I remember the day I became God, which is every software engineer's deepest desire. Not one we'd flagrantly admit, of course. A false sense of humility is required in my profession, especially during code review, but deep down inside we really want to be better than the rest. So you can imagine, the first thing I wanted to do when I'd blinked my way into the mshell console was to brag about it to my friends. None of them would believe me, and then I'd triumphantly show them my prowess by demoing what I'd done. It's amazing in retrospect how fast that goal disappeared once I started getting into the menus and figuring out just what I could do in mshell.

Without a doubt, I had the best interest of everyone at heart. I wanted to eliminate everything unfair, from theft to cancer, and I think we all could agree that the world was better off without those. The process turned out to be that much more complicated than I thought it'd be. There was no menu item just to remove cancer, and when I finally tracked down what cancer was in mshell I saw a pile of source code written in some language I wasn't familiar with. Of course, I tried to read it, for what software engineer wouldn't? My hubris was quickly met with the realization that cancer spoke with some pretty sizeable universal data sources and that changing the source code wouldn't eliminate it at all, perhaps only for a square foot of the universe, if you could believe that.

Once I'd satisfied my need to feel good about my power, I looked up every girl I'd ever had a crush on. That's when I first suspected something was wrong because I couldn't find any of them. I knew that most of them were still alive, I had them on social media. As you could probably understand, I desperately wanted to read their minds. I couldn't conceal my disappointment and sent a large fireball crashing down into the ocean. When it fizzled out in a pixelated kind of way I started to really doubt that this character in mshell called "TheRealGod" was actually God. So I switched to "TheRealSatan" instead.

"TheRealSatan" had a different look and feel, and a few different menu items, but was largely the same as "TheRealGod." Even more puzzled now, I decided to peek around in the menus for some source code for these characters. That's when I saw that their source code was exactly the same, they were built from the same template, they just had a few different flags set.

I was so intrigued and ready to spend hours studying the code that I jumped an inch when I heard Terry come through my mic to ask me if I was OK. It was then that I realized that I'd left my VR headset on, and that I'd somehow gotten into the shell of the metaverse I was in. For some reason, I thought I'd hacked real life.

Like I said, we'd believe almost anything that made us believe we were God.

r/StoriesToThinkAbout