"Yeah, that was hot."

"...but by the pool isn't?"

"No! Anyone could see!"

"...are you saying that it's different when it's just a risk of getting caught rather than a certainty?"

"Yeah, that." He decides to hop off the bed and spin into his clothes. "I'm annoyed now. Bye."

"Bye..."

Off he goes.

Well now he knows that he doesn't have superpowers of overriding people's consent? Yay?

No, really, genuinely it's good to know, now he has a direct concrete rejection, it's proof of concept that the world and other people aren't completely under his power or anything like that. Doyoon just is in fact a horny guy who was into Peter and he wasn't doing anything he didn't want to do, Peter wasn't personally causing him to act counter to his best judgment. 

That's pretty relieving, actually!

Okay, so, back to his journaling.

Other people have preferences, and express those preferences, and being good at words does not suffice to override them. He feels like that at least gives the idea that they can consent a lot more legitimacy? Again, not just to sex, to anything. If he extrapolates from what he's seen so far, they do actually take actions to achieve their goals, despite his earlier despair about how they didn't have agency. And, really, he should've thought that earlier when one of his brothers mentioned wanting to get married and stuff. Hell, when Doyoon did. They have plans and aspirations and desires.

So what is up with the way they've been behaving? Where does Peter get off on calling them automata and stuff?

...well, even though they have goals and take steps to achieve those they're clearly missing something, some kind of faculty that allows them to remember individual events or even earlier conversation topics. It's, again, kinda like they've been programmed to respond to certain stimuli but don't have their full experience simulated.

Hmm.

The way people behave. The way he behaves, when he's timesliding. The whole thing about skipping space between places, or how knowledge gets downloaded into his brain, or how he can cause some cooking to happen if he's sufficiently distracted even though he's not actively (lol) timesliding, the shortness of the years and their lifespans, the simplicity of it all.

Is he in a simulation of some other, higher-complexity reality? One that matches his weirdly clashing intuitions better? Did he "wake up" somehow?

Except, how? Why would "waking up" entail acquiring intuitions from this more complex reality? Why him?

Also that theory doesn't really explain the cracks between reality he witnessed.

But maybe there's still something to it. Maybe it's just that he's still being partially simulated and there isn't anything there between places so when his simulated brain tries to perceive something that just can't be simulated it gets filled with, what, random noise? Stimuli that his simulated nerves just aren't programmed to process?

Hmm.

Okay, maybe the question should be, what testable predictions does this hypothesis have?

If he's being simulated in a computer then it might, in theory, be possible to segfault it? Find bugs in it? But of course, given that he is in fact living in this simulation, that would be the dumbest fucking idea. If he segfaults his program and it gets shutdown he gets shut down with it.

It might be possible to run some low-level experiments? If the simulation is being run at low fidelity, which is what he's thinking it is, maybe it'll be obvious with an electron microscope or something. Now, of course, if he's special somehow maybe the simulation could increase in fidelity exactly where he's looking, but that's assuming that it even can. Plus, it hasn't particularly tried to become more plausible with the things he has noticed, like, he can still timeslide and he still got a good look at the eldritch beings beyond reality yesterday.

And if the simulation is not being run in a computer, then...

...then what is it being run in? What other kind of substrate is there to run a simulation in?

Hmm.

Peter's class is in ten minutes.

...is it, now. Well, he doesn't give a fuck, does he. He can retake it next term if he needs to, it's fine. He's skipping it, this is more important.

Whatever he says.

Okay, so. One thing that might be possible is that—actually, scratch that, it is most likely that he is being run by someone. Some kind of intelligence. And while they have so far chosen to not interact with him, maybe they don't have direct or easy access to his thoughts? That'd make sense, if the simulation isn't used to simulating thoughts very well.

(Actually, is that evidence against his being in a computer? How would the computer simulate his entire brain? If it can simulate his entire brain, why is it doing that only for him?)

Anyway, if he's being simulated by a person maybe he can take actions that will make him more noticeable to that person, such as, "Hey, if you can hear me, I'm awake, I've been uplifted from whatever simulation I was in, I'm a real person, hi?"

No response seems forthcoming.

Yeah, that was probably too much to hope for.

...hmm.

Maybe talking by itself isn't enough but maybe he can draw the attention of the simulators by being more dramatic? By doing something pretty unusual or different, something other Sims don't seem to do, or at least something that very few Sims seem to do. Maybe the simulators don't pay all that much attention to individual Sims but if he could make himself notable somehow maybe they would. So maybe a first step would be becoming famous, and then...

...

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