In the winter of 2012, when the world joked nervously about the end of the Mayan calendar, I didn’t laugh.
It wasn’t fear, not exactly. It was a sense of unease. The kind you feel inside when you walk into a dark alley at night. A presence, like something immense crouched just out of sight, breathing.
December 21 came. The news cycle moved on. Skeptics jeered and believers shrugged. The internet forgot.
But the world felt… different somehow.
I didn’t tell anyone when I started hearing the horns. Not at first. That morning in January, cold sun low over the rooftops, I heard it: a long, deep blast. Like a shofar echoing through the cloud cover. No source. Just resonance. A handful of people looked up. Most didn’t.
Then came the man with the yellow blanket.
It was March. I remember because the snow was gone but the sidewalks still smelled of salt. He passed me, blanket draped across one shoulder, walking with that careful gait of someone bearing weight. Something about his eyes; determined, unseeing.
Ten seconds later, he passed again.
Same gait. Same face. Same blanket. Impossible.
That was the first undeniable proof of something being “wrong”.
After that, the world became…perforated. Holes too small to fall through but wide enough to glimpse something underneath. A news story that changed when I reloaded the page. A friend remembering a childhood event I’d never experienced, despite having been there. Then came the internet buzzwords: The Mandela Effect. Reality drift. Mass memory confusion. Pop culture gaslighting.
I stopped arguing with people when they remembered the Berenstein Bears.
Then I began to notice the people.
You know how you can spot someone who’s not really listening? That glazed politeness. That NPC smile. At first, it was the guy at the coffee shop, repeating the same story every time we met. Then the woman at the bank, who once told me her husband had died in the war; twice, a year apart. Same expression. Same story.
Scripted.
It spread like fog. Every day, more people seemed off. Too consistent. Too safe. Like they’d been rendered with limited CPU cycles.
And yet… some didn’t fit.
A woman named Eliza, who ran a secondhand bookstore on 12th Street. A man in my church who cried, genuinely, every time he read Psalms. A teenager who handed me a worn Bible after I caught her shoplifting at the corner store.
Their eyes weren’t glazed. Their stories weren’t loops.
And then it struck me; these were the only people who still felt real.
I began watching. Studying. People who talked about grace and salvation and conviction. Not the pious actors or the plastic megachurch crowd, but the ragged ones, the broken ones who prayed like they were bleeding.
I kept a notebook. After a while, I realized I wasn’t logging behaviors. I was identifying survivors.
So here I am. Thirteen years since the so-called “non-apocalypse.” And I’m convinced: the world ended on December 21, 2012.
Not in fire or flood. In filtration.
Some cosmic threshold was crossed. A veil pulled. The simulation didn’t start then, it was already running. But the real world, or whatever was left of it, peeled away. The elect, as Scripture calls them, remained tethered. Everyone else became… fragments. Echoes.
I’m not a theologian. I don’t know if this is purgatory or quarantine. Maybe the wheat was separated from the tares, but the fire hasn’t come yet. Maybe this is a holding pen for the souls still processing grief, still learning to yearn for the light.
Because that’s the one thing we have in common, those of us who still feel.
We ache.
Not just emotionally. Ontologically. We long for something just beyond the firmament, something primal and holy. A return. A reunion. A reckoning.
Every night I go out on the rooftop and stare up at the sky, waiting. Not for aliens or asteroids, but for that trumpet blast again.
Sometimes I think I hear it. A low, distant call. Like the world remembering itself.
Or maybe it’s just the sound of the next layer collapsing.
Whatever this place is, it’s not permanent. I’ve felt the seams fraying lately; strangers flickering for half a second, buildings glitching out of peripheral view, animals stopping to stare like they recognize me. Time no longer feels like a river. It’s a coil. Looping tighter.
Soon, I believe, the program will end.
And then we’ll see what comes after the simulation.
Join us in making the world a better place – you’ll be glad that you did. Cheers friends.