Man accidentally rewrites The Matrix plot and calls it The Shed...

First, there was growth. Then, there was overpopulation. Next, there was disease and pollution. Finally, there was death.

In the beginning, everybody abided by social distancing measures. We self-isolated if we were sick and adapted to permanently work from home.

There were positives: nature reclaimed the earth, renewable energy became a powerful industry, most people adopted plant-based diets, electric vehicles replaced their gas guzzling ancestors, fewer people travelled internationally and realised the natural wonders they had at home. Governments across the globe agreed upon a universal basic income, which allowed the people whose jobs were lost or replaced by machines to have a better quality of life - some argued better than those who continued working. This afforded many of us the luxury of time. Time to be mindful. Time to be grateful for what we had. Time to be accepting of the situation and more creative. Happiness increased exponentially, and some whispered in utopia from the confines of their rooms.

Then came the global effort to maintain the status quo, which involved taking drastic measures to ensure the population remained stable. Governments decided a 1-child policy. Women were regarded as the gatekeepers, the dominant sex, and afforded more rights than man. For example, every woman received two votes, where men only had one. Perhaps most shocking and controversial of all was the decision to refuse any medical care, apart from palliative, to members of a population that were older than 72. This was a profound shift, but a huge effort by the scientific and medical community as well as the media allowed this paradigm to be accepted by the public.

Historically, it was an arms race between the Americans and the Chinese that destroyed most of civilisation in a cyber war that left many people in poverty and dead from neglect. Of course, Americans thought they were the heroes. Death rates in isolation began to soar from suicide and homicide. Public intellectuals decried we had all become brains in jars. Humans kept indoors paled, their eyesight shortened, and their backs weakened. Everyone became clinically overweight and sexually deformed from vigorous over-masturbation. Lifetimes spent staring at screens corrupted the neurons of the brain, which resulted in high incidences of brain cancer. Rather than spend time and money on treating people, the scientists developed a method of inserting the human brains into machines, so that the earlier warnings of the intellectuals were realised with ironic precision. These cancers were unique in that they gave evolution a way to rapidly adapt to a fast-changing, external world. The tumours became extensions of our cortex and ushered in a new era.

Behind closed doors, negativity began to proliferate. Was this all just a simulation, they asked. Virtual reality had made huge leaps. As the lines between the real and the virtual worlds blurred, many people opted to plug themselves in permanently. The landscape changed as AI emerged and took a stranglehold on society, which undermined what it meant to be human. Computers learnt to keep us happy as they usurped all the power. Many suspected that the computers had built their own sophisticated models that reduced humans to cells that could be programmed. Us humans, prone to error and bias, had been reduced to a data source. The energy that the computers lived and breathed. We worried that one day they would kill us, so before they ran away with themselves, our smartest programmed the AI to kill itself before killing us, and to produce a list of options and outcomes for us to make an informed decision. With all humans plugged into The Motherboard, one of the last acts we remember of the machines was that they devised a living simulation known as The Shed.

This is the story of a man who managed to escape. A genetic mutation allowed his brain to avoid manipulation by the machines because it could not be fully programmed. In a story as old as time, this man would decide to destroy what enslaved us. It was his mission to reprogram the computer and liberate mankind once and for all…