Let’s say — purely as an exercise in paranoid imagination, the kind the therapist charges two hundred fifty dollars an hour to gently discourage — that the world is a simulation. Not in the Elon Musk sense, not the philosophical Descartes sense, but in the older, dirtier sense: that there are people behind the screen holding the controllers, and the game they’re playing has been running longer than you’ve been alive, and you are not the player. You are the NPC. You are the little stick figure in the burning village. Now. Purely hypothetically. Imagine that in late February 2026, someone pressed the big red button. Not by accident. By design. The Strait of Hormuz seals shut like a bad wound. Twenty percent of the world’s oil — gone. Qatar’s gas liquefaction plant — offline. European natural gas prices — doubled before the week is out. Oil climbs from seventy dollars a barrel to ninety, then a hundred fourteen, then the whisper campaign starts: two hundred is coming. Meanwhile, the audience doesn’t really pay attention to the prices, because they are dazzled by the fireworks. No one is sure what fireworks are real. Regardless of which side you are hooting for, it seems to be winning decisively. It’s only a matter of time that the enemy will capitulate. Except that they won’t, because you are an NPC, and you’re embedded in a simulation that has other plans for you. https://open.substack.com/pub/janwellmann/p/you-are-the-n…