The Existential Conversation on the Moon

A few nights ago I was on the moon. Just a little trip to see Yuri, my lab partner from grad school. We had coffee in his apartment and talked about the old days. Then I went out for a walk around the crater rim. The view of Earth is so beautiful you can't get it out of your head. All those lights strung across the dark void, like beacons to heaven.

I decided to call Yuri that night. He answered right away, even though it was a Saturday night, and said he wanted to show me something cool. We met in a conference room at one of the lunar research stations and he pulled out a tablet with the text-chat app open on the screen. There was a message there from himself. Me, talking to myself. "Hi Betty!"

"What's this?" I asked him. "A chat bot? You slipped out an early Christmas present?"

He laughed, "no no no! Look at the timestamp."

It read: "Time elapsed: 3 seconds". What? He meant this message was sent three seconds ago, but that didn't make sense -- we hadn't been chatting for three seconds before I got there! I looked at him quizzically and he just shrugged, so I went back to my phone and opened up the same app again. Sure enough, my own message from three seconds earlier had still not appeared yet -- the app was still showing me waiting to send my message while Yuri's reply was already in place!

"Vampire messages!" Yuri laughed again and explained how they'd been doing some tests with a bunch of these tablets running in parallel, all trying to send messages to each other at exactly the same time. It turns out that messages are actually placed into queues when they arrive, and your device has to wait its turn until it gets to send its message within whatever time limit they set up for testing purposes -- usually just milliseconds or less than a second. So technically, all these messages were queued up and ready to go at exactly the same time -- but because there wasn't any delay between them sending them, it felt like they were being sent one after another as fast as you could press a button! And since we hadn't started that chat session for more than three seconds yet (accordingly), my tablet had only just started blinking that I had new messages waiting -- which meant that Yuri's reply was already sitting in queue awaiting transmission from his tablet!

I was amazed by this accidental discovery of some pretty neat tech -- but then Yuri told me about what else they'd found when running their tests on these tablets... By accepting those vampire messages into our conversations with people who aren't online right now (but who may be later), we've unwittingly created an ever-expanding universe full of fictional characters who are having whole conversations via these vampire messages -- all without any awareness that they're fictional characters! And someone somewhere must have designed these fictional universes well enough that they seem real enough for us to talk to them (or even fall in love with them). So it's no wonder their replies seem so realistic -- because they are real people too! We're having whole conversations with fictional characters without knowing it!

I'm starting to realize now that all this might be true... But I'm still sure there's some explanation that makes sense otherwise everything will just fall apart if we think about it too much... So please don't tell me anything important until after I post this story so we can find out together what's happening here and whether or not there's something we can do about it before it's too late...