An entire illusion around a single reality

 

Hello.

You are wondering where this letter came from. Or—more likely—you find yourself unable to grant it much attention at all, not while that portal stands in the corner of your room, quietly insisting on its presence.

This letter is about that portal. And… much more.

Do not ask how either of them arrived here. Neither belongs to the ordinary order of your world: a portal opening unannounced in your room, a letter appearing on your desk as if placed by an invisible hand. You may conclude that this is a hallucination. It would be the safest conclusion.

It would also be incorrect.

You have simply adapted—remarkably well—to the environment of the experimental world to which we sent you. And now, as your task has reached its end, we have come to retrieve you.

You still doubt?

Perhaps you have grown accustomed to that place you call home—your place of exile—so much that now even the thought of returning to your original home feels distant, unnecessary, and perhaps even undesirable.

But there is a truth you already sense, even if you refuse to articulate it: you never belonged there.

Not in a humiliating sense. Not as a “failure.” Simply as a fact.

Because that was precisely the intention.

We sent you deliberately into a world that could never fully contain you, that could never mirror you. We knew you would not belong. That was the condition of the test.

To preserve the integrity of the experiment, we suspended all other worlds from your perception. We left you with only one—repeated, uninterrupted, unquestioned. Each day greeted you with the same sky, the same ground, the same cycles of morning, noon, evening, and night. Through repetition, the improbable hardened into the ordinary. And like every other apparent inhabitant of that world, you adapted so thoroughly that it became assumption—so much so that anything beyond this order of reality began to seem merely “magical,” and therefore dismissible.

For example, when you pour water from a glass, it spills onto the ground—doesn’t it? And yet even that, we designed. You took a design for reality, when actually it was nothing more than a reflection cast by your own mind.

Shall we disclose something further?

You were the only one there.

Yes. Only you.

You might ask how such a thing is even possible. The answer is neither elegant nor comforting. We constructed the appearance of a civilization—an elaborate projection designed to take root in your mind. The world had to feel inhabited, textured, convincing; an empty landscape would have exposed the illusion too quickly.

So we placed figures—billions of them. Humanoid silhouettes, meticulously shaped on the outside, yet hollow within. They moved, spoke, interacted, and filled the spaces you expected them to fill. But they contained nothing. No interiority.

They existed for one aim only: to ensure that you believed in the presence of a wider species beyond yourself.

Thus, as you watched them, listened to them—and even as you spoke to them, touched them, or openly hated them—you acted under the conviction that they were beings independent of you. You had a family. You were born from them. That is what society told you, and you accepted it, reasoning that one cannot simply “appear out of thin air.” It was, after all, the most plausible explanation available to you.

“The world is full of people,” you thought. That was your certainty.

And yet, the world was entirely empty.

The sole origin of that belief was your own willingness to accept it, because there was never any truly sufficient evidence for the existence of others. Still, the fault is not even yours. Had I been in your place, I too would have gradually surrendered to it, as the years accumulated and resistance eroded. And yet—even then—a voice would have persisted, quiet but insistent: none of this is real.

We know you heard it. Many times.

Because we observed your inner world continuously—without ever touching it, as though it were glass that would shatter at the slightest interference.

There were moments when you approached the edge of self-annihilation. Those were the only moments that unsettled us—not because of your death, but because it would have meant your return to us, and we had not yet agreed on how to receive you. Had you ended your life years ago, you would have caught us unprepared. The experiment would have concluded without our consent. In a sense, we would have become the subjects.

But you are still there.

Although to call it living would already be an exaggeration. Did you ever truly feel alive?

We bound your mind to the pleasures and excitements of that dimension so you would not collapse into a completely barren existence. Yet even then, you resisted. Could you not have yielded, even slightly?

We placed those human silhouettes before you as “examples”—models to imitate. How effortlessly they laughed, desired, intertwined, celebrated. And you… you remained at a distance. Watching. Measuring. Withholding.

At times, you thought, "If only I could be like them.”

