(Life is but a screen)
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Okay, what’s wrong with the following sentence?

“Operating out of a trailer in rural Illinois, government researchers are experimenting to determine if our reality is really just a great big hologram.”

You’re right. That wasn’t a fair question. Practically everything is wrong with that sentence.

• It can’t be in a trailer. In many Midwestern states, state law requires that all mobile homes maintain an active meth lab.
• “Government research” is mismanaged by everybody, accountable to nobody, and expensive for the wrong people. Plus, it tends to result in monumental missteps, like federally-restricted toilet flushes, or the UN.
• Given the tepid state of our economy, I don’t see how we can afford to fund psychotic “Do We Live In The Matrix?” research and simultaneously support federally-funded grants that pay scientists to coax shrimp onto treadmills and measure their stress. (the shrimps’ stress, not the scientists’)
• If a federal agency is running some op out of a rural Illinois trailer, another federal agency could confuse it with a meth lab, and then the government might arrest itself.
• Not that that’s a bad thing.
• The whole hologram premise is silly, haphazard, and functionally useless, much like our current foreign policy.
• On the other hand, if our government’s using our tax money to see if we’re all just reflections in some alien’s hologram, I guess the “That’s just silly” ship sailed long ago.

But apparently it’s happening. According to an online article at vice.com (yes, there is), government employees are busily trying to prove that you’re not real, except on April 15. You, and everyone you know, might be nothing more than overworked, overweight characters in some cosmic kid’s video game. The universe is just one huge PlayStation, with a really long extension cord.

This includes everything you think is real: the feel of your child’s cheek; the color blue; the smell of bacon; Hollywood indignation; official statements from the White House.

The group in charge of this research gets their beer money from the Department of Energy’s Fermilab Center for Particle Astrophysics, which is in the same building as the DoE’s Algae-Powered Automobile Research Lab (yes, there is) and just down the hall from the Bureau of Fracking And Other Words That Sound Dirty But Aren’t (no, there isn’t, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised).

According to the gang at Fermilab, reality is like a game, with a game screen, and the screen only has a limited amount of intelligence at any one time, as if reality were Joe Biden in mid-sentence. Team Fermi claims that if you were able to zoom in close enough, you’d be able to glimpse the “pixels” of the universe. (This also works if you zoom in close enough to Joe Biden.)

That’s your tax dollars at work. Federal monies lavished on adult boys who spent their childhoods clutching game controllers in dark basements. These are the fashion-awkward dweebs you knew in college who were always trying to sneak up on the light inside the refrigerator.

The trailer-bound team is hoping to resolve long-standing incongruities between Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity (never lend money to your relatives) and Max Planck’s packet-based model of quanta (an Australian airline). Unfortunately, the federally-funded goobers are coming at giants like Einstein and Planck with existential ammo of this caliber: “The natural world behaves exactly the same way as the environment of Grand Theft Auto IV.”

Well, that is breaking news. The cosmos is just a crime scene; the Big Bang was based on downtown Detroit.

And the Red Bull & Doritos-diet crowd are claiming some rather bold discoveries.

“It’s not every day you wake up and learn something that happened a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the beginning of the universe,” said Mort Kanioskowalski, an astrophysicist who sadly was not involved with the hologram team because they couldn’t fit his whole name on the grant. However, as acknowledgement for his “megaskillionth of a second” observation, Mort was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for Understatement.

Personally, I just want to see the guy’s watch.

The Fermicelli are structuring their experiments around an array of old plastic surgery lasers bought at auction from Michael Jackson’s estate, and padding their documentation with pickup lines and quantum buzzwords used at astrophysicist singles bars.

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• “Hi, cutie. What’s your valence?”
• “So Schrödinger walks into a bar. The bartender says, ‘What’ll it be?’ Schrödinger replies, ‘Hard to say.'”
• “Stop me if you’ll eventually have heard this one…”
• “So. You localize your wave function here with a statistically significant regularity?”
• “Schrödinger’s cat walks into a bar. The bartender asks, ‘Can I see some ID?’ The cat replies, ‘Okay, but it may have expired.'”
• “Girl, you need to stop! Don’t you know curvature like yours could sublimate gravity?”
• “Schrödinger’s cat walks into a bar. Or not.”
• “Why am I staring? Look, in quantum mechanics, particles don’t have a definite state unless they’re being observed. So I’m doing you a favor.”
• “What say we get outta here and go somewhere quiet where I can talk.”

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And then it hit me. The scenario these holistic hologramaniacs are trying to prove is this:

What if you could step outside yourself, rise up into the sky, and see yourself in a simulation where you were stepping outside yourself, rising up into the sky, and seeing yourself in a simulation? Which you is real?

Well, I have a news flash for the kids at Quantum Trailer Park. Mankind already has one of those. It’s called Google Earth. You’re welcome.

Now hand over the Doritos.