The number of people in VR had continued swelling over the two-week period of martial law and strict curfews. While not everything had translated to VR yet, which meant people still had to leave their houses for things like critical jobs, most people had still taken advantage of the time dilation in the public simulation and spent practically an entire month getting accustomed to the new world. That time had been enough for even the hottest of heads to cool down and wonder why theyd ever been angry in the first place. After all, nothing truly bad had happened since the empire officially came into existence; on the contrary, a lot of good things had come their way.

But while the hotheads had mostly calmed down, conspiracy theorists came to the fore. While extra time to think about things was a positive thing when dealing with angry people, conspiracy theorists were the exact opposite. The more time they had on their hands, the deeper, more complex, and more weirdly believable their conspiracy theories became as they were perfected. Coupled with the wonder of scientists in different fields, who constantly exclaimed over this and that and saying how impossible it would be to create the technology they were seeing with the current level of humanity, believable conspiracy theories sprouted up like weeds after a heavy rain.

Scientists had been oohing and aahing over a few things more than others. They knew that, in order to create full-immersion VR worlds, Aron must have had a massive breakthrough in a few areas, like the knowledge of the brain and its functions. Current science still couldnt explain how the brain functioned, and researchers were still almost completely mystified by the human consciousness, yet Aron had, seemingly effortlessly, conquered the field of brain science.

While humanity at large was still fumbling around with implanting microchips that could enable people to move a mouse cursor on a screen with their mind, Aron had fully recreated all of a humans senses. The primary senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell, and taste were faithfully recreated in the simulation, and so were the secondary senses of proprioception, equilibrioception, and even thermoception. Without knowing everything about how the brain functioned, that recreation would be impossible even without taking time dilation into account.

(Ed note: Proprioception is the ability we have to know where our body parts are relative to each other, like how we can touch our noses with our eyes closed. Equilibrioception is our sense of balance and orientation relative to other objects, like how we know which way is up when were swimming. And thermoception is our ability to detect changes in temperature, like walking into an air-conditioned building on a hot day and feeling a chill.)

The second-most talked about feature of the simulation was its eerily accurate representation of the real world. Current science had no explanation for that, unless they were to turn the entire planet into one gigantic supercomputer cluster. After all, it was even capable of recreating the laws of physics to a point that physicists could only exclaim in wonder about Arons knowledge of universal laws. Others could, at most, use some of the famous supercomputerslike Japans Fugakuto run experiments one at a time, and they would still take hours, or sometimes even days to complete. But when they ran those same experiments in Research City, they were completed nearly instantly, almost as if the simulated world had anticipated what they wanted to do.

The difference between meatspace and virtual reality had resulted in quite a few scientists suffering existential crises as they began questioning whether or not theyd been living in a virtual simulation all this time and just didnt realize it until theyd entered Arons VR simulation and saw the faithful recreation of reality as they knew it.

The theory gained such a large following that Sarah was forced to issue a press release to calm the scientists down.

One of the earliest breakthroughs in GAIA Tech was in quantum computing. Using our proprietary quantum superclusters, in conjunction with our advancements in artificial and virtual intelligence, we pioneered an algorithm capable of faithfully recreating reality. As we continued working along that line of scientific inquiry, many more minor breakthroughs were achieved that culminated in a faithful representation of reality in a virtual form. Then it became an issue of man-machine interfaces, which was a relatively easily solved engineering problem. First, we developed augmented reality glasses, then virtual reality helmets, and the virtual reality pods are the culmination of that line of research so far.

As for the simulation itself and its capacity, we at GAIA Tech have been faithfully building enormous quantum superclusters and striving to increase our quantum capacities. Currently, the simulation runs on a total of eighteen quantum superclusters with a combined seven billion qubits and a quantum volume (QV) of a little over eight trillion. Combined with gate error rates of 1x10-28 and a quantum coherence time of two seconds, our hardware allows us to simulate a faithful one-to-one representation of reality and accelerate perceived time to a ratio of 2:1 with an estimated concurrent user capacity of twelve billion users.

We at GAIA remain faithfully committed to progressing the technological capabilities of humanity and will continue that mission into the distant future, wherever it may lead.

Regards, Sarah OConnor, CEO of GAIA Technology, Inc.

The press release alleviated most of the issues in the scientific community, but GAIA Tech had a new headache: curious scientists wouldnt stop pestering them about how they had achieved their breakthroughs. In the eyes of scientists, businesspeople were leeches and profiteers that put profit above the advancement of mankind. Scientists, to the contrary, were pure-hearted champions of the human race who believed that all knowledge should be openly and freely shared for the benefit of all. It was an intractable debate that had been going on as long as researchers had sought patrons to fund their research and wouldnt be solved that day, just as it had never been solved in the past.

Thus, Sarah simply shrugged and tossed the thorny problem to the GAIA Tech public relations department, then washed her hands of the issue. She had already explained the why of it all and was under no obligation to explain the how behind the why.