Simulation Bypass Unit
Description: a Simulation Bypass Unit (SBU) is a set of six oblong units that somehow manage to adhere to any flat surface, without damage, moving, falling, or sinking. The surface feels like warm metal; the oblongs are utterly impervious to any kind of damage, up to and including coming into contact with antimatter. Weight is negligible. Power is unlimited. And good luck trying to figure out who makes these things.
Use: Set the units into a rough hexagon, with no unit more than a yard from any other: when the last unit is placed, the(SBU) will suddenly snap into a perfect hexagon array that leads one to RealSpace (see below). People will find being caught in the SBU array when it forms very strange. Not fatal or even really dangerous, but strange.
If the universe really is a simulation, well, it turns out that there are internal hacks available. The SBU is apparently one of those: using it turns off the simulation in its area of effect, thus allowing all of us to see what’s really there. And fiddle with it, too.
This sounds more mind-blowingly awesome than it actually is. What is apparently really there is something called RealSpace, and it is exquisitely boring. There’s air and gravity and even a vague sort of ambient light, but nothing living; and while there are a number of items (which all directly correspond to items in the simulation) in RealSpace, they’re all identical. Every door is the same door, every chair the same chair, every wall the same wall, and so forth. And there aren’t very types of things (estimated total number is no more than eight hundred or so). The whole thing is sort of like the idea of Platonic Forms; only less awe-inspiring, and more lowest common denominator.
Humans can climb through to RealSpace, and it’s not inimical to life in the short term. In the long-term people might starve (nobody’s really sure how wholesome RealSpace ‘food’ and ‘water’ are), but the subject’s yet to come up: after about five minutes in RealSpace anybody visiting is unceremoniously booted out of Real Space and into the nearest clear area in the simulation. This is not painful, but it can be surprising to the unprepared. Things brought out of RealSpace will revert to whatever they are in the simulation; this does not create duplicates of any items, though. It’s more like the item has just instantly teleported into the person’s hand.
Eh? What’s that? Good God, man: of course people use SBUs to rob banks! Turn the vault into ‘door,’ and open it; turn the security system into ‘alarm,’ and flip the switch that turns it off. Or just walk into the vault, grab everything that’s ‘money,’ and leave. These are known techniques, of course. Just don’t really look at how the SBU operates. Doing so can cause severe vertigo; the kind that sticks around for a while even after the dang thing’s turned off.