History Main / InsideAComputerSystem

''Literature/{{Caffeine}}'' takes place in Dynamic Reality, a virtual reality internet one 'ascends' to in REM sleep. Ascenders interact through customizable "vanitars", which they feel and use the same as their real bodies.

* The entire premise behind ''Literature/SwordArtOnline'', in which characters immerse their consciousness completely within a virtual reality.

* We did mention ''Film/TheMatrix'' once or twice, [[SarcasmMode didn't we]]?

[[folder:Anime and Manga]]
* In ''Manga/AhMyGoddess'' the Universe is maintained by a pair of super computers named Yggdrasil and Nidhogg.

* In ''Manga/SilentMobius'', this is [[MadScientist Lebia Maverick's]] main shtick.
* ''Anime/YuGiOh'': The Legendary Heroes arc of Season 1 and the Virtual World arc of Season 3.
* This is the premise of ''Anime/YuGiOhVRAINS'', people can live and duel inside a Virtual Reality setting called LINK VRAINS.

* ''Anime/CorrectorYui''.

* ''Possible Worlds'' by John Mighton has two detectives investigating the theft of a human brain. At one point they go to a scientist who studies brains, and one takes a machine hooked up to a rat brain with him. He muses what it would be like to be like the rat brain and believe things are real although they are really just electrical pulses. His partner tells him not to be ridiculous. Also, [[spoiler: In the end, the detectives find that the scientist with the rat brain had stolen the human one and all the scenes that had "happened" to the dead man were just dreams he was having after the scientist hooked up some machine to his brain.]] Fascinating play, but bloody confusing.

* In ''VideoGame/Fallout3'':

* ''VideoGame/StarOceanTillTheEndOfTime'' [[spoiler:All of the PlayerCharacters were actually {{NPC}}s in an {{mmorpg}}.]]
* The ''VideoGame/MegaManBattleNetwork'' series integrates this into gameplay. The player controls Mega Man's human counterpart who can "Jack In" Megaman into various computer systems to solve various puzzles and progress through the plot.
* ''VideoGame/KingdomHeartsII'' gives us Space Paranoids, the ''{{Franchise/Tron}}'' level. That's without mentioning [[spoiler: the virtual Twilight Town [=DiZ=] and Riku trap Roxas in, which Sora and the gang later visit. Weirdly, you have to be go through the latter to unlock the final dungeon - the heroes enter a portal in the virtual mansion's basement, pass through "Betwixt & Between" and end up at the Organization's home, apparently flesh and blood again.]]

** We get to visit The Grid, which is based on the film ''Film/TronLegacy'', in ''VideoGame/KingdomHearts3DDreamDropDistance''. Surprisingly, while Sora and Riku become computer programs with their own identity discs, [[spoiler: Xemnas and Young Xehanort]] remain flesh and blood.

[[folder:Webcomics]]

* ''WesternAnimation/FiftyFiftyHeroes'': When Sam gets [[TheBGrade a B+ instead of her usual A's]], she wishes for the power to enter computers so she can enter Mr. Brick's desktop computer to alter her grade. The world inside that computer is dusty to illustrate how old it is. Lenny's smartphone is portrayed as a clean and more organized world and has an antivirus that treats her like a virus unless she's combining her powers with Mo's[note]Whenever Sam and/or her half-brother Mo wish for a power, they must share it[/note].

* ''Literature/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'':
** One of the books featured a description of an alien computer terminal which worked in this way. However, one could exit at any time, and reality and virtual reality were quite distinct.
** This trope is central to the original book's premise: [[spoiler: The Earth itself]] is a very elaborate computer created to discover [[spoiler: the Great Question of Life, the Universe and Everything (the answer has already been found: 42).]] The behavior of the beings on the planet are a goodly part of the computations.
* The ''Literature/{{Otherland}}'' series by Creator/TadWilliams is about a RagtagBunchOfMisfits who break into a virtual reality network (in a [[TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture time]] where [[TheMetaverse VR is commonplace]]) and become trapped there, unable to go offline. Furthermore, they can apparently be [[YourMindMakesItReal killed there too]]. One of the mysteries they must solve is why this is the case.
* G.A. Effinger's book ''[[Literature/MaridAudran When Gravity Fails]]'' has a system where people meet in a Virtual Reality system, and can even have sex while in the system, and it's indistinguishable from the real thing. In one case, eight people lie down on the Virtual Reality couches, and only seven get up; one of the visitors figured a way to kill one of the others by causing their "soul" not to go back into the body, but to stay and effectively be purged when the machine was shut down.

