De simulacron

The world of the future built its policies on public-opinion samplings! But Rien Reactions, Inc. realized that old-fashioned public-opinion polls were too slow, inaccurate and unstable on which to base a conforming society. So scientific researchers Morton Lynch, Hannon Fuller, and Douglas Hall built a total environment simulator, Simulacron-3, into which they fed subjective analogs and got human reaction results. But Lynch disappeared, Fuller was murdered, and Hall was charged with both crimes! Then Hall discovered that his world was nothing but a total environment simulator for a governing world as large as his was to his own miniature simulator world—and that he was marked for extinction!

To date, the novel Simulacron-3, about a counterfeit world, has twice been adapted, first as the two-part German television play Welt am Draht (1973) (World on a Wire), by Rainer Werner Fassbinder; second, cinematically, as The Thirteenth Floor (1999), by Josef Rusnak.