Tortoise.

On a quiet afternoon we see a small beetle making its way across the outside of a window glass. Its tough armor shines in the sun as its small legs move gingerly across the smooth surface. Every detail of its body is visible: the ridges on its carapace, the fine hairs on its legs and the complex structure of its antennae. The little beetle, unaware of its spectator, quietly continues on its way, following a path that only it seems to know. He moves from the bottom left corner of the window to the top edge, unhindered by gravity, his world turned upside down.

We could speculate about what this little beetle is thinking, what its motivations are, why it has chosen to take this exact route. Maybe he's looking for food or a mate, or maybe he's just driven by an unknown urge to explore. He may wonder why the landscape is so flat and hard, unlike the soft earth and undergrowth he is used to. Or perhaps his thinking is not at all comparable to that of us, his human spectators. Perhaps he experiences the world in a way we can hardly imagine.

But what if this seemingly simple scene is more than it seems? What if the beetle and its journey are a message, not to us, the spectators, but from us? A message from the operators of a computerized simulation, addressed to the characters within that simulation – to us, the people. In this vision of the world, we are not the spectators, but the participants, the characters within a complex simulation that shapes our reality.

This is an idea that is beyond our understanding because we are so programmed that we cannot comprehend it. We are programmed to see the world as we experience it, not as it could possibly be. Yet the little beetle continues to walk across the window, following its path in accordance with the rules of its existence. And perhaps, like that little bug, we too follow our own paths, driven by invisible forces and rules that we are only beginning to understand.