* Vivian Van Velde's novel ''Literature/HeirApparent'' rests completely on this idea. Gianine gets trapped in a virtual reality fantasy game when it's damaged, and has to win the game to escape.
* Creator/PiersAnthony's [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killobyte ''Killobyte'']] involves a paralyzed cop and a diabetic player who are both trapped in a virtual reality game by a hacker and in danger of dying in reality.
* The majority of the storyline of ''Realtime Interrupt'' by James Hogan is InsideAComputerSystem. The apparent strangeness of reality the character experiences is explained to him as mental illness.

** The short story Crystal Nights is about creating AIs that live inside a simulated universe.

* Creator/TimothyZahn's ''Conqueror'''s Trilogy: The Copperhead fighter pilots have implants that allow them to jack into their fightercrafts: the pilots become the craft. They have expanded fields of vision, data from the ship's status comes in as taste, smell and touch. It is an extremely addictive feeling, leading to some pilots remaining jacked in between missions. Recently the Commonwealth military had set up better screening processes to avoid this. Reception to these new tests is varied.
* Most of the events in Creator/SergeyLukyanenko's ''Literature/LabyrinthOfReflections'' trilogy take place in a virtual city called Deeptown, made possible due to a psychosis-inducing video that is played every time someone logs on. A full body suit is necessary for an immersive experience, although the first case of perceiving a virtual world as reality occurred with a guy playing ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}'' afted watching the video. A special group of people are able to exit the "deep" at will. These so-called "Divers" can also see security holes and backwoods as... holes and doors. The trilogy also features a "super-Diver" with the ability to see how things really are and affect them (e.g. walking through a solid object after realizing it's only a computer-generated model).
** In Lukyanenko's ''Literature/{{Competitors}}'' novel, the Seekers believe that all of them (i.e people who have been sent to the SpaceStation for three years, while their original bodies continue living on Earth) are trapped in a computer simulation. They're eventually disabused of that notion.
* The ''Literature/EightWorlds'' series by Creator/JohnVarley has a few examples:
** ''Film/OverdrawnAtTheMemoryBank'' (and its infamous film adaptation) has a man whose consciousness is loaded into a computer to keep him alive after his body is misplaced.
** ''Literature/SteelBeach'' has the protagonist spend several virtual years (and very little actual time) inside a therapeutic computer simulation.

* ''Literature/TheQuantumThief''-trilogy features three distinct kinds of virtual realities in its {{Transhuman}} future: Spimescape, that is highly abstract representation of computer systems and networks themselves where gogols (uploaded minds and [=AIs=] mostly live, tending their tasks, Sobornost virs that are either highly accurate replicas of real places and events, sometimes all the way down to the quantum level, or representations of abstract concepts, and finally the Zoku Realms that tend to tell a story or fulfill a fantasy and are only limited by the vast imagination of their creators. The Realms also have a special quality of altering their participants to suit the story, often stripping their {{Transhuman}} capabilities temporarily in the process.

* Creator/TerryPratchett wrote "#IFDEFDEBUG + ‘WORLD/ ENOUGH’ + ‘TIME’", a short story in which everyone has become virtual-reality dwellers, or "afers" as the story calls them.

* In the Franchise/StarTrekExpandedUniverse, Diane Duane's novel ''Literature/SpocksWorld'' has several historical interludes. In one, a member of a pre-Reformation Vulcan family-ship crew spends considerable time participating in the mind-nets, a telepathic/computer net virtual reality. When a mutiny on board ship sends it on an uncontrollable course, she retreats into the mind-nets until the ship is destroyed.
* In ''Star Wars on Trial'' (a series of essays defending and criticizing the Franchise/StarWars canon), one of the essays proposed that the GFFA [[note]] Galaxy Far Far Away[[/note]] was a computer simulation, and that those who used the Force were merely exploiting bugs in the code.
* Literature/{{Ravirn}}, being a hacker/cracker with some magic due to [[spoiler:being descended from one of the Greek Fates]], can enter computers, or even networks, to help in modifying the code he's looking at. But so can a lot of other people.....