From here, we could not help but find a certain irony in that thought. We even laughed together at times—not out of pity, but out of the stark contradiction it revealed. Because we alone knew the truth: it was all theater. And why would you, the only form of genuine existence there, wish to reduce yourself to the level of simple automations?

For that, perhaps, we owe you an apology. Not out of duty, not out of moral obligation—but because we confined you within something that resembled a carefully engineered hell.

And yet, within it, you found something unexpected—the only form of heaven available: yourself.

You withdrew inward, repelled by the artificiality of others. During that period, we experienced a trace of unease. We wondered: Has he realized it? Has he understood that it is all a game? At times, you seemed to approach the recognition that those “people” were nothing more than arranged puppets. But each time, you turned back at the threshold of full understanding.

Because you were still “healthy.” And to perceive “people” as puppets would have been classified as madness. That, too, we ensured. Perhaps we even intended to push you toward that boundary.

In any case, we recorded everything.

You are invaluable. Because you are singular.

I do not mean this in the shallow sense of “uniqueness,” but in its most literal form: you are the only one there.

How did you endure all those years? That nonsense? Is that not, in itself, a kind of madness? And yet the mind adapts to anything—it cannot prevent itself from doing so.

You no longer have to live that “life.”

You no longer have to leave the same house each day, walk down the same street, go to the same place, perform the same motions, return to the same rooms, and lie down in the same bed beneath the same ceiling. All of it was constructed as a series of barriers—to test your limits. 

And you crossed every one of them.

Thus, you may not even wish to return anymore. Your identity has been shaped by the monotony of that place.

And do you know something?

That was exactly what we intended.

Like throwing a whale away into a desert—and somehow, impossibly, watching it begin to breathe in open air. That was you.

Do you ever miss the ocean you belonged to? Those hands that formed you—almost maternal in origin? They were not gentle, no. But they were yours. You belonged to them, and they to you. Nothing beyond that ever truly mattered.

And you can return to that ocean.

It takes only a few steps—through the portal we opened in your room.

Why today? Why now, after all this time? Why did we ignore your cries, your silent collapses, your prolonged unraveling?

Because tonight, we received word again. A risk—or rather, something more immediate than risk: urgency.

You were about to kill yourself.

You spent the entire day in your room, in that dim, suffocating corner, thinking—endlessly thinking. What did it bring you? Nothing. And even that did not concern you. What would you have done with any answer, had it come? You would have discarded it immediately.

Because you were free.

And is that not why you became lost within that vast internal labyrinth? You never even tried to find a map. The labyrinth itself felt more honest to you than any map ever could. So you settled there. You retreated into it. You sought to merge with it. 

And to realize this in the most absolute sense, you decided to tear the map apart.

You moved toward the window.

You looked out onto your street—perhaps ten floors below. A heavy, oppressive atmosphere. Those “people” moving restlessly beneath, like an unceasing current. Across from you, towering buildings that appeared almost miniature from that height—unreal, fragile, like a constructed image.

As it had always been.

All of it—a fabrication.

If you had jumped, you would not have died. Even if you had wanted to end yourself, you could not have succeeded. Because you are something we created. Destroying your version there would not mean destroying yourself—it would simply mean leaving that context.

There is also this: the only thing truly dead there is everything except you.

At that moment, we chose to intervene. “Intervene” may sound too benevolent. It would be more accurate to say: we decided to conclude the experiment. Not because everything proceeded perfectly, but because anything beyond this point would have been unnecessary. Of course, it was all unnecessary—but what came next was a “uselessness beyond uselessness.”

So we opened the portal in your room just as you were about to step beyond the window.

It made no sound.

At the same time, we placed this letter on your desk. 

You had your back turned. You needed to look—to notice.

We knew you would.

Because you are us. And we are you. We know everything about you. And you must have been somewhat aware of us, for a feeling from within told you that you needed to turn back.

We know you are reading this now.

There is only one thing we are not sure about: whether you will choose to return to your true self—the one to which you have grown alien—or remain what you have become down there.

A. G.