Part I: The Bug in the Simulation

In the beginning, there was the word.

Well, two words: “Hello, world!”

Okay, yeah, that does sound a bit too pompous. Let me start over.

My name is Persus Markson, and I’m the guy who accidentally created the virtual multiverse now known as the Simulation. It’s not like I ever planned to become a digital god, trapped inside his own creation and writing travel notes about it, but… when life gives you lemons, the least you can do is document how exactly you ended up with them.

I’ve been making games my whole life. What’s now called the Simulation used to be nothing more than my personal storage — a collection of prototypes, half-finished projects, and weird experiments in game design. That’s what I loved most: building worlds from scratch, inventing rules, breaking genres, programming little miracles. Sometimes I’d forget about food, sleep, or the existence of reality outside the computer screen.

But there’s a problem: making games is painfully slow. Breaks for sleep, work, coffee, and the occasional blackout after a 48-hour coding marathon really got in the way. And I wanted to create faster. So I decided to go radical — to “hack” the system and move my own consciousness into a virtual environment where the laws of time could be rewritten.

I built a VR-capsule capable of transferring my mind directly into a computer. I configured the software environment so that time would flow faster there than in “reality.” I gave myself unlimited developer privileges, integrated access to all my past projects into the build — and finally got what I’d always dreamed of. In a single “real” weekend, I could finish an entire universe. Or two. Or three — if Monday at my day job wasn’t too busy and I could afford to show up a bit late.

With every session, I created new worlds: zombie towns, steampunk westerns, fantasy kingdoms, digital nightmares — anything that came to mind. Dozens of game universes, each with its own mechanics, laws, and aesthetics. And, of course, plenty of genre clichés — I’m only human, after all. I was productive, inspired… and, as it turned out, a little too confident.

Everything changed when I was finishing work on a new prototype — a cubic-style shooter with the working title PG. Instead of simply saving the project and returning to the real world, I accidentally launched the compilation process. What’s that? Well, just a “little thing” that tried to merge ALL of my EARLIER projects into a SINGLE data array. Yes, by accident. Yes, it was a terrible mistake. And no — by the time I saw the progress bar and the endless stream of error messages, it was far too late to cancel.

The worlds were incompatible: different engines, physics, rules — even logic itself. Millions of errors flooded the system. The auto-debugger couldn’t handle it and decided to “fix” the issue the only way it knew how — by merging all the errors into a single entity. One massive system bug is better than a million smaller ones, right? Spoiler: wrong.

That’s how the Bug was born — a living, breathing programming nightmare, the embodiment of all my mistakes. I barely had time to glimpse its monstrous form before it took control of the virtual environment and stripped me of my developer privileges.

With the birth of the Bug, everything changed. All the worlds I had created were “cubified” — reshaped into a single format based on my last project, the PG shooter. And that’s how the Simulation was born — the way you know it today. As for me, after a hundred failed attempts to return to the real world, I decided to lie low and come up with a new plan.

Back then, I didn’t yet realize that while I was searching for a way home… the virtual multiverse itself was already changing — in ways far more dramatic than I could imagine.