You Do You

The first thing he did after winning the fifteen billion dollar lottery was quit his job at the shipping center and cut his ties with everyone he had ever known and move somewhere he could become someone new. This kept him busy enough for a few months that he had no time to pause and consider what he would do with his newfound wealth and the freedom it brought, but when the house had been bought and he found himself with nothing to do, the anxiety began. He knew he wanted to do something more than just satisfy his own desires, which were, after all, rather modest, at least by his own estimation. After many weeks sitting at his computer, searching the internet for some semblance of purpose, pacing the grounds of his new estate, sleeping fitfully when at all, reflecting endlessly on what might be the potential consequences of this or that course, he stumbled upon the website for a tech startup called You Do You that offered a service made possible by the latest developments in brainlink virtual reality and life simulation. For a relatively modest fee, You Do You would plug you into a simulated life where you could trial various decisions, experiencing possible futures born from your actions. After his first simulation, which had him under for almost a week to experience decades unfolding from a single decision that brought him pleasures and pains and joys and sufferings he never could have imagined, during which he entirely forgot he had had a life before the simulation, which ultimately ended in his death at the hands of a stranger whose life he had inadvertently destroyed, he came back to himself and, after an initial few weeks of disorientation and depression and determination to never again submit himself to such an experience, bought the company and had it relocated to his estate. The more simulations he ran, the shorter the decompression period between, until, one day, he jumped from one directly into another. After that lifetime, he left instructions for the company to keep generating possible simulations based on a decision-making algorithm that would continue to analyze the state of the world and seek for ways he could use his slowly dwindling fortune to make a good difference, and that he was to be shuffled seamlessly from sim to sim until a set of satisfaction criteria were met and he would be awoken to realize whatever plan he had discovered through his virtual lives. Investments were made to keep his money working while he dreamt, and then he closed his eyes for the last time for a long time. Eventually, after he had lived hundreds of lives, after he had become so many possible versions of himself that there was some concern among the most senior staff as to his ability to distinguish sim from reality, after his money had grown into financial empires that had fallen and risen and fallen and risen again, along the way underwriting more devastation and suffering than any single person could hope to wipe from history, his eyes opened to a world in which he was as wealthy as ever but had run out of time. “The question was wrong….”