Simulations have always drawn the interests of our modern day society. Essentially, simulators are real life events, scenarios, and interactions translated in a video game style. With the rapid technological advancements in computing and graphics, simulation engines have become increasingly realistic, blurring the line between virtual and actual (base) reality. Scientists have even speculated that life as we know it may actually be nothing more than a simulation itself. While no definitive evidence was uncovered to prove this theory, it certainly did not stop developers from creating this sort of "hyper-realistic" reality in virtual space.
A company named Horizon Fidelity Inc. was up to the task in creating such a virtual environment. Sure, it took decades to amass the computing power, program the foundational platform, and depict the realistic scenes throughout Earth. However, when the end result was presented, everyone agreed that it was time well spent, as the virtual world, named the DigiGlobe, was essentially indistinguishable from the real one. Each object, building, model of scenery was portrayed in extremely high resolution, and they all moved according to the underlying, sophisticated, physics engine built specifically to mimic every movement in the real world. Each rendering from the simulated world can easily be mistaken for a picture taken in real life.
While great strides were made developing the platform, the developers were not able to simulate human interaction in their world. The human consciousness was understandably complex and could not be created easily from scratch. Luckily, the developers partnered with a biotech company on developing headsets capable of transferring human consciousness into DigiGlobe. These headsets looked fairly similar to the standard virtual reality headsets in markets, but they were equipped with nano-sized needles to both transfer brain signal-based consciousness to and from virtual space and inject a mild anesthetic to keep the physical body in stasis while the consciousness was away. Using machine learning tactics, the developers were able to successfully model various consciousness obtained with this system and ensure the safe transfer of participants through a backup system. This method also has an added bonus of allowing the participants to explore the virtual world and test its interactions for realism.
This system has just passed its closed beta stage and is opening its amenities to a wider audience for an open beta test. The goal is to test the system's capabilities of simulating many types of consciousness and to determine the capacity of consciousness that can be sustained within the technological limits. While operations ran smoothly for the most part, some glitches were reported during the process. They can range from inaccurate renderings of the world, users being stuck in weird physics, or even them being transferred to the wrong body after testing. In an effort to preserve PR, Horizon Fidelity Inc. tried to resolve issues and even provide compensation in a private manner. However, word of mouth is a force to be reckoned with, and these 'rumors' have spread among prospective testers. One day, one fearless user obtained a testing headset, in part due to the thrill of testing such a cool technology, and in part due to the curiosity from hearing these rumors.