“Our lives, the world, it’s all just lies, it’s all a story that we’re making up until a more compelling story comes along.”
—Alan Moore
I’m not a religious person, but I often think about God. To me, God is something alien, in a similiar vein to how Arthur Clarke thought that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
This is my first attempt at what I call a narrative essay, or narrathema. Narrare is Latin for “story,” and thema is Greek for “theme” or “subject” proposed for discussion. I didn’t coin the term myself. It was my long-time friend and intellectual ally, the artist—or “phonometrician,” as he likes to call himself—Robert, who suggested it, and I liked it immediately. Robert writes on his blog Aeternam Praesens.
I set out to create a piece that functions as both essay and story, with each component able to stand on its own. To do that, I leaned on metafiction. Jorge Luis Borges and Alan Moore are two of the writers I return to most often, and their work informed the structure I wanted: a critical or conceptual text embedded within a narrative that enacts it. In the narrathema below, the excerpt serves as the essay and the metafictional frame; the story is that same material expressed as lived action.
Lastly, I’m not sure if he’d ever read this, but I dedicate this in part to George Hotz, who has inspired me in more ways than he knows.
Enjoy.
The passage that follows is pulled from Dima’s manuscript “Mythic Recursion and the Simulator”, circulation date uncertain.
Cultures disagree about nearly everything, but they tend to reserve one privileged slot for something that stands outside the game and looks in. I will call this the Prime Exterior Agent. This is the imagined mind that is responsible for the world itself. There are many local names for it: spirit, ancestor, god, architect, simulator. People often insist these names refer to different things. I think that is mostly surface dressing. The functional role is the same. The Prime Exterior Agent is the answer to the question, "Who or what made this whole situation and could, in principle, reach in and alter it."
This, I claim, is the oldest and most durable piece of human cognition. We keep updating the face we assign to the Prime Exterior Agent, but we rarely retire the role. The reason is straightforward and non-mystical. Each era has a dominant form of power that feels both unquestionable and explanatory. People borrow that form of power to sketch their Prime Exterior Agent. A subsistence farmer in an early agrarian society sits under violent weather and unpredictable seasons. For him, rain and river and sun are the obvious levers on life. Of course he imagines spirits who own those levers. An imperial bureaucrat in late antiquity lives inside law, tribute, and decree. For her the only unquestionable force is the sovereign who can rewrite rules by proclamation. Of course she imagines a single God who legislates morality, judges infractions, and enforces sentence. The early modern mechanic, dazzled by the triumph of clockwork explanation and the promise of universal laws, imagines an architect who calibrated the machine at time zero and then let it run. Today, our most absolute instrument is computation. We build software systems which generate entire environments full of agents who treat those environments as reality. We speak without irony about virtual worlds whose inhabitants have limited access to the truth of the hardware that runs them. It is therefore predictable, not profound, that the latest portrait of the Prime Exterior Agent is an upstream civilization running a simulation. We are simply using our present toolkit to outline what ultimate power would look like.
Many observers look at this pattern and conclude that "God" is nothing more than projection. They say: you see a storm, so you invent a storm god; you see an emperor, so you invent a cosmic emperor; you see an operating system, so you invent a cosmic sysadmin. You reach up with whatever metaphor your century gives you and you paste it onto the sky. That dismissal is comfortable, but too quick. There is another, less smug possibility. The alternative is that the human picture of the Prime Exterior Agent is not randomly wandering, but converging in slow steps. Early attempts are noisy because human brains are limited. You cannot natively picture a mind that exists outside spacetime, generates worlds for reasons that are not biological, and can intervene in those worlds without being locally visible. So you start with bootstraps. "He is something like a storm chief," you say. Then, when that is no longer enough to hold the questions that bother you, you refine it. "No, larger. Something like an emperor of existence itself." Then you refine again. "Not a person sitting on a chair in the clouds, but a divine architect who designed the laws." Then you refine again. "Not necessarily a benevolent architect, but any agent with sufficient compute to spin up conscious subrealities and sustain them." Each refinement tries to subtract parochial features and keep only what you take to be essential: authorship, capacity to intervene, and interpretive authority over meaning. If reality does have an external author, then it would not be surprising if clever primates, over a few thousand years, groped toward a better description using whatever analogies they had available. If we are in fact artifacts of such an author, then of course our thinking would eventually bend in its direction. We are, after all, products of that same architecture. On this reading, talk of "the simulator" is not an adolescent video game fantasy. It is the most recent tuning pass in a very old inference engine.
