A Box

It's not a brain in a vat.  It's brains in a vat.  Lots of them.  All the brains we could find, really.  All the brains that were dumb enough or unlucky enough to get got, anyway.

But that makes it sound like a witches' cauldron - which it isn't, really.  I mean it is kind of in that we are cooking something but there's no recipe or result that we're expecting.  We don't know how many sprigs of nightshade or how many infant's toes we need in this mix, we just keep throwing things in and keep wondering what is going to come out.

Not out, really because nobody leaves the box.  The box is really lots of boxes.  200 of them to be specific, each one nested inside the last.  Each one insulated and secret from the others.  Each one a world created by the brains contained therein.

We thought about building the worlds.  Who doesn't want to be a god, right?  Make the perfect world or the perfect experiment to understand some piece of human nature but gods work hard so we crowd sourced it to the brains.  Brains go in, brains make the world - consensual reality in a box.  If some brain can't agree with that reality then maybe it can pass into the next box up or down.  Will that satisfy them?  We thought about 2 boxes, thought maybe that was enough but then what if someone figures it out, right?  So we put some serious metaphysical space between the real world and the box - 200 reality boxes worth of space.

Why not an infinite number of boxes?  Why only 200?  I think that one is my fault, really.  I wanted there to be an endgame.  I wanted there to be a chance that some brain, some lunatic might keep jumping up and up and up and hit a ceiling and wonder what else is there and maybe they can jump right out of that box.

If they do I don't know what the hell they'll be because their brains are nothing but zeros and ones.  But if someone gets that far maybe they'll figure out how to make that jump anyway which is why there's not a computer within miles of that box, there's not a spec of oxygen with 500 feet of that box and there's a box of a dark, lead walled room that holds that box, waiting for whatever god being tries to birth itself from that hell of a galaxy we made.

I'm looking forward to it, honestly.