You needed your milk every morning. You drank it fast, as usual. The cold liquid was running down your throat, reminding you of the dawn of humankind, when people stopped drinking water from lakes or streams, and started domesticating cows and stealing the milk from the calves.

The day went by. The mills of civilization grind in business as usual.

When things slowed down, you were back in your apartment. It was your habit to smoke a cigarette every evening.

The milk-routine in the morning and the cigarette-routine in the evening. You always flicked the ashes in the empty milk bottle from the morning. Filling the empty bottle of liquid cow motherhood with the burnt ashes of a burning death stick. There was nothing better in the world to contaminate the cold and milky interior of your mouth with the bitter and acid taste of nicotine. It was like a symbolic representation of the end of humanity in an ever-hotter world. Burnt and buried by the side-effects of their hedonistic hybris. Your morning and the dawn of humankind: milk! Your evening and the nightfall of humankind: fire!

Your hushed away these bizarre and dark thoughts with the smoke of your last puff and flicked the rest of your cigarette into the bottle. While having been sunk in your egocentric phantasies, you didn’t realize how dark it suddenly got outside. It was snowing!

It got so dark, it almost looked as if the snow was black. You turned on the light and––the snow was still black. You feel how a chilly feeling of cataclysm runs down your spine. You shiver. This must be an optical illusion. You open the window and reach out with your hand. You expect the cold snow to land on your hand, and, surely, something falls, but what you sense is not cold, it is almost warm. Afraid and curious you withdraw your hand and stare. “This is not snow,” you think. “These are ashes!” “It must be burning somewhere!”, you reason. But there is no fire in sight, not burnt smell. Nothing unusual, besides ashes falling from the sky.

An insane thought bursts into your mind. You rush to the milk bottle, and turn it upside down. You see the ashes pouring out and – you lose the ground under your feet. Your books, your clothes, are falling with you from the ground to the ceiling, your furniture, chairs, the table, your bed, everything falls to the ceiling. You land hard on your back, into the chaos of what was once your room. You feel dizzy. You manage to stand up. You shudder with sheer terror.

“The world is a simulation”, you stutter, “and the milk bottle must be the administrator perks!”

You panic! Where is that milk bottle? You look around. And there is the bottle, it is lying only some meters away, next to the wall. It landed safe on some cushions in the corner. Carefully you walk towards the bottle. – And then you hear a noise. A copy of Edward Munch’s The Scream that was hanging on your wall and was still held on the wall, slides off the nail that was holding it. It falls. Towards the bottle. You sprint. The Scream is faster. It lands on the bottle and bursts it into pieces. The bottle cracks, and so does your world. Your furniture, your room, torn apart. Your body, torn apart. Splinters of wood and cement, of bones and flesh.

Blood everywhere.

The end.

I walk into my San Francisco office with a hot cup of coffee fresh from the market in hand. I sip it slowly with a smile on my face. As the coffee trickles down my throat I think to myself, “today is going to be a good day”. I sit down at my desk and look at myself in my desk mirror. “You don’t look half bad” I say to myself. I smooth out the flyaway hairs that are living on the top of my head with a sweep of my hand. I look to my right at my other desk mirror and think “You just got promoted baby. The world is your OYSTER!”

I eagerly login to my brand-spanking-new MacBook desktop. A glorious 42” wide plasma retina display suited with a 64-Core processor and M3 chip to boot. “I’ve made it”.

The first duty I have in my new role is to get up to speed on all of the documentation of my predecessor. I promptly log into my account. Immediately a popup displays on the screen that reads “Congratulations on your new role as Administrator! To begin training, please click the Begin button below”. I quickly select the bright green “begin” button.

Gosh, there is no personal training these days, just me and my computer. I often think to myself how much I miss the old ways of the world, where face-to-face interaction was deemed commonplace, it was so nice being able to communicate with an actual human being who would sit here and talk to me, especially when I had questions about what I was learning, I’ve always found it nice to be able to go back and forth with someone about what you’re working on. It’s nice to have someone to help you out immediately when you need it and bounce ideas off of and— **DING!** a sharp, high-pitched sound interrupts my train of thought.

The sound continues on, getting louder and louder, each reverberation vibrating the insides of my eardrums more intensely than the last.

I look up. A 3D rendering of the earth has incapsulated my entire screen. It’s spinning, and as the sound gets louder the speed of the sound picks up with it, and so does the spinning earth.

What the?

The earth on the screen starts shrinking. Immediately another earth appears on the screen that encapsulates the first one. That earth then gets smaller too, and a third earth swallows the others. This continues endlessly at a dizzying pace. The DINGs are getting so fast and so intense, I start to feel nauseous. I lean over in desperation and grab my glass of water that’s vibrating on the table. The sound around me has now completely crescendoed. My entire body is buzzing. The screen suddenly flashes black, and in the earth’s place a pop-up window appears with black, bold text. “The world is a simulation.” It reads. Below it are two options. In green, it reads “I accept”. In red, “Exit without making changes.” I gulp back my water and take a deep breath.

“I accept”.