At this point, the impatient reader will want evidence. "Show me," they will say, "how this supposed author manifests in the world." This leads into the old dispute about miracles. The standard scientific objection to miracles is that they violate law. That is a category mistake. The question to ask is: which level of law is being discussed. If you boot a process in a virtual machine and then you, from the host system, flip a bit in the child's memory, you have not violated the laws of physics in the host system. You have made a perfectly boring state change in RAM. From the point of view of the child process, however, something has happened which cannot be explained using its internal rules. A variable that was false is now true without any legal instruction that could have produced that result. A door that was locked is now open without any internal record of a key. There is no cause within the frame, but there is definitely a cause. The higher layer reached in. We can call that a "glitch" if we like the engineering flavor, or a "miracle" if we like the older flavor. The point is the same. Intervention does not need to mean suspension of order. Intervention can mean an edit request from a level of description you cannot normally address. Classical theology insisted, against rising Enlightenment physics, that "miracles" were possible but could not supply a mechanism. Simulation language supplies a mechanism that does not require abandoning regularity. The framework's conceptual vocabulary emerges as the first version of the old claim that is even superficially coherent to someone raised on computational thinking.
Up to this point I have spoken as if ideas simply evolve in individual minds. That is not accurate. These large pictures of the Prime Exterior Agent do not propagate mind by mind like trinkets in a market. They propagate in a shared cognitive layer that sits above any one person. Older writers called this layer the "noosphere," which is imprecise but serviceable. You can think of it as the species-level background process that is always generating explanations, caching them in culture, and copying them into new hosts. This layer has its own selection pressures. One of the strongest is the need for surveillance. Groups whose members believe that no one is watching tend to produce more opportunistic behavior, more defection, and more corrosion of trust. Groups whose members believe that someone is always watching, and that this someone cares about certain patterns of conduct, tend to stabilize norms more efficiently. You do not need perfect celestial justice for this to work. You just need the belief that you are observed by an evaluator who is outside the reach of your excuses. The Prime Exterior Agent supplies exactly that. The form changes to preserve plausibility (sky father here, moral judge there, now omnipotent programmer), but the function persists: "You are being watched." That signal is socially valuable. The noosphere tends to preserve what is socially valuable. It will gladly swap the outer metaphor when the old one loses credibility, because the surveillance function matters more than the metaphor that carries it. There are obviously other selection pressures (the explanation of suffering, existential reassurance) that I'm leaving out here but will touch on briefly in later chapters.
This gives us a hard fork in interpretation. Either the Prime Exterior Agent exists, in which case human cognition is, step by step, getting a little closer to describing something real. Or the Prime Exterior Agent does not exist, in which case human cognition is generating adaptive fiction that keeps societies from dissolving. The interesting part is that both worlds, from the inside, feel almost identical. Both yield a story in which "there is an eye in the sky." Both revise that story to keep pace with the current technical vocabulary. Both enforce the intuition that we are embedded in a system that is not indifferent. Both become harder to shrug off as childish as they absorb more of our own engineering experience. The more capable we become of spinning up simulated agents in simulated environments, the less ridiculous it sounds that we might ourselves be simulated agents in a simulated environment. Our own progress tightens the argument. That tightening can mean that we are homing in on the structure of reality. It can also mean that we are getting better at fooling ourselves. From where we sit, the two cases are observationally entangled.
I believe psychology provides a fertile medium for practical tests. When you claim that you are watched, and protected, and that intervention is possible on your behalf, and that apparent violations of physical closure are just higher-layer writes, ask yourself: how do you know. This is the only honest check available from inside the system. You do not get to answer, "because I feel it," without noticing that this is what every culture has always said about its current picture of the Prime Exterior Agent. You do not get to answer, "because otherwise I am alone," without admitting that comfort, not evidence, is doing most of the work. You also do not get to wave it away with, "it is all projection," without noticing that projection itself is a strong claim about the origins of cognition, and you have not proved that either. The right move is more modest. You log the experience. You acknowledge the inference. You keep the question live. "How do you know" is forensic. You ask it in daylight as a thought experiment. You will ask it again in the dark, when you are frightened, and the way you answer when you are frightened will tell you what you actually believe, no matter what story you endorse in public.
