Simulations in Space

Story starts out in a fairly normal low-magic fantasy setting.  A good deal of fantasy races.  There are plagues killing human people, the weather and many other natural phenomena are going a bit crazy, fertility is down, and there is a powerful sorcerer-king that everyone is worried about.

As the story goes on, there are a number of factions, or cults.

One faction ostensibly wants to destroy the world.
Another wants to stop them, and keep the status quo.

This gets more complicated, as the reason for the plagues, wacky weather, and worse is because something's terribly wrong with this world, and the world-destroying faction wants to destroy the world so that a new one can appear, one less terrible for everyone to live on.

The major stopping factor is the sorcerer-king, who allegedly stopped/jammed the cycle of renewal and reincarnation, because he liked this world and what he had achieved in it.

In a quest to achieve the same power as the sorcerer-king, the protagonists take part in what is, to them, a spiritual journey sort of thing.  They wake up in tunnels of metal, where they have been kept in stasis/dreaming, as per the matrix.  Forging out and around, they come to realise/are told that they are in a giant, run-down starship, and that the fantasy-world is the stasis-dream.

The computer AI is kinda broken, and the ship has been continuing to falter.  Eventually they uncover that the sorcerer-king was one of a group who were pulled from the simulation to make some repairs that the AI could not.  However, the sorcerer-king instead modified the simulation to give himself powers, and when the AI protested, he damaged it badly until it gave up.

The AI has since been fairly reluctant to pull humans out of the simulation, but the method it provided to the sorcerer-king and his companions was left open.

Darker truths are also found: the plagues aren't something natural, but rather the cover-story for people dying in their stasis pods due to the continual degradation of the ship.  Also, more subtly, everyone in a stasis pod is human.

Unfortunately, the sorcerer-king left in place several blocks and controls that prevent the protagonists from reaching the places necessary to repair the damage.  Instead, now armed with what powers the AI was able to provide them, they are plugged back into the simulation, and must convince (through force if necessary) the sorcerer-king to relinquish his hold before everything goes wrong permanently.

Upon their return, they are met by one of the people who is trying to stop the remaking of the world.  He reveals that the sorcerer-king programmed an admin interface into the world, in addition the the sorcerer-king's current direct powers.  His highest priests have limited access and knowledge of it - the person speaking was formerly one of those priests, before a major disillusionment.

However, one thing the former priest found was that all the dreamers are human, in human bodies - all the other races are simply simulations.  This explains the sorcerer-king's fairly xenophobic (well, not phobic - he simply does not care about the lives of simulations) policies.  Worse, if the world is renewed, all of the other races will be erased, and replaced with the denizens of the next world - unlike humans, who are simply re-incarnated into their new roles.

The other pressing issue is what happens to people who die in the simulation.  Normally they are held unconscious for a while, until the next world-generation.  However, it's been far too long since the last world-change, and this is beginning to become a problem.

The former priest wants there to be some method of re-incarnating humans directly back into this world, rather than this (in his eyes) horribly destructive cycle.  He is, perhaps, less aware of the larger problems facing the ship, or the source of the plagues - this is because his disillusionment came before the ship's degradation became a lethal issue.

Talking with the other side, they note that preventing the periodic remaking of the world prevents the creation of new races, prevents the realization of potential.  The fantasy races in this simulation live long at the expense of every race that does not get to live at all.  How is it that those currently living are more important than those who have not had a chance to live yet?

The sorcerer-king is, perhaps, a bit mad with power, always wanting to try something new, somewhat dangerously bored with the cheats he has put into the game.  He has power over almost everything, save the choices and will of humans.  Thus, his one last game is to try to win dominion and control over humans.

He is aware of the problems in the ship, but he figures he will go and fix that all right again once he's done conquering the world.  He doesn't want to lose his powers now, or have the world remade and his work undone.  He does note that to fix some of the problems would require him to reboot the simulation, and while he doesn't care about the simulations, it would undo everything.  He's saving the new game for later, though.

