Nobody else seemed to notice the mistakes. As if they were just a part of life – well, they were, to some extent. But it wasn’t normal – clocks jumping a few seconds, people repeating the same thing word for word multiple days in a row, the same stranger appearing in multiple places. I noticed them. The mistakes. They were few and far between, yet I remembered. I remembered every one, as if this world was just a simulation that was beginning to glitch out. When I told my friends about this, they laughed at me and asked if I was for real – they thought that I was joking or hallucinating the events, but I knew I wasn’t. I’d seen the mistakes with my own eyes, or at least I’m pretty sure I had. Everyone I told thought I was going crazy, and after a while, I began to believe it too – why would I be the only person to see them? After that, life seemed to go back to normal – I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary.
Then one winter morning I knew I wasn’t imagining things. It had snowed overnight, yet when I stepped outside the snow wasn’t cold, like it should’ve been, yet hot underfoot. The sun hadn’t even risen yet – it was still dark – and being so warm it should be liquid. Yet here it was, a warm blanket of snow, covering all the streets in the country. Still nobody noticed. It was beginning to frustrate me – I began to wonder whether everyone was pulling an elaborate joke on me because there was no way they hadn’t noticed the hot snow, however it seemed they genuinely hadn’t noticed anything off and told me to go to the doctor.
I was checked into a mental hospital the day after going to the doctor’s. The hospital felt wrong – plain walls, plain doors and a plain floor. There was no life to this hospital. They locked me in a white room with nothing but a chair and my own thoughts. I was stuck in there for what felt like days before a wall started to glow a faint blue and ‘glitch out’. This time, nobody could miss it. There were security cameras in the room and they watched me walk from the chair to the wall, and pass straight through it. The other side was a black void, as if it hadn’t ‘loaded’ yet. The employees rushed into the room but the wall had solidified behind me – they couldn’t cross. I could see them trying to get through, trying to get to me, but I had slipped through a crack in reality. A crack that shouldn’t exist.
Then came a booming voice from everywhere around us, as if from Heaven.
“Simulation 23 shutting down. Life Form 77182 has realised the true nature of their reality. Shutting down in 3… 2…”
Just before 1, I realised that nobody was ever for real.