Caspian had underlined one line twice: “This is the only honest check available from inside the system.” He copied it into his notebook, then shut the printout.
“Woof!” A low, grave blast traveled the air. “Woof! Woof! Woof!” From nowhere storms a lean, high-chested working dog, rangy and big enough to block a doorway but built to move. Before Caspian could turn his head, warm breath hit his face and a wet tongue dragged across his cheek.
“Who’s a good boy?” Caspian asked, ruffling Apollo’s thick bronze mane. “Woof!”
From the summit, the sunset felt like a silent sermon. The view opens in every direction: layered hills and long folds of forest brush the grassy valleys. Twilight strikes the strange rock towers, turning them orange. Just below the true peak, before the dense conifer forest begins, a narrow corridor stretches like a brushstroke. From above, it resembles an open arena, its perimeter marked by eroded buttresses—tall, rounded pillars that seem deliberately placed, almost like statues or sentinels. The ground is covered with grass and low scrub, and the whole scene suggests that any step forward might lead to an unexpected encounter.
The awe teases Caspian’s mind, aggrandizing introspective thoughts. “God knits man out Its own flesh and abandons him into a world set as a stage for his soul to perform in Its glory”, Caspian whispered. “Why perpetuate yourself in the ethos of your creation if you don’t dare meet the lachrymose beggar’s eyes?” Apollo begins to whine agitatedly. “You’re right. I suppose it’s time for us to return. It must have been hours now.”
They started down.
Caspian turned his head for the last time. The rock fell away behind them and the ridge went from orange to a cooling line of brass. From certain angles, Apollo’s fur glowed dimly, as if begging light linger just a little longer.
As the first firs took them in, Apollo moved ahead with the easy certainty of a creature that never doubts return. Caspian followed, boots finding the groove worn by habit.
The forest received them like a mouth.
Up here the day is long, but once you step under the fir line, night is awake all at once. The air tightens and the temperature drops. What was dry stone and sun-warmed grass on the summit turns damp and metallic between the trunks, like water left too long in a rusted cup. The smell changes too. Resin and old needles and that faint iron note that always sits in shaded soil where rock sweats under its own weight.
Apollo’s tag clicked against his collar. A light, regular metal touch. Caspian kept half an ear on that sound without thinking about it. He talked, mostly for the dog, partly for himself.
“Good boy. I think we’ve seriously overextended our stay, but we’ll be fine. You’ve done this a hundred times; I’ve done this a hundred times. Even though the dark falls, it will be nothing.”
It seemed as if the trail narrowed to the width of a single boot, the space closing in, becoming uncomfortably and paradoxically claustrophobic considering the wide landscape that had met the eye not long ago. One side banked up and held cold, while the other fell off into brush he couldn’t see. Tree trunks shouldered close, and the canopy over the path blocked what little sky remained. The last color from the ridge thinned behind them in slow strips through the branches, like something being pulled shut.
He could still see his hands in front of him at first; not as hands, but more as lighter gray shapes against a more general black, enough to know his own boundary and nothing more. Then, several turns later, not even that.
Apollo breathed ahead of him. That was all right. The breath was steady and the tag clicked expectedly. Click, click, click, almost like a metronome.
Caspian let that rhythm anchor him. He kept talking.
“Are you listening? The Prime Exterior Agent, as Dima calls you. Exterior is a particularly useful word for you right now. I imagine you might even be laughing at the mess I’ve put myself in down here on the interior. In any case, you built all of this. I can’t help wondering why you would choose the exterior over the interior. Maybe you perceive geometry so differently that future and past look like hikes not unlike mine. What lies ahead on this one for me, hmm?”
They reached the first bend, where runoff had eaten the path into a shallow gully. Apollo dropped in and trotted through with liquid ease. Caspian slid after him and felt the cold, damp mud smear over the side of his boot, some of it reaching under his sock. He hissed at the contact.
“Apollo,” he said. “Slow.”
Then, he hesitated. Hesitation was new. He didn’t usually have to tell the dog to slow down. The dog usually stayed. The command left his mouth before he felt why he had given it.
The firs tightened further. The path ran between trunks spaced close enough to brush both shoulders at once. The air no longer moved on its own; you walked into it, displaced it, and it slid back into place behind you. The dark ahead was now the same as the dark behind. Caspian felt as if he were inside a hand closing in with every passing moment.
He exhaled, and tried again, softer.
