PAPERWORK AS THE PRIMARY ELEMENT OF REALITY

Certain metaphysical types will suggest that consciousness is primary in the universe and that matter and physics are derived from intention. A great many cultures still believe that physical matter is primary and that consciousness arrives from complicated arrangements of particles and charges.

But we at the Time Bureau know the truth. The true primal force from which all of reality springs is: paperwork. Nothing is possible without paperwork. Any people, places, events or objects that are said to have occurred with that absence of paperwork are illusions.*

*This is according to the definition spelled out in Article 7369a4 of the Consensus Reality Border Dilineation Charter of 2397.

Confirmation numbers or it didn't happen.

Because of the time consuming nature of filling out paperwork, any sufficiently advanced life form evolves or develops internal paperwork automation system as a part of their consciousness Operating System. It constantly documents, time stamps, and submits paperwork for all experiences. These filings are cross referenced and logged into the database we in the Bureau call the Approved Consensus Reality Database. If your mind files an experience which contradicts the data in the Approved Consensus Reality Database it is rubberstamped with the word DENIED along with the reason for the denial is written in red pen below the rubber stamp. For instance, if you saw a glowing light in the sky that flew at great speeds and turned at right angles without losing momentum your experience would need to be corraborated by thousands of others or else it would be DENIED: Anomalous with Insufficient Corraboration.

The Concensus Reality Border Dilineation Charter was written as a sort of solution to widespread cases of Reality Fraud. Conspiracies were arising where large groups of powerful people across the universe were knowingly falsified Experiential Paperwork. Physical and Metaphysical Reality no longer resembled legal reality at all, causing chaos throughout the Visible Universe. The solution, decided upon by those within the highest offices of the bureaucracy, was to legally disband physical and metaphysical realities entirely and only paperwork based reality was to be recognized at all. By definition, the fundamental building blocks of reality were no longer subatomic particles, but forms, xeroxes, receipts.

And just as the filing process was automated by advanced AI/consciousness ssytems in biological brains, so was the receipt and re-integration of confirmation missives. And in majority of cases, memories of events were now at least partially overwritten with the official database-compliant experiences. 

Thus, Consensus reality became a self-sustaining and self-consistent feedback loop that became entirely untethered from the reality of Physical Matter. Hackers were able to override the feedback mechanism to regain control of their senses and memories removed from Consensus Reality, but such an act was highly illegal and violated the terms of service within Consensus Reality, leaving you forever unable to relate to those still within the paperwork realm. Life outside of the paperwork realm could be lonely and dangerous. They became invisible to everyone within the Paperwork Realm or viewed as ghosts due to the Database-compiant consciousnesses of those around them being forbidden to acknowledge them.

But communities were formed and with new communities came new bureaucracy and eventually these bureaucracies were significant enough to be acknowledged by consensus reality, but were defined as threats. Enemies of the state to be assimilated or destroyed.

If they too adopted feedback technologies they would become two warring realities with no overlapping commonalities. The key to avoiding this war is for everyone to turn off their automatic updating mechanisms, Cut themselves off from the officially approved experience to internalized experience feedback loop. And the key here is that everyone needs to do it simultaneously. They can't arrest us all.