"You wake up in one of those pod things like in The Matrix. There’s a woman standing in front of you, wearing a lab coat, holding a clipboard.

“Hi,” she says. “This is the real world. You used to live here. We erased your memories and stuck you in a simulated world for a while, like in The Matrix. It was part of a great experiment.”"

This is a short story narrated by Matt Arnold with the permission of the author, Scott Alexander. The original text is here:

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/03/asches-to-asches/