"I'm not joking. Have you seen The Thirteenth Floor?"
"No."
"Then I'll have you watch it."
Yang Weite then watched as Little Panda played him a sci-fi time-travel movie.
The kind with infinite nesting dolls.
The protagonist was a genius living in a simulated world. He created a simulated world and, through it, realized that the world he lived in was also simulated.
The villain from the Main World had created him. Through a series of coincidences, the villain's woman fell in love with the genius, the villain died, and the genius entered the Main World.
At the very end, the Main World lost power, and the screen went completely black...
Watch too many stories like that, and the nested layers became boring. But for Yang Weite, seeing it for the first time was deeply shocking.
He could not help falling into deep thought.
How did you know the reality you lived in was not simulated? If it were merely fantasy, that would be one thing, but the key was that there was plenty of evidence.
For example, the world was not continuous; its foundation was built on discrete units.
It was much like data. The two discrete digits, "0" and "1," formed a seemingly continuous and vast universe.
The speed of light was finite. Because it was finite, it gave rise to the Theory of Relativity, which completely defied common sense.
For instance, by common sense, if someone stood on a train and kept running,
their speed relative to the ground should have been the train's speed plus their running speed.
But the speed of light was absolutely constant, no matter the environment.
That was where things became troublesome.
If you stood on a train holding a flashlight, the light still traveled at the same speed. It was not