“Listen. I’m playing along. I’m in the world you made. I hit my marks as best as I can. I’m not unreasonable. I’m only trying to understand. If you set the stage, and this whole ridge and sky and dog are yours, then I’m yours, which means abandonmnent would be cruelty, and you don’t—”
Click.
Then, silence.
Caspian stopped mid-step. The word died in his throat as if something pinched it shut from the outside. He stood still and let every muscle lock where it had landed. One foot forward, weight soft on the ball, the other planted behind, knees slightly bend, hands half raised as if to part branches even though he couldn’t see branches. His body held the pose like prey that has just realized it has made noise.
“Apollo?”
The name came out quiet. Too quiet. The dark swallowed it before it had traveled a full arm’s length.
“Apollo. Heel!”
The silence had texture and thickness. It felt like standing with both ears packed with wool. He could hear the inside of his skull better than the outside.
The first slice of fear came in through his sternum. It was mechanical. His chest pulled tight, as if a strap had been cinched around it. His diaphragm tried to drop for more air and met resistance. His next inhalations were shorter, breath stacked on breath without full release, and acid heat began to build in his throat.
“Ok, stop. Dogs go quiet. Don’t escalate.”
He turned, slowly, careful not to lose the plane of the path. The turn didn’t help. The dark was the same in every direction. It was now black on black so uniform his brain kept trying to invent lines just to regain orientation. But those invented lines shifted and dissolved as soon as he tried to follow them. His balance wavered, and a small pulse of vertigo rose, carrying the sense that the ground might not be where he assumed.
He put his right hand in front of him and nothing met it. He put his left hand out to his side and touched damp, cold bark at shoulder height. He dragged his palm along it, rough against the skin below his fingers, and felt the shallow grooves where insects had run. He held on to the tree without thinking.
“Apollo, come.”
He could no longer tell thought from speech.
“That’s not right. Something’s not right. You don’t just disappear. You can’t just disappear. Physics doesn’t allow drop-out. Not like that, anyway. Not unless something higher-level writes you out of the…”
“No! No! I refuse that”, he said out loud. His voice shook and he heard it shake, and the hearing only made it shake worse. “You don’t get to edit him out while I’m looking. That’s not acceptable. That violates the premise. I forbid you.”
A buzzing started at the tips of his fingers and worked its way up his forearms in a faint electrical creep.
To his heightened perception, the forest kept narrowing. It was already narrow, but to him now it became immediate. Closer than skin. He had the absurd impression that if he lifted his face an inch, the dark itself would touch his lips. His body started scanning on its own. His eyes were wide and useless, pulled open so far the skin at the outer corners hurt, even though there was nothing to see. His vigilance was entirely deployed outward, hunting for contour, for edge, for anything meaningful at all.
The moment filled the whole channel, and into that overfull channel, without warning or buildup, something placed four words into his head.
Howdoyouknow?
The words arrived wobbling and torn from a larger piece that shared their quality; they bore the trace of a wholeness in which speaker and source were the same. They were just there, without any trail of origin, unlike remembered words, which retain a faint one, and fully formed with the immediacy of physical contact: as if someone or something had pressed the question against the inside surface of his mind from the other side and left it there, undeniable. They were, in their fractured form, kerygma.
Caspian’s right knee dropped out from under him; the joint simply stopped holding. He fell forward and down, and his kneecap hit a buried stone. The impact shock detonated bright behind his eyes, a white burst in the black like a flash without light. For an instant he couldn’t tell if his eyes were open. He squeezed them shut, but the dark stayed the same.
The question still floated, calibrating the color of light in the room of his mind. He became aware of how small his body was relative to the trees, how thin his jacket felt, and how quickly heat was leaking from his knee into the cold ground.
Time thinned. He had no measure of how long he stayed like that. It might have been only a few heartbeats or a long while.
Ahead and slightly downhill, the dark shifted. At first, it was nothing more than a smear where the black loosened. It wasn’t brightness, more a different density, as if someone had taken a thumb to charcoal on paper and smudged it to a lighter gray. He stared at it. The smear resolved, gradually, into a dull, flat yellow through the trunks. Human yellow. Sodium-bulb yellow. Porch-light yellow. It was low, ugly, but real, and he felt a sudden yearning for that reality.
“Apollo.”
From downhill came the familiar light metallic click of a tag like one small coin of sound spun into the dark, already cooling by the time it reached him.
Then silence again.