Hunor Gangel
So John our main character was a regular college student studying in the morning and working in a grocery store in the afternoon. He was living happily: his grades were good and his salary satisfied him. He was working as a re-stocker in that store and doing his job really well. But one day when he was working with his best friend Dan, he wasn’t really paying attention and accidentally dropped a box as he was putting it on the shelf. He quickly picked it up and took a peek inside to see if anything had gotten damaged. When he looked inside, he couldn’t believe his eyes: there were a lot of zeros and ones. He told Dan to come and check it out, but Dan replied that there was nothing wrong with that box. Later he went to see his boss and told him what he had seen. But the boss didn’t believe him and told John that he must have been really tired. But John knew what he had seen and kept on telling his boss that there was something wrong with the boxes. His boss had enough and told John to take a week off and also see a psychologist. And so John went on a short vacation. He took his boss’s advice and went to a psychologist. The psychologist told him that all of this had been caused by sleep deprivation. But for John something felt fishy. To get told the same thing by two different people without any evidence was weird. So John went on with his vacation. The next day he thought that he would go to the cinema and watch something, but two agents showed up at his door in the morning. They told him that the government had sent them to take him to a special facility. John refused to go with them, but then he suddenly fell asleep. The next thing he remembered was that he was in a dark room, tied to a chair, and the two agents were sitting in front of him. He asked them what this was all about, but they didn’t reply. Then a third person came and asked John what he had seen. So he told him that he had accidentally dropped a box, and when he looked inside there were a lot of numbers inside it. The person who asked him looked like he was panicking. He told the two agents, “Get him out of here and don’t let him come out of his house.” John realized that he had seen something he shouldn’t have. When they got to his home, John only saw a bunch of numbers, but the agents told him that everything was okay and he should just go in. So he did; from the inside his house looked as it should except for some patches with numbers. John didn’t know what was going on, but he knew that there was something really wrong. At night he tried to sneak out to investigate further, but one of the agents caught him and shocked him. He passed out instantly. When he woke up he was in full darkness and couldn’t move. A few minutes passed by, and he suddenly saw a blinding white light. A woman was standing in front of him who told him that he was in a simulation to preserve Earth. And he had been woken up because he had a VIP membership, so he gets woken up every 50 years to be asked if he wants to live in the real world or continue the simulation. Well, John obviously chose to start a new life in the real world. And he was happy that he got out of that mess.