“Oh, baby! This is really taking off!” The young research scientist exclaimed, leaning into his monitor.

“What’s that?” his older colleague muttered, feigning interest while continuing to hammer at his keyboard.

“My sims! I’ve been monitoring their genetic and cultural evolution, as you know. They’ve existed through about 250,000 years now — sped up for our observation of course — and they’ve just developed the theory that they’re in a simulation! It’s being spread to their mainstream media now!”

The older man paused and thought for a second. “Hmm, that is interesting. We haven’t seen that in previous iterations before, have we?”

“Not that I can recount unless it just didn’t make our summary report. It’s fascinating though!” the young scientist remarked, arms crossed and nodding contentedly. “It’s almost as if our simulation is becoming conscious in a way… aware of itself for the first time.”

The older man shrugged and nodded in return.

“What’s really interesting though,” said the younger man, “is that their theory suggest it’s simulations all the way up! That even their sim overlords — Us! — are in a simulation!”

“Hmrph. We know that’s not the case,” responded the older man resolutely. Then he added, “We’ve explored down to the basic building blocks of our reality, and we know they’re really real.”

“Right, of course,” agreed the younger man, beginning to scribble on a notepad as his colleague resumed clacking at his keyboard.

“Hey, you know what?” said the young scientist, staring up at the ceiling tapping a pencil against his chin.

“Huh?”

“I think I’m going to accelerate my sims discovery of their own basic building block,” the young man said, “I know it won’t be ‘real’ but they won’t know that. I’m interested to see how they’ll respond to discovering what we’ve discovered and whether they’ll use it to debunk their simulation theory.”

“Mm-hmm, sounds good,” the older scientist responded, fully content in the knowledge he did not live in a simulation.