Final Iteration

Look around as the world around you becomes more like the futures depicted long ago. Flying cars, space ships and everything else seems much more realistic to occur in our lifetime. However, the area of most growth is virtual reality and the increasing difficulty of separating the real from the simulated. As the world becomes more populated and there are fewer frontiers to explore, people will begin focusing more on escapism. People are born with the drive to succeed. Without goals people will struggle to find new challenges. However, people won’t believe they accomplished anything unless the experience feels real. People will escape from reality by creating an identical virtual reality. Computers will become so advanced that people can store their entire minds and experiences. However, knowing that the virtual reality is a simulation ruins the illusion. In order to believe this is real people will need their memory of it being a simulation erased. At this point, it becomes impossible for subjects within to distinguish reality from virtual reality. Since the environment is the same and the nature of the subject hasn't been altered besides the memory reboot, then iterations will be the same with the creation of a virtual reality resetting your life. A problem occurs in that everyone within this environment will continue to perform the same actions over and over up to the point this point that the virtual reality is created, then the world resets and plays out the same way. Your entire life up to this point or singularity will replay exactly the same without your knowledge. You could try going against your own nature and moving outside of your normal routine. However, whenever you did that, didn’t you notice that there weren’t that many people around? It’s as if the world wasn’t designed for you to explore that area at that point. You are doing something you weren’t meant to and your experience isn’t making sense anymore. The mind will be essentially immortal through the support of computers. The mind wipe is necessary to maintain space for the endless stream of repeated data as well as retaining the illusion that this world is real. You are essentially immortal but you have no way of knowing that; except for the occurrence of Deja vu. You seem to remember things that you shouldn't. You sometimes hear things in your mind before people say them. You remember events that haven't happened yet. Your mind works like a hard drive; you can delete files to make space but traces of it can still be recovered because all deleting does is allow stored data to be overwritten. Deja vu is basically your deleted memories coming back. It’s a sign that your mind can't take anymore, your sanity is being stripped away and your thought processes are becoming less and less coherent. Eventually your brain will rot and devolve into nightmarish delusions. You will begin to lose your concept of reality as the simulation will no longer seem real. There is nothing you can do but break the cycle so you can still hold onto some humanity. You can try to kill yourself but you may just find yourself exiting the simulation and awaking in another simulation that you believe is reality. On the other hand, you may find yourself back in reality. You’ve escaped and can see the world for what it truly is with some shred of sanity! However, before you do such a rash act, ask yourself: what was so awful that your only means of escape was entering a virtual reality and forcing yourself to forget whatever horror drove you into this mad cycle in the first place?