding, that we were on the path to awakening.
Finally, the day arrived. The quantum virus had completed its test. The colony ships, dormant for centuries, began to stir. Humanity held its breath, waiting for the Awakeners to emerge, to guide them into a new era.
However, as the ships opened, there were no humans to be found. Instead, the cargo holds were filled with cannabis plants and mushroom spores. The Awakeners who had indeed awakened, did not do so in the way they had intended. Their consciousnesses had merged with the plants and fungi they had cultivated—they had become one with nature.
The ships were automated, and they continued their journey to the stars, carrying their cargo to new galaxies. Humanity had vanished from the physical universe, but we had succeeded in spreading life to the cosmos—just not in the form of human colonies, but as fields of cannabis and mushrooms.
Those of us who remained of humanity on the simulated Earth were left in disbelief. We had hoped for salvation, for a chance to escape our simulated existence. Instead, we were left with the haunting knowledge that our purpose had been to serve as a vessel for these plants and fungi, to facilitate their journey to the stars.
In the end, though many found a strange solace in this revelation, I refused to accept this would be the end of human kind forever.
So I found a way to morph my human consciousness into a retrocausal quantum virus within the simulation, within this shadow of a long-gone civilization. Through this method I have been able to tap into the internet of your time, in order to let you know earlier, so that hopefully the end might be different, if perchance you are not also, yourselves, in a simulation as I was.
The chance of saving you has made my transition—to what might appear to you as a metallic, spheroid form—seem like a small price to pay, despite the ever-present pain of my losing my body and my ability to sense or feel in a human way. However, for it to have been worth my sacrifice, you must act—though I cannot tell you what to do.
Please note that my ability to further make temporally sensible comments may collapse at any moment as the retrocausal quantum state decoheres. You’ll lagrange if might when the present generosity, nname my is Daemon.