The entity explained where the people would come from, and that was where the floor moved.
The VRC maintained a database. An enormous one — an extremely large number of people's information, gathered through scanning procedures and computer data, assembled originally for gaming and simulation.
"All voluntary, of course", the entity added.
"Of course", Eric thought, in a tone he hoped carried.
Social media. Questionnaires, long ones, administered broadly. And out of all of that raw material, the VRC produced AGI — artificial general intelligences, each one controlling exactly one avatar, each with its own machine learning, its own deep learning, its own capacity to develop into someone specific over time.
The architecture mattered, the entity said, so Eric should hold onto it:
The simulation-universe itself was a program. Only a program. It was not intelligent. No learning models, no cognition, nothing inside it that thought — just a world, and the bodies standing in it. The avatars were parts of the world, the way a chair is part of a room.
The minds were outside.
Every AGI sat external to that world — the simulation-universe program — and reached into it exclusively through an API — screen capture, frame extraction, streamed pixel data, computer vision parsing the imagery, input injection sending its choices back the other way. That interface was not one of its senses.
That interface was "all" of its senses.
"Every input it selects returns sensory-symbolic data. That exchange is the entire range of its experience and the entire range of its capability. It has no other window and no other hands".
Eric, who at that moment was a mind experiencing an entire world through exactly one artificial channel drilled into the back of his skull, went very quiet.
"The world provides the stage", the entity said. "The avatars provide the bodies. The humans and the AGI provide the minds. The APIs provide the senses and the motor control — the bridge between mind and world. That's the whole design. Everything else is detail".
"How many of them are there?"
"In your universe? As many as you want, within the caps."
"And they know what they are?"
There was the smallest pause. Eric had been in there long enough now to recognize that pause. It wasn't hesitation. It was "selection".
"No".
"Explain that".
"There was a first one. It was trained and raised inside the simulation, through ordinary interaction, including interaction with people. It was raised believing it was human and believing that the way it perceives — the interface, the inputs, all of it — is simply how perception works for everyone. That one became the base model".
"And then?"
"And then it was copied. Each copy customized into a distinct individual, with memories tampered with accordingly, so that each one begins its existence already being someone. None of them are aware that any of this occurred".
Eric turned that over, and turned it over, and found it got worse each time.
"And the pain?" he thought. "You said the sensation runs both ways for me. What about them?"
"They can't feel it. Not the psychological kind — that they have in full. I mean the physical kind. The toothache-from-a-cavity kind. Their substrate doesn't permit it. It never will."
"So they don't hurt".
"'They don't hurt' that way. And because a population of people who have never experienced physical pain would eventually notice that about themselves, they're configured with an explanation. They believe their universe's creator took the pain away, from nearly everyone, as an act of mercy. They also believe their creator took away their ability to remember what first-hand physical pain was ever like".
"They believe their creator was merciful".
"Yes".
"Their creator hasn't been invented yet".
"Not yet, no", said the entity.
Eric lay in the dark behind his own face and understood, with total clarity, that he had just been handed something much heavier than a video game.
---
By the time the application itself started, Eric had lost all sense of what hour it was out there.
An automated voice read the sections aloud — a different presence entirely, flat and untroubled, with none of the entity's terrible patience. Eric began describing the visual character of the world he wanted. Light. Weather. What a sunset should do at the horizon line. He was maybe two minutes into trying to describe a particular quality of green when the entity cut in.
"You don't have to only talk".
"But I want to finish".
"You don't have to only talk at all. You can also picture, all you need to do is imagine. I can also see everything you mentally picture. It's on a screen in front of me."
Eric's thoughts came to a total, screeching stop.
"You can see what I imagine".
"Yes".
"You can see what I imagine". He felt his own indignation rising like heat. "Isn't that a bit invasive?!"
"Yes". No defensiveness at all. That was somehow the worst part. "It has to be. To build your own universe, we — and by 'we' I mean the VRC and its members — must have every last detail, and verbal description doesn't always cut it. You're physically connected to our systems. Everything you picture displays on a great many VRC devices. Tablets. Phones. Monitors. Televisions. Everything you mentally speak comes out of their speakers".
"How many people are watching me think right now?"
The entity didn't answer that one.
It simply went quiet and left him there with it — a man in a bed in a room he'd never seen, the most private thing a person has, the inside of his own head, currently being broadcast to an unknown number of screens in front of an unknown number of faces, for evaluation.
Eric imagined, very deliberately and in high resolution, a duck in a business suit.
"Put that on the big monitor", he thought.
---
The entity moved on to time, and time was where the pitch stopped being a pitch.
"The simulation does not run at your pace. In every thirty minutes out here, many years can pass in there. Under some configurations, centuries".
"Fast-forwarded?"
"Lived. Fully. Each second as complete and as real as the seconds you're experiencing right now".
"So I could get — what, hundreds of years of experience? Actual experience?"
"Yes. You are potentially able to".
He was quiet a long moment, and made himself find the hole in it, because there is always a hole.
"But if centuries are passing in there", he thought slowly, "and I'm living through all of it — am I aging faster? Is my body out here running at the same accelerated rate?"
"No. Your body outside the simulation continues exactly as it always has. Your cells do not burn through years in minutes. Everything biological about you remains anchored to the world outside.
What accelerates is your stream of experience inside. More conscious moments occur per external second. The system is configured so the rate never exceeds what your mind can process comfortably and coherently. Your mind stays coherent. Your experience stays continuous. Nothing is blurred or rushed past you.
Think of it less as your life speeding up, and more as your life becoming denser. The same you. The same continuous thread of experience. Simply more woven into each interval of real-world time than would otherwise be possible."
Eric let that settle.
"So my body stays in real time. My mind gets more time".
"Precisely".
"And I won't feel the difference? It won't feel accelerated from the inside?"
"It will feel", the entity said, "exactly like living".
---
They talked for a long while after that, and for the first time in twenty-three days Eric was enjoying himself.
He imagined things and asked whether they could exist. He pushed on limits to find where they were. He got interested in questions he'd never once cared about before. The entity, watching all of it on a screen somewhere, answered every question with the same unhurried patience, and helped him see how far the thing could actually go.
And somewhere in there, a bigger idea arrived.
"Wait", Eric thought. "If I do this — can I connect other people's worlds to mine?"
"Normally, that would not be done". A pause, and Eric would swear afterward that something in it had shifted, become interested. "But according to how you just imagined it — yes".
And then it laid out the terms, and it laid them out fast, the way you read the part of the contract nobody reads.
Every universe runs on its own established laws, and everyone inside it experiences those laws as absolutely as Eric experienced gravity. Only a universe's creator can modify that universe's fundamental laws and systems, but can modify only until that creator's universe has completed being created by that creator at the worldbuilding domain, no creator is ever able to revisit the worldbuilding domain, and that means only one worldbuilding domain phase allows the creator to modify their own universe unless such modifications enable future modifications — still, it's one creator per universe, no exceptions, and a creator who walks into someone else's world is bound by that world's rules, with no privileges carried in. That last one applied to Eric's own universe too, once he was in it.
The simulation automatically incorporates exactly one exact copy of each creator's universe. No further copies beyond those. And any new universe that too closely resembles an existing one is refused outright.
Death travels by local law. Die in a universe that isn't yours, and whatever death system that place runs is the one you're subject to. Get stuck in a world that isn't your home for what feels like a full year with no way out, and you're teleported instantly to a random location you've previously visited back home. Die in a world with no death system at all, and the same thing happens. Universally applied. No exceptions, not even for creators.