The other world was created on the foundation of three mistakes.

  With humble roots as an idea scratched on a drawing board, the prototype came to be in the garage of a tech genius who wanted to make a video game that his grandmother could play. The old woman had Parkinson’s, according to popular legend, so bad she couldn’t hold a spoon, let alone a controller. The genius, using technology he bought and stole, pioneered the technology needed to put her into a world that did not need her real body to move.

  The mad boy went further, incorporating every sense of the human body to craft a wholly realistic experience, indistinguishable from life outside the machine, a mirror of the real. He wanted it to be a smooth integration for the old woman, a simple stepping ground for grand adventures to come. You couldn’t fly if you could not recognize your own legs first, right?

  As the legends go, this first mistake changed everything. The experience was too real, deathly in its perfect mimicry. The young man’s grandmother soon forgot which was which. She was unable to pull herself out of the illusion. She started to believe the fictional world was the one she was meant to be in.

  It was understandable. In this other world, she was healed from her debilitating illnesses. She was ageless, free, and anything she wanted was provided through a line of code her dutiful grandson would write. And perhaps, just as tragic as her confusion, the genius saw no wrong in what he was doing. Believing he was creating a utopia for the old woman, he filled it with incredible technology and wealth, fulfilling every need and want that a human being could ever have. His second mistake was playing God.

  As the old woman, who had been a seamstress in her previous life, dipped her toes into the abundance that was around her, she was pulled even deeper into excess. Soon, she was coming out of the machine for the most basic of bodily functions. Everything else, even sleep, was done in the machine world. Spirit soaring, her health predictably fell. She aged in days what others took years. New bed sores rotted within old ones. No amount of medication could keep the old woman’s body from decaying in that chair. She suffered a stroke that made her mute and paralysed those hands she had stopped using.

  When he realized what had happened, the genius was already in too far. He had to make a choice then, to pull his grandmother into waking hell, or allow her to live out her miserable life in merciful dreams.

  He chose mercy. Not only that, he increased the dilation of time so that every day his grandmother spent alive in the machine, 12 years would pass in the other reality. He wrote more code to allow the old woman to live as a young girl again. When one dream life ended, he reincarnated her into a new body to continue whatever venture she had been focused on, and the world was given just as much freedom to grow alongside her. The old woman could set up a legacy with one life and carry it on with herself as the torchbearer, transforming fiction to her singular design. Lifetimes of study let her shed her history to become something wild and powerful. She was a billionaire, a leader, and finally a monarch.

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  A hundred years passed with her at the helm of this world, during which time she led a crusade across every nation before turning to the stars for purpose. She commanded the world’s resources to fulfill her whims, ordered the birth and death of entire nations for the fruition of a grand future known only to her.

  All this was possible, easy, even, for the laws of the universe were mere suggestions when one was immortal, or as much as she could be. She might have had as much time as her physical body would allow, but that time was running out as illness and exhaustion brought her real nerves and fibers and cells to entropy. The old woman’s tale would have ended with her here, sad but perhaps uplifting, if not for the third mistake her grandson had made.

  One evening, when maintaining his machines to make sure they would still be working through the night, the genius grandson accidentally adjusted the time dilation settings. Perhaps it was fated to be. Perhaps he wanted this to happen, deep down. Whatever the reason, instead of one day being multiplied into 12 years, the machine caused every second to equate to 12 years.

  Each tick of the clock, each strike of a heartbeat, meant more than a decade passing for the old woman inside the machine.

  If the genius had discovered this blunder quickly and turned the setting back, he would have accelerated the march of his fictional world by a few generations at best. But it was not until the next day that he found this error.

  The next day, a total of 6 hours had passed in the real world. Inside the machine, it was 21,600 seconds. That was 259,200 years. Enough for more than 3 thousand lifetimes lived end to end.

  In his horror, the genius unplugged the machine. But when his hands were around the plug, he stopped. He looked at the body of his grandmother. She was so still. It was impossible to tell if she was alive or dead. And what would happen to a mortal brain forced to consolidate all those memories at once? What kind of biology could withstand so much information?

  He let go of the plug.

  259,200 years.

  If he remembered correctly, 259,200 years was around the entire historical existence of modern humans. Did this mean his mirror image of the real world had gone through an entire cycle of human history again? Was his machine even capable of generating that amount of time and data? And his grandmother… did she really live through humanity’s second evolution as 3 thousand different people? Only this time it was not from caves to modern apartments, but from nuclear fission to… what exactly?

  It was unfathomable, yet it had happened right here. Curiosity grew, becoming unquenchable. The genius went to his monitors. There was another helmet, built like binoculars to observe. It would be safe for him to peak. And he would peak. Just briefly. Just to see what this new world looked like, what the pinnacle of humanity was, and what kind of god he had created from the shell of a frail old woman.