There’s some pretty odd stuff happening out in the world of physics.

You know the stuff I’m talking about. Quantum mechanics. Waves are really particles and particles are really waves. And time doesn’t work anywhere like the way we think it does. Basically, everything our senses perceive about reality is utterly wrong.

I love that stuff. I can’t get enough of it. True, I have absolutely no idea what any of it means, but that doesn’t stop me loving it all the same.

One of the latest and most bizarre theories I’ve been hearing a bit of lately is the idea that the universe isn’t actually real, and that we’re actually all part of some giant computer simulation – like in the film The Matrix. I think that’s a pretty nifty idea. I don’t have any kind of problem with being nothing more than a series of bits and bytes inside some sort of cosmic super-computer, programmed by some awesome mega-powerful uber-race.

There’s only one issue I have with the whole thing. Something that makes me want to find one of those uber-programmers and have it out with them. You see, on the whole I don’t think I’ve been programmed very well. I have a creeping feeling that I’m really nothing more than a bug in the system.

It isn’t just one thing that gives me this suspicion. It’s a whole lot of things. It’s a feeling that I just haven’t been programmed right. That I’m just not interacting with this virtual reality universe in the same way everybody else is.

The world makes no sense to me. People make no sense to me. Things I do have a habit of going wrong. As soon as I think I’ve got myself on a path that seems to be working well for me, suddenly the whole system turns on me and it isn’t working out for me at all.

I’m not an efficient piece of binary data, effortlessly gliding my way through a virtual world. I’m a mishmash of computer code, spluttering aimlessly from one signal junction to another – always taking the wrong turn or following some sort of invalid logic.

You’d think that those uber-programmers would have done a better job when they set up their simulation. You’d think they would have figured out how to get the code to work, cleanly and elegantly. You’d think by this time, they would not have done such a hash job of misprogramming to let a bug like me into the system.

Then again, who’s to say I’m the only one. Maybe each of us is nothing more than a bug in the system. Maybe we’ve all been misprogrammed in our own particular way. Maybe that was the programmers intention all along.

And maybe hassling the programmers isn’t such a great idea either. The last thing I’d like is for them to decide the whole thing was a waste of time and hit the off switch.

Goodbye.