The Myth of the Nested Reality

I am just a copy of a copy of a copy.

— Trent Reznor

“The Myth of the Nested Reality” is a theory within the Clarkwoods Literary Universe that reality is naught but a simulation, and that the people running said simulation are inside of a simulation themselves. It builds upon “The Story of the Sisters,” one of the foundational myths of The Old Faith.

Summary

The sister goddesses, River and Eden, are the only survivors of an expedition which began on Earth and was tasked with finding new sapient species and new habitable worlds. They’ve realized that their two sister ships have been lost or destroyed, and they’ve decided to repurpose their vessel’s artificial reality system to begin running simulations of their people’s history.

After a number of unsuccessful attempts, they begin adding “fun” things from their own reality’s fantasy and folklore into the simulation. Then, after one of their creations—the dwarf from the story “The Sisters and the Simulation”—finds a way to cross the barrier between worlds, the sisters begin seriously questioning the nature of their own reality.

The sisters come to believe that they exist only in the mind of a writer and illustrator from another universe, the person who is typing these words right now and wondering how his creations figured it all out. The sisters wonder how their creator can call himself an atheist when he has now created a universe within a universe, and why he can’t see that he must simply be but one part of a stack of Russian nesting dolls.

And now that they’ve wondered that, I’m wondering that too.

Spread

Lucky for me, Eden and River disagree on whether they’re living in my head or in a simulation I designed, and that should keep them busy for a while. And lucky for both them and me, almost no one inside the CLU believes this nonsense to be true.

Date of Setting

53.4 Billion BCE

Related Ethnicities

• The Restless