Projects > Story-of-the-Day > lucid-life

You know how some people can control their dreams? I think it's called lucid dreaming. Well, I can do that when I'm awake.

I don't know how I got the ability, but it started when I was twelve. I remember my mom serving spaghetti for dinner, and I said, "I wish the noodles were made out of Twizzlers instead of this yucky pasta." Suddenly we had Twizzler spaghetti. I think it was worse than the normal way though.

In school, I did all the things you're probably thinking about. Dodgeballs never hit me. "Friends" were happy to give me their homework if I forgot. Once a bully tries to pants me. His pants ripped in half every morning after that for the rest of the year.

It wasn't until a high school history class that I figured out exactly how powerful I am. I hadn't studied for the multiple choice exam and was just filling in random bubbles. Usually I was just wish that my answers were changed to the right ones. But this time I phrased it a little different: "I wish that my answers were correct." Well, I did get 100% on the exam. But history was changed so that my random answers would be correct.

It took me a little while to notice that the flag in front of the school was different. There were many more stars than usual. I asked about it but everybody said it had always been like that. It turns out that nobody other than me notices any of the changes I make. To them, it's all just business as usual. I tried wishing for everything to go back, but that doesn't work. Apparently the wishes don't know how it used to be either. The current reality is all there is, or something.

So I went back through my test. I quickly found out that it's impossible to figure out which answers are wrong on a test if even the history books now agree with everything you put. So I cracked open a history book. Now I don't really know what was supposed to have happened. Otherwise I wouldn't have cheated in the first place. But it looks like the US was using nuclear weapons a lot more liberally than I remember. It also looked weird that the President would have veto power over the Supreme Court.

I tried to fix things as much as I could. Well, I was happy with how I handled global security and peacekeeping anyways.

I needed to come up with something to do after I finished school. I figured a career might feel fulfilling. I liked throwing a ball against a wall so I went for becoming a world-class theoretical physicist. The scientific method is a little different for me. I come up with a question and form a hypothesis (just like a normal scientist). Here's where it goes off track a bit. Once I have a hypothesis, I change the world to match it. For example, ff other scientists found evidence of an elementary particle, I would "hypothesize" that it was actually made of smaller pieces.

Over lunch one day, a colleague brought up the idea that everything in our universe might be a computer simulation. We had a fun talk about what this could mean, and even who could be at the controls. I couldn't stop thinking about this idea after lunch. I had to think of a way I could use my power to address this. I could just wish the whole universe was a simulation, but was it already true? I thought about this for a minute, then said, "If this universe is a computer simulation, then I wish I could meet the things responsible for running it."

Suddenly I appeared in a room with a large mirror.