One of Those WTF Ideas

So I was thinking about the subject of time as I drifted off to sleep last night, probably because of a recent discussion I had with someone concerning the idea of "before" the Big Bang.

If Stephen Hawