13 Mar 2021 - Vidar Hokstad
Tove often pondered what reality really was. Maybe it was true that we are all in a simulation?
So when a window opened in front of her, hanging in thin air, it oddly didn’t bother her so much as it made her think “about time”.
She climbed through the window and was curious to find herself in a room that looked no different from any normal living room.
She wondered if this meant she was still in the same reality she had come from, and what that meant given she had arrived there by means of a hovering window with nothing attached to it.
Maybe she was hallucinating.
Did I fall and knock my head? she thought.
A man entered, and motioned for her to follow him. No words were spoken. For some reason, it did not occur to Tove to ask the man who he was, or where they were.
She followed him through a hallway, and into what appeared to be an office.
It looks like it belongs in the future, Tove thought to herself.
“Why are you here?” the man asked in a non-descript accent that she wondered if might be artificial.
“What do you mean?” she answered. “I walked through the floating window.”
The man looked puzzled.
“Who are you?” she followed up.
“Why don’t you tell me about your mother,” the man countered.
Tove didn’t respond. She didn’t know what to say. She got up and walked back down the hallway and back into the room she had first found herself in.
Behind her, she heard the man yell “what is it about your relationship with your mother that makes you want to leave?”
She didn’t answer. She had not realized how large the room was. A row of windows that seemed to grow longer the further down it she looked all looked out on different places. None of them looked like home.
Tove opened one of them and stuck her head out. It led to the middle of a forest. She looked around and realized this window was also floating without being attached to anything.
She did not dare go through it in case she would be stranded in the strange forest.
She pulled her head back in and noticed movement. Far down the row of windows, a boy climbed in, and a man looking almost but not exactly like the man she had spoken to appeared out of a door that had not been there before, and motioned for the boy to follow him.
She felt a tap on her shoulder and jumped.
“Her” man was there again. He once again quietly motioned for her to follow him, and she could not help herself but followed him back down the corridor.
“Tell me why you’re here,” the man said.
“I don’t know,” she replied.
“Why don’t you start by telling me why you think you don’t know.”
“How can I know why I don’t know?” Tove asked. She was starting to panic, more and more certain that this was not real and that she must be hallucinating.
“Tell me about your mother.”
“I don’t want to talk about my mother. This can’t be real.”
“What makes you think this is not real?”
“Because none of this makes any sense.”
“I knew it. I win!” a disembodied voice said from all around her.
“I did tell you a bot that basic wouldn’t work even if the environment is lifelike enough. Let’s try over with another one.”
Tove often pondered what reality really was. Maybe it was true that we are all in a simulation?
A window opened in front of her, hanging in thin air, and she felt an odd compulsion to walk through it.
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The image is a composite of a public domain image of unknown source on the Wikipedia page above, and these two Unsplash images:
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