Prologue

Many creative minds have dreamt up the day of the System Apocalypse. For some, it was pure fiction. For others, a real possibility. Yet none got it right.

On August 8th, at 4:03 am UTC, human life on Earth ended. Nominally, it took 1.3 seconds, even so, there were some stragglers that lived for a couple of seconds longer. Yet, nobody on Earth, or to be more precise, no human on Earth knew it had happened. We all knew that something happened. The people awake at the time all claimed various harmless symptoms like a short bout of dizziness or some disorienting deja vu. It wasn’t something that had a real effect on them; there were no plane crashes, not even someone tripping and falling.

Yet, it was so widespread that humanity was puzzling over it for weeks. With no result. No matter what the scientists measured, the priests prayed, or the charlatans promised, nothing came out of the investigation. No instrument had recorded any kind of blip. Nothing on seismic, no radio waves, not even the big gravitational arrays had gotten anything. Which, if you knew what happened, was no surprise. Asking a simulated reality that was designed to pretend to be real if it differed from reality was futile.

However, there were some people who had massively different experiences. For them, the transition from being flesh and blood to being a digital simulation of themselves wasn’t as seamless as it should have been. They noticed. I know that because I was one of them. Or so I thought at the time.