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So my buddy Ryan introduced me and Jo to his new girlfriend this past weekend and she's a mathematician (who is clearly not very good at it, because Ryan with a girlfriend doesn't add up - ZING!), so I was like "Do you think we're all avatars in a big futuristic game of The Sims?" and her face just lit up, like "I've been waiting for someone to ask me this all my life!" She is adorable, and we geeked out about parallel universes for like half an hour while Ryan and Jo made big exaggerated sighing noises. "Hey, just let us know when you want to talk about something that's not the nerdiest bullshit ever." "Okay, that will be never because we're best friends now." I said that. Ryan's girlfriend probably thinks I'm just okay.

And that's why this is a great book: because it's wicked fun to talk about all this shit. Whee, multiverse! says my avatar. You ever hear that theory that once computers get to the same complexity as human brains, they'll sortof automatically develop consciousness? Scientists think that because otherwise there's something we totally don't get about consciousness, and who needs that? Lame. So here's the thinking: if that's true, then we'll probably have it by around 2020. And once we have artificial intelligence, what are we going to do with it? Put it in video games, obviously. We know this because we are people, and that's the kind of shit people do. So we're going to have these virtual worlds, just like The Sims except the people in it will actually be aware, and we'll all play these virtual world games on our Playstations. And that means there'll be like thousands of virtual worlds with conscious inventions in them interacting with each other. And that means that only one of all the worlds featuring conscious beings is the real one; the rest are video games. And that means that odds are the world you're reading this in isn't the real one. Just statistically, it's more likely that you're a collection of sprites that some pimply teenager created near-arbitrary rules for.

That's nuts, right? Crazy nuts! Batty! Among other things, it means that there's a God after all, because whatever pimply teenager is playing this particular game that I'm in can delete this game whenever he wants, or make an asteroid hit Brazil, or make Kate Middleton show her boobs. For most intents and purposes, that is God.

Also, it raises this question: is Pimply God doing a good job? Is this particular world a good one? Or is he an asshole? If all the sim worlds were ranked from most pleasant to least, where would this one fall? If you set a bunch of AIs up in a fairly nice place, will they probably fight? Is there like an Aggression Slider so you can make us more or less likely to fight? What would this world be like if Pimply God was deep in the throes of puberty? Or is this it?

Ryan's girlfriend thinks we are most likely virtual - seriously, think this whole thing makes perfect sense - but I think I lost her with the puberty bit.

This is the craziest and last theory in Hidden Reality. There are eight others, and they're not mutually exclusive. The least crazy theory is that space is infinite, and infinite is a lot, so somewhere beyond what we can ever see, given the speed of light, there will be a world just like ours, and infinite worlds just like ours, because infinite means everything, including a world where everything happens and will happen exactly like it has and will in this world you're in now with the sole exception that, instead of reading this review, you personally decided to make a sandwich.

Infinite is a lot.

Everything in Hidden Reality is theoretical, so there's no pressing reason for you to read this book. (Or any of the rest of the books, while we're on the subject. Pimply God read Shakespeare and was like "Ha, that's cool - it rhymes and everything, sometimes! I mean, it's terrible compared to real-life literature, but not bad for artificial intelligence.") But whee, multiverse! Four stars, says my avatar, as Pimply God happens to narrow his focus on my apartment just to see what's going on near Boston and says "That sim there just called me pimply! Here's a random asteroid, how ya like me n