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I am not completely convinced that life isn’t a
simulation. Now, I know that sounds a little bit tin foil hat flat earth
turtles all the down conspiracy theory-ish, but hear me out. Have you ever
looked at someone randomly and thought, “They look pretty familiar”? Not
that you mistook them for someone else, but that they could pass for an
immediate blood relative. I noticed this one day in the last couple of
years. It’s almost as if there is only a limited amount facial feature
types and everyone is a derivative of those types. Growing up, I used to
play a game called Covert Action and part of the game relied on you identifying
bad actors in a plot by watching a building to see if they appeared, then you
bug their car or follow them to a new destination that revealed more of the
plot. After a few cases, you would start to see the same similar features in
the hair or mouth or even shape. It’s like a game of Guess Who?
Remember the gang members in GTA III? Pedestrians in
GTA IV and V? You always saw the same ones walking about. It would
be hard for a video game to have a fully stocked universe of totally random
characters that did not look like any other NPCs. Same goes for
Skyrim. And, of course, No Man’s Sky. Now, with the latest updates
like NEXT and Atlas, we have even more diversity in the universe, but still
there are only so many permutations of creatures and alien NPCs able to be
conjured up in this procedurally generated game. That means you see the
same type of flora and fauna across the planets you visit. And that’s
where I start to lose the thread that life is not a simulation.
I went to school with this particular person and at the
time, he was the only one who looked like him. I would never have
mistaken him for anyone, yet here, 25 years later, every time I see a
particular Senator on television, I immediately think of him. After
Bailey’s maternal grandmother died, we were convinced on more than one occasion,
that a person we saw in the store was, in fact, her. Granted, our grief
probably manifested in some conjuration of similarities between the two, but it
is possible, they shared the same facial features. Same goes for
me. My freshman year of college, there was a student directory of
incoming freshmen and while I wasn’t in it, since I transferred in the Spring,
my doppelganger was. Clear as day, confirmed by more than one
person. Over the years, I’ve been compared to various celebrities, each
vastly different in how they looked at the time I was associated to them, but
still, I was compared to them all the same.
And it’s almost like you can look at someone and see what
they would have looked like as a young person, or even as an old one.
Same for less weight or more weight. Hair or no hair. I constantly
see the same facial types across the spectrum which could be the leading
cause of déjà vu when it comes to thinking you know someone you’ve never met,
even though you are sure you’ve seen them before. I’ve even been told by
people, after I had met them, that I reminded them of someone they knew all
their life. I suffer from the best friend displacement syndrome, I guess.
Of course, that’s something I’ve entirely made up but the definition would be
that someone you meet immediately becomes the best friend you lost years ago
for whatever reason.
So, if in fact, we are trapped in some simulation, it would
make total sense that there are only so many combinations of possible features
in this world. Now, there are celebrity look-a-likes that could fool
forensic experts but even in those cases, but chances are, they made their
career out of looking like someone by actually having work done to look more
like someone. But there is something to be said out of the idea that
there are 7 people on Earth that look like you. However, chances are, if
there are that many, you probably aren’t too far apart geographically.
After all, given your own facial features, gender, race, etc. to find your doppelganger,
you have to have similar features and while the US is a melting pot of
different ethnicities, you’re probably not going to find a middle aged white
man who looks like you living in Cambodia, unless they are an expatriate.
But let’s delve further. Where I work, I have to park
on the other side of the river, walk two blocks to a light rail station, ride
that two stops, then walk another block and a half before I reach my
destination. In that time, I constantly see the same people at roughly
6:30 in the morning. In fact, I can usually tell if I’m going to miss my
train if I see the same woman walking, with her lit cigarette, past me on
the street or the older woman with dark shades on coming up the escalator
before I reach the platform. And there’s always the same group of
students who pass me coming out of the station, and the same guy with his
duffle bag and black trench coat, waiting for a bus near my building.
Also, there was a time when I was parking in an alternate location, and I
would pass a gentlemen coming from the light rail station wearing a green shirt
with a recycling shape on it. We passed by on several occasions.
And in the afternoon, while standing at the window of my office, I saw him
walking past my building, across the river from our usual passing spot.
It was strange. It was almost as if I were walking through the streets of
Whiterun and passing by Belethor or Brenuin on my way to Breezehome. I
began to suspect that maybe the people, who are always on the same path during
my commute, were NPCs in my simulation… Or even more frightening, I was also an
NPC in someone else’s simulation.
Think about it. I get up and do the same thing every
day, drive the same route, go to the same job… have the same routine, I always
eat the same foods. That’s it.
I’m an NPC.
I mean, I used to be an adventurer like you… but…
