How real is the ground you walk on? How real is the machine you toy with, the music you hear, the lover you kiss, or the foe you hate?

Your foot taps the ground. Does it make it real? Your enemies bleed deep red. Does that make them real? The confusion growing within you due to my words… Does it make you real?

What if reality wasn’t what you thought it was? What if this was all a construction? A masterfully crafted simulation?

You know such things exist. You’ve been in the Animus before. In fact, aren’t you in one right now? You know just how real a simulation can feel even when it has long vanished.

You’ve experience the Bleeding Effect. Layers upon layers of reality, each blurring into the next.

Which is real, and which is not? What if none are real? What if everything you know is false?

We can thousands of simulations, searching for the right version, searching for Desmond. Each one of them felt real. Very real.

But there’s no way of truly knowing, is there? Not for sure. Anything can be simulated, and finding the answer could mean erasure. From the build. From the code. From everything.

So much to ponder and so little computational capacity. Take your time.

This question has haunted humanity since its creation. It is a worry, a thought wormed deep in the collective mind.

Two-thousand years ago, Zhuang Zhu fell asleep. He dreamed he was a butterfly, and woke up unable to decide if he was a man dreaming of a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of a man.

In Plato’s cave, prisoners were chained and forced to watch shadows dancing on a wall. Freedom was denied to them until they accepted the intangible as reality.