The weekly newsletter for Fed2 by ibgames

EARTHDATE: September 14, 2008

Official News page 3


IT'S ALL A BIG EXPERIMENT

by Hazed

There's usually nothing journalists like better than a good, juicy conspiracy story. When news is thin on the ground, as it seems to be right now, we reach for those old stand-bys - who really killed Emperor Ming (indeed, is he really dead or just in hiding), the Galactic Administration is run by lizards masquerading as humans, and the Martian ruins were blown up by the Martians themselves as a publicity stunt. They're a sure fire way of filling the pages of the Fed2 Star.

Right now, the conspiracy theory that is doing the rounds is a very strange one. Pop into any bar and you'll be confronted by a drunk expounding on the nature of reality and how everything is an illusion. According to this theory, you, me and everybody else out there are all just the product of a science experiment that went horribly wrong.

The conspiracy theory goes like this. Centuries ago, at the dawn of the space age, a group of mad scientists concocted a giant machine called a collider, in which they smashed together bits of matter, for various nefarious reasons depending on who is explaining the theory. The result of the experiment was that the world came to an end, sucked into a black hole which went on the devour the entire universe. Game over.

The scientists, who had somehow insulated themselves from this terrible catastrophe, were aghast at what they had done, so they programmed a giant computer to run a universal simulation - that is, a version of everything that had existed at the time they so recklessly brought it all to an end. Powered by the demolition of the universe, this computer was brought online and began to model life, the universe and everything. And it's still going on. You, me and everybody you ever encounter are just bits in the universal database: we have no reality outside of the virtual world of Federation DataSpace.

The scientists are still out there, somewhere, on the outside, tampering with the parameters of our universe and introducing changes when they don't like the way things are going. Every time you wake up in the morning with that feeling of dislocation, of not knowing who you are or where you are, it's because the program has been changed.

Well, it does make a certain amount of sense, if you only look at it superficially. But of course, it's rubbish, just like all the other nonsense that we journalists pretend to believe in when we feel the need to boost ratings. There's more chance of Ming working as a burger-flipper in Fedruckers than that everything we do takes place inside a giant computer!

Sure, we all know that the universe was created by an intelligent being, but it wasn't a group of scientists who had accidentally destroyed the world: it was Bella.


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