Anasûrimbor Serwa was no more than three when she realized that it all gave way, the World. She would find her eye drawn to the threads of white knotted across all things illuminated, and she would know, This is not real. And since her memories began at three, it had always been thus. The Unreality, as she called it, had forever sapped her surroundings. “See, Mama?” she would cry, “Look-look! None of it is real!” Sometimes she would even dance and traipse, singing, “Everything is False! Everything! Only! Seems!”
[...] It had been unfathomable then, The Unreality, more an ethereal assemblage of inkling and intuition than anything explicable. A certainty of breakneck plummets across flat ground. An intimation of perspectives hidden in the creases of what could be perceived. A profound incompleteness in the warp and weft of whatness, making smoke of the ground, paper of the sky, lazy scarves of whole horizons. It would strike her in the gleam of things in particular, the wires of white that looped about everything illuminated: the pools of shining marble beneath the sun wells, the afternoon radiance that dazzled their dinners on the Postern Terrace throughout the summer. The glint of reflections while bathing.
I've heard posters vaguely reference "The Simulation Theory" numerous times but I've never heard the theory in detail. After my last re-read on the Slog, I've noticed small fragments here and there that might have suggested it's true, that Earwa and its universe exists inside of a computer simulation. But the opening passage of Chapter Seven quoted above made me feel like it's all but been confirmed.
Her description of their being threads of white behind everything reminded me of portrayals of VR simulations in other media, such as Neo seeing green computer characters as code behind objects/people in the Matrix. The wording specifically recalled the Animus from Assassin's Creed, a device that uses your genetic memory to place you in a simulation of the past:
Her mother, young Serwa had realized, was not real. She acted for reasons she knew not, spoke words she did not understand, pursuing ends that she could neither fathom nor bear. The mother she had loved (as far as she could love) quite simply did not exist. That mother, Serwa realized, was a puppet of something larger, darker, something that merely manufactured scruple to prosecute its base demands.
The Empress did not change because she could not change: she had borne too many injuries to learn from any one of them. She chided and struck her children the way she always had. But never again would Serwa—or her siblings (for they shared everything)—suffer her affliction. They knew her the way an old miller might know an even older mill: as a mechanism grinding the same grains in the same ways. Understanding her particular Unreality had allowed them to rule her as profoundly as Father had ruled her—even more!
The way she describes her mother sounds like the the darkness that comes before but it also sounds like something carrying out the functions of a computer program. The fact that she was just describing objects in a similar way, not just people, suggests that this is all a part of one larger recognition about the whole of the Ground.
There's obviously a bigger thread about the rest of the series but generally Sorcerers are known as those who recall the truth, who can see the impetus behind things, or the onta. It's put in metaphysical terms of meaning and purpose because those are the concepts by which they can define it but it sounds like the world exists because it was intentionally built to carry out a simulation.
From the metaphysics discussion between Kellhus and Achamian in the Thousandfold Thought:
Achamian swallowed, tried to recover himself in his knowledge. “The Nonmen once believed it was the language that made sorcery possible. But when Men began reproducing their Cants in bastard tongues, it became clear this wasn’t so …”
To me, the Anagogic sorcerers are using a graphical user interface or something simple to use sorcery. They are limited to using analogies because they can only create something based on what is already there and it's nowhere near as powerful as the Gnosis. Gnostic sorcerers are true computer programmers themselves, writing their own algorithms and geometry to cut and tear through the world. They use their programming language to create shapes like a graphics artist rendering 3D objects.
The Inchoroi maybe just stumbled on a function wherein if the population drops below 144,000 conscious/sentient beings, the simulation ends.