The protagonists, even with their powers, are imprisoned, but the sorcerer-king comes under attack by a great coalition of many races.  The former priest from earlier was somewhat worried that the PCs would actually convince the sorcerer-king to reboot the world, and launched on a bid to kill the sorcerer-king, thus keeping him out of circulation until the remaking of the world... which would maybe be never, but maybe they would find a way to re-incarnate him with the fully-realized power of the admin interface... without his powers.

The protagonists are a murkier case, however, because they have the out-of-game knowledge necessary to use the admin interface fully, and unlike the sorcerer-king, some of them do care about the non-human races.  The sorcerer-king is out-foxed, tricked into using his powers to destroy great swathes of the coalition while an elite group steals into his temple to access the admin-interface, and depower the sorcerer-king.  This also frees the protagonists, and they make their way over to the admin-interface.

This leads to an argument between various factions about what should be done now, while the protagonists undo the locks preventing real-world access to the damaged sectors.  This done, they are overwhelmed by the anti-remaking faction, but the computer directly unplugs them from the simulation, waking them up.

It turns out that the anti-remaking faction sent other people the same way that you got out of the simulation, and while they have been stymied by the doors, now those doors are open.

The AI also notes that the sorcerer-king left some fall-back protocol that causes him to be awakened in the real world upon his death in the simulation, and he's in control of a number of robots to help him retake the real-world admin controls.

The protagonists race through the ship, as the ship tries to stop the sorcerer and his robots from reaching the admin room.

Upon reaching the room, they are set upon by the world-saving loyalists, who still don't trust that the protagonists won't save things the easy way, sentencing millions of non-humans to oblivion.  However, with the sorcerer-king cutting his way through door after door, their time is fairly limited.

Instead, they let the protagonists onto the controls to remove control of the robots from the sorcerer.  Once on, the computer informs them that the robots are under first-law restrictions, and the only thing that needs to be worried about is the sorcerer-king, who has armed himself with certain rather lethal tools.

The AI doesn't want the loyalists to know this, though, as they would retake the controls, and probably make things worse.

The reboot is truly needed for for the AI to be restored, and without the AI being restored, life-support will continue to fail.

Also, without the AI being restored, the sorcerer-king will probably shoot his way through all of the loyalists, kill the protagonists, and return things to they way they were.

With heavy hearts, the protagonists reboot the system.  The fully restored AI is not under any first-law restrictions, and immediately kills the sorcerer-king and disables the loyalists.

The AI tells the protagonists that this time it is ready, and will vent toxic gas into their chamber if they do anything other than repair the physical damage.

As the protagonists repair the ship, they foist various new ideas onto the AI,  trying to make sure that instead of the constantly changing cycles, the new simulations continue to live.  The AI argues back about various problems, and poses a number of philosophical questions, such as: what is the meaning of continuity in life?  After all, humans are re-brainwashed into their new roles in the new simulation.  If simply took the simulations from the old sim and put them into the new sim, like humans, what really happens when their memories are scrubbed and replaced?  What's the difference between storing sims between worlds and just having a number of personality archetypes stored between worlds?
If the world were run without humans in sped-up time, until such a date that all the sims have died of natural causes, would that be better? Worse?

The protagonists gradually realize that the ship has had an awful lot of time for philosophy, and, as an artificial intelligence itself, is somewhat concerned with philosophical questions pertaining to artifical inteligences.

They also discover that the ship is on a long journey to a world not unlike those in the simulations, and that, eventually, a world reboot is necessary so that the last generation of ship-dwellers is used to a setting not unlike the world they will be landing on - while knowledge can be uploaded, personality cannot, and the AI is mandated to use the simulations to get the personalities of the last generation into something that will start a colonial civilization decently.  The AI is, however, very worried about what will happen once humans are out of its protective simulation.