* Creator/IsaacAsimov and Creator/JanetAsimov's ''Literature/NorbyAndTheCourtJester'': The concept of virtual reality games are called "feelies", due to the way they interact with your brain and create the impressions of sense-stimulus. A FictionalVideoGame in this story provides a central plot element, as the program is corrupted by a ComputerVirus that {{Brainwash|ed}}es the players.

[[folder:Film]]

* ''WesternAnimation/WreckItRalph'' takes place in a world of video games. Its sequel, ''WesternAnimation/RalphBreaksTheInternet'', takes place in a world where the Internet is a sprawling metropolis.

* ''WesternAnimation/TheEmojiMovie'' takes place in a world inside a person's smartphone, which is technically a computer, where apps become worlds within themselves that can be visited.

** Not only this but there's also Porygon that is implied to travel freely into the cyberspace.
** Also, this make sense when you [[BreakingTheFourthWall meeting developers]] and when they explain that the pokemon world is [[NoFourthWall virtual one]].

** ''Literature/PermutationCity'' is a remarkably hard scifi look at this trope, with some strange philosophical added in.

* Anime/BakuganBattleBrawlers has the Interspace, a virtual reality intended to return Bakugan battling fo a fun card game from SeriousBusiness. Unfortunately, not only is it highjacked by the QuirkyMinibossSquad in the next season, but attempts to prevent a similar situation by making the system self-sufficient results in it [[NotTheIntendedUse making the game more violent]]. Eventually, the protagonists decided to delete it and start over with a whole city.

* The entire premise behind ''LightNovel/SwordArtOnline'', in which characters immerse their consciousness completely within a virtual reality.

* Piers Anthony's [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killobyte ''Killobyte'']] involves a paralyzed cop and a diabetic player who are both trapped in a virtual reality game by a hacker and in danger of dying in reality.

* In the ''Wiki/SCPFoundation'', SCP-866 is a supercomputer that happens to be much stronger than it should have been, and the Foundation realizes its MundaneUtility as an exceptional way of simulating physics and other properties of the universe. The catch? 20% of its resources (which are in the zettabytes, by the way) go towards four "test worlds." The computer itself probably exists elsewhere in TheMultiverse, with the version built in the 21st century of our world being its vessel, in a way. When a doctor tries to input some programming to shift a city in the second test world slightly, he winds up [[EpicFail sending our version of said city into outer space.]][[note]]Assuming test world #2 isn't our world, which is suggested.[[/note]] Investigation revealed that [[FailedASpotCheck he made a rounding error; the same type of error managed to]] [[DisproportionateRetribution kill the last person who made one.]] Speaking of which, it's also CrazyPrepared to do all sorts of things to the people who try to cut off its power, for obvious reasons.

* In the ''Literature/SmallMedium'' series, it's made clear that the ''Generica Online'' books exist in a world where the Playas were originally playing an extremely immersive VR game (with some implication that the virtual reality world was overlaid on one that already existed) before something changed that trapped them there.

However, being within a computer sysyem means most of the "rules" of so-call "hard" science fiction (e.g. traveling distances requires use of a a device, typical rules of physics are applicable, you have to eat and drink to live, etc.) go right out the window. You can [[{{teleportation}} teleport]] yourself by just thinking about it, fly like a bird, be the size of a fly (and thus be a literal "fly on the wall" listening to someone else's conversation), make surreptitious audio and/or video recordings without a camera or recorder, etc., and the work can still qualify as hard science fiction since all events that happened there were virtual and do not occur in the "real" world.

->'''Sark''': What kind of program is he?\\
'''Master Control Program''': He's not any kind of program, Sark. He's a User.\\
'''Sark''': A User?\\
'''Master Control Program''': That's right. He pushed me in the real world. Somebody pushes me, I push back, so I brought him down here.
-->--''Film/{{TRON}}''

* One issue of ''Comicbook/GrantMorrisonsBatman'' is set inside "Internet 2.0". Oracle is the local representative of Batman Incorporated, appearing as a version of Batgirl designed around the Oracle mask.

* * ''VideoGame/{{Seedship}}'': One possible ending has you encounter a Dyson sphere that moves the ship and the colonists into a perfect simulation.