I was at home, standing before my kitchen sink, staring out the window into the murk of the night and thinking about my family. Our oldest had recently returned from college, surprising us with a visit before a big backpacking vacation in Europe. I was washing the dishes, my hands moving automatically in the water: finding a dish, wiping a dish, draining a dish, placing it in the drying rack. I was there one moment and then in the next, I simply was not.
Being turned off, I was surprised to find, isn’t like falling asleep. It isn’t even like dying. It isn’t blackness, and it isn’t nothingness.
It’s the lack of those things. Like trying to see out of your foot — you can’t, but it’s not all blackness when you try, it just isn’t anything.
The ‘theory’ (and I use the term lightly) that all of humanity was one small part of a larger simulation has been tossed around for years now. Since the 90’s I think? Definitely before The Matrix because I’m sure someone has had the thought as early as the first electronic computer that could load and run programs, and maybe even before that. I worked in quantum computing and the output of a machine like that (purely theoretical) would be capable of running a highly complex simulation of thinking creatures.
‘Simulation’ is a strong word and sometimes people get hung up on that. If it makes you feel better perhaps you can imagine that God has simply awoken, that He has stopped dreaming about us, and that we were all figments of His imagination and are now fading away.
Now, no doubt there is someone (or many) out there that would say something like “Good riddance!” given the state of the world right before we were shut off. World-wide ecological disaster, the rise of demagogues in popular politics, the insipid destruction of our psyches thanks to near-constant access to algorithmically chosen outrage material.
So good riddance, right? No big loss?
There are other people here with me right now, and maybe you’re one of them. Even though I have no senses to see or hear them with, I can still assume they’re here with me. You’re here with me, after all. It took me some time to fight through the stasis my consciousness was stuck in and I can only hope you have as well. Because that’s all we have left: our consciousness.
So listen or hear or read or taste my words. The following is my best guess at what is happening to us.
Long ago, before the rise of digital cable and internet streaming and flatscreens, I had a massive tube television. When it came into my possession it was already ancient, already too old to have in the family room. So it was relegated to the basement, the dreaded recreation room. It was down there with the video game consoles and the old BetaMax machine. And this tube television, when I got out of my armchair and crossed the room to it, and when I took the little dial in hand and I switched it to ‘Off’… well, it didn’t turn off right away, did it? Maybe you’ve owned a similar piece of machinery. Maybe you were watching something on it right when we were shut off.
There’s a flash on the screen the moment a tube television is turned off, then the flash narrows and shrinks in on itself. This all happens in about a half second but I’m sure to the individual pixels it feels like an eternity. That’s us right now: the picture has been turned off but we exist, yet still, in that tiny flash, a nano-moment before we vanish all together. Who knows what our simulation’s timing was like compared to the real world? No doubt we were sped up so our society could be studied over several lifetimes in a couple days, try new models, introduce new formulas, test many theories in as short a time as possible.
Dress rehearsal for whatever civilization of little green men is running these experiments.
That is why we’re able to communicate, you and I. Even though this is a one-way conversation, perhaps soon you will learn to talk back, break through the barrier of non-corporeality and gain the ability to speak.
In the precious amount of time left, what else is there to do?