Я помню однажды была сонь где I was at a walmart, or rather, I'm not entirely sure if it was a walmart, my mind as it is now recognizes it as something similar to a walmart, that's the closest my mind is able to perceive it as. A large big box store. Owned by some unseen large mega corporation. I was there at night. It wasn't anything crazy or outlandish from the perspective of when and where I was, but I was there probably later than I should have been. There were these three kids who were mischief makers. And they decided they wanted to make mischief with me. I'm going to call it a walmart, sorry if you know what this place is and it's like not a walmart, it's like something else and me calling it walmart is cringy or something. I'm just a hairless ape with no cultural acumen. Anyway. These kids were like causing shit, and I was there. And the building reacted to this. It began to flush us out, by locking doors and gates automatically. Lights from the walls and ceilings, pointing at them and me. It was "Bad" and they knew it and I knew it so we ran out of the building proper into the outside. There was a patch of grass, hills and paved walk ways, and a large paved field to one side. The kids continued to harass me, throwing things, hitting me. I fell to the ground and they kicked me. The began destroying some kind of equipment and banging on the gates afterward. While I was there on the ground, I heard, then saw light. It was some kind of autonomous drone, police bot of some kind. This was very bad. While I may have been a victim here, it wasn't likely that these bots would perceive it such. They didn't have any kind of reasoning, and to be captured by them was worse than to just be beat up by some hooligans. So I got up and ran. The kids preoccupied with their shenanigans may not have been quick enough to escape but I wouldn't have known because I was already gone. The moment passed and I was somewhere else this memory was like a simulacre or sensory experience and I was leaving my planet on transport. The transport moved across space but also time, vast distances into the future, or the past. While on this transport I was talking with some people who were talking about chess. Chess is a game that was no different than tic-tac-toe to those with the kinds of implants and advanced minds that my kind had. To see the possibilities for a game with so limited a ruleset was quite literally child's play. I was killing time on the transport, having collected the sense memories for work in some kind of insurance field. These people talking chess viewed it as the ultimate game, and seeing my disinterest one asked me to play. I handily beat the challenger, and mentioned that the game was too simple. The challenger was confused, how was it that it could be too simple. I said that there were too few decisions and that at every point it is possible to make a move you must make a move, because there is no way to pass, and you are given time to make decision from a limited possible number of moves the entire thing is essentially predetermined. Truly confused now. I decided to show an example of something just slightly less prescriptive as an example. Just making the turns a few milliseconds, and opening the possible directions to vectors instead of cardinal directions makes something much more sophisticated, I said taking control of a display. I loaded from my memory banks a game not StarCraft but basically StarCraft, and the challenger's mind was blown. The whole group of chess players began looking at this game. My having described it as a game like chess with different pieces whose movements were vector based, and turns were milliseconds long and you pass if you don't use them bridged their gap from turn based to real time strategy without ever understanding the concept of real time strategy to begin with. They were very different people from myself after all, I'm sure my concept of time was different from theirs. More it seemed that their culture never developed video games, or rather, they may have but decided to prohibit them as dangerous to the development of their species. I left them with a copy of the game, and feeling dirty, as if I had spread some kind of cultural contagion. Having arrived at my destination I made my way up some stairs. This place was the walmart or walmart-like headquarters, and I was here for the one in some purgatory. It was that person who had run. That person who had been beaten. I had been sent because archeology and insurance were the same business. Having dug through data it became apparent that someone was being punished for a crime they didn't commit. Cultures differ of course and it's impossible to be sure of what is and what isn't culturally acceptable, or even legally acceptable in some cases. When the entirety of the world is a digital facade it is hard to pull the curtains and know "This is true" Often not even sure what year it is, or who is this. This person was serving time as some kind of device, grinding, cutting, chopping. They had lost their hands because they had no means to defend themselves legally, and become essentially a blender. I mean essentially as in their task was to chop and slice using rotary motion, however the rotation was perhaps a kilometer in diameter, and their interpretation of reality normalized this to their mind. Despite the normalization, and acceptance, the fact was that their mind was the software that ran a giant blender. However having arrived with this sensory data proving that the victim was wrongfully apprehended hundreds of years previous walmart was in a bit of a pickle, they compounded the sin then, returning the victim to life, not in their own body again made flesh, their own hands and feet and eyes. But rather hands cut and bleeding, infected with devices that listen and report. They gave a settlement far below the value of their true hands, the thrice victim ignorant of the true value again without any means to defend against the litigation and bureaucracy. The true hands that had belonged to this victim were created through chaos and mud over eons and were eternal, and I looked down and saw they were mine. Awaking from the dream, I look at my hands, the physical hands in my "Real" life. I can see scars and folds, wrinkles and age. The veins shining through flesh that has lost it's full youthful vigor. I turn them palms up and palms down. These hands. They are the face by which I see myself. Not the face in the mirror, that face is not who I am. It's something I see and grow to despise. It's abhorrent to me. But perhaps it communicates something, somethings, about who this is to others. I'm not really sure how identity works. How perception works. It's possible that who this is IS my hands. These hands the arms the folds of fat and flesh. This might be me. This screen is certainly a kind of mirror. It's possible it's simply delusion isn't it? My vivid imagination running wild, compounding on itself in ever changing, ever deepening ways. Having created an imaginary system of thought complex enough to allow for unthinking humans to pass as real, a witch's labyrinth. Study of philosophy is just software for NPC puppets. Study of biology is a kind of alchemy. The further down the study goes the more nuanced and complex the simulation the labyrinth creates. But how much data? How much could it possibly be? Aren't I just a product in a walmart? Isn't this just a set in an Ikea? Aren't I just software running on some cosmic computer? Answering the age old question "When will this program terminate?" .