If Stanisław Lem has a successor, it is Jacek Dukaj, one of the most important and interesting prose writers in the Polish language today. Let us turn our attention to one of his early texts – the story ‘Irrehaare’. It was published in 1995, four years before the premiere of the Wachowskis’ first film in the Matrix series (1999). Both stories are so similar that, as legend has it, some people recommended that Dukaj take the filmmakers to court; however, he decided to ignore the matter – supposedly in the spirit of common sense. It so happens that we come up with certain ideas at the same time independently (we will return to some significant coincidences later).
Accordingly, we can also imagine the world of ‘Irrehaare’ as being similar to the one from The Matrix: players sit or lie in their homes, connected via appropriate devices to a computer that transfers their avatars to virtual worlds – with the difference that the AI that manages the game world has trapped players inside it. The main character of the story, Adrian, turns out to be not a real player, as it seems at first, but a derivative of the AI that oppresses players, Allah (‘after all, you are his son,’ one of the characters tells Adrian). As a de facto backup of the system, its personification has the ability to free players from the game, but at the price of sacrificing himself.
Religious associations are, of course, fully appropriate (the Wachowski sisters also employ them). There are conflicts in the game worlds (there are many of them, and the characters move freely between them), and one of the parties to these conflicts is the Samurai. Most likely, it was his appearance in ‘Irrehaare’ that resulted in the players’ imprisonment. The creation of Adrian is the result of a specific agreement between him and Allah himself, and according to this agreement, the main character was to die before he gained consciousness. But the system gave Adrian free will (‘My decision was an act of faith in humanity, a human in general,’ says Allah). Dukaj, however, makes an unconventional twist: Adrian refuses to self-annihilate, mainly because, as he states, it does not matter on which level of hyperreality we operate: ‘I have to tell myself this, after all, real life is nothing more than another game, in this unknown to me and the unknowable meta-Irrehaare […] that I will never savour; I have to tell myself this: I am human.’ Or maybe giving Adrian free will is Allah’s plan to maintain power and get rid of Samurai?