User blog comment:DYBAD/Character Sheet/@comment-26322734-20161004075306/@comment-4867780-20161005120557

There is definitely a sense of curiosity in Selforge City, nurtured in the many academies where Lawrence passes down his knowledge to citizens, but it is the entertainment-based kind of curiosity, driven by a personal desire to learn and understand specific subjects for citizens’ own growth and satisfaction, a more intellectual side of their hedonistic lifestyle.

An excellent point ! Clearly, the uncaring realities beyond Selforge boundaries would likely be far below the wonderful standards they have grown accustomed to, which is why very few citizens choose this path, and rarely for long. But still, changes of scenery and foreign experiences remain a necessary condition for long-term happiness.

To overcome this paradox, Lawrence created the Inner Planes also known as Selforge Reality System, existing within the Selforge plane but outside of the City itself. They are a vast network of independent artificial realms offering an ideal middle ground for citizens to freely explore, enjoy and partake in, combining the hardcoded rules, objective realism and permanent actuality of the outer planes to an extremely brilliant citizen-friendly engineering, allowing the IP to optimally fulfill their adventurous expectations in an ideal balance of satisfaction and immersiveness (the perfect cross between MMORPG and reality).

A transcendent version of virtual reality does exist in Selforge City, but is only accessed during citizens’ daily resting period, and the corresponding memories only carry on from one session to the other, allowing citizens to fully appreciate both sides of their heavenly lifestyle and nicely avoiding the typical plugged-in syndrome.

Didn’t you mention that mind uploading was a con, merely creating a digital duplicate of the subject’s consciousness, which remains hopelessly trapped in its native shell ? Being this advanced, how comes the aliens didn’t realize that ? ^ ^;