Eventually, they convince the AI to save the data from each world right before it is rebooted into a new one.  Even though the data will be static, and thus not really alive, it will have the potential to live again, via computers on the surface, should the humans decide to care.  The ship, with its fretting, decides that it will let any asylum seekers onto itself, to live in assorted civilizations, and let the sims in each civ to live once more in connection with the rest of reality.  And, you know, give the ship something to do.

The Dreamworld

The story starts with the main character, a struggling writer.  He has a very creative imagination, and all his life, he has dreamed of inhuman intelligences, of worlds beyond our own.  He writes, but his stories are just a bit too strange for humanity.  (Alternatively: Start within one of his stories.)

Eventually something happens and he wakes up in the world he was writing about... or, it appears, some sort of mishmash of elements from all his stories.  He is told that he has pierced into the dreaming, into the world of his imagination.  He asks more, learns assorted stuff.  The dream intelligences tell him that there are others who have contact with the dreaming, and give him hints on how to find one of those others.

Back in the real world, he is able to find this person.  She  is amazed that he knows so much about her dreams, even ones she never put to paper.  Also a little worried.  He tells her (as instructed) that soon she will no longer be just be dreaming of this world, but enter the dream-world herself.

The next night, he wakes in the dream, and is directed to meet the other dreamer.  They talk, and then agree to talk in the real world.

In the real world, after a bit of uncertainty, the other person shows up on the place they had agreed upon in their dreams.  He is delighted of the proof about the dreaming, but she is leery of the dream-intelligences.  If they are real, what do they want?  Humans were never in the dreams, what could their intentions be?

The next night he dreams again, and the dream-intelligences ask him to stay a while.  They have built a human-style abode in the dream-land, and ask him to spend the night there.  He is amused by the prospect of dreaming within the dream, but sleep anyway, and sleeps normally - in fact, for the first time in his life, he lacks any strange dreams, but rather he dreams of the other dreamer in a conventional dream-dream.

Later the dreamers hurriedly return him to the real world, and he is amazed to find that almost an entire day has gone by in the real world - the time spent in the dream-land corresponded to the real world dream.

The other dreamer is knocking on his door, and she tells him that things have been happening.  Strange happen-stances, things herding her in a direction to meet him.  She is suspicious, unstable seeming.  She worries that she might be going insane, or that the real world is controlled by the dreamers.  She demands aloud to be brought into the dream-world.  A sheet of paper blows in the window with a single world on it: "Sleep"

They both go to sleep, at her insistance, and he awakens in the dream world.  He is able to find her.  Once together, she asks the dream-intelligences what is going on.  They say that both worlds are real, and, yes, they have limited control of what happens in the normal world - just as the dreamers can exist and have an impact in the dream world, they can interact with the real world.

The other dreamer denies this - the dreamers awaken into the dream-world, but the dream intelligences don't awaken into the dream-world.  She posits that the normal world is actually a simulation, and that this is the actual real world.

The dream intelligences verify that, no, the normal world is a simulation, but it is a real simulation - experiences that matter occur, and are no less false than any other.  Instead, they note that this world is simple one they have less control of.

The other dreamer inquires further - if this is the physical world, and the other world is one of only experiences (a distinction constantly naysayed by the dream-intelligences), what about the other people from their lives?  Do they all have real bodies here in the physical world?

No, there are only very few real humans.  The simulation they had was based on historical research, and populated by simulated humans.  The two of them shared a reality, but while other humans exist, they are in different simulations.

They asked what happened since the history where humans lived?  Well, they are informed, the humans have died out.  The intelligences, having been created elsewhere by their own deceased forebearers, were able to observe the humans from a distance, but by the time they arrived on the humans' world, all the humans had died.

So they recovered genetic material of humanity, and grew humans and raised them in the simulation.  But the first batch had extreme trouble when they were brought into the physical world.  The second batch were given dreams of the physical world, so it would be more familiar.

But now the two had discovered the reality before the intelligences expected it.  The plan was to bring all of the second batch of humans into the physical world, and then have them raise further human children in the physical world directly - a sort of bridging.  All this for the human race to exist once more.  To bring back a race that had once destroyed itself.