I was just minding my own business reading crap on the internet one day when I came across an interesting article regarding simulations and virtual reality. I've always enjoyed cyberpunk, and I love the Matrix (the first one), but I was never really interested in writing about it until this article. In a nutshell, our simulation technology and virtual reality are getting better all the time. That's obvious. And, assuming the human race doesn't wipe itself out, in a few hundred years our ability to create simulated realities will be quite advanced. And when we reach that point, we'll be using AI to create simulations of our reality in order to predict events. For example, I want to see how a certain person might react if I say a specific thing to them. And, of course, there are all types of scientific reasons to create simulations (predicting the weather for example). So, taking this to the extreme, it posses a question. If, in the distant future, our descendants are capable of creating perfect simulations of our universe, are we currently in one of them? Is our reality a simulation? How would we know? This, believe it or not, is actually a question that is posed at several major universities. There really are people trying to figure out how to determine if our reality is inside a computer.
So, this was my inspiration. This was the concept I ran with because, unlike the Matrix, our reality doesn't have any bodies. We aren't 'plugged in' somewhere, we're simply AI living in a vast super-advanced computer network that contains trillions of simulations all designed to predict specific futures and outcomes. Or, they're just there for fun. In fact, there are a lot of reasons and many of the simulations are different. So then I had to ask myself, what if there was a way to move between them? And what if someone were given APIs into the system that allowed them some level of control? What if some of these people exist in our simulation right now? What if you met one of them and they gave you an API?
What if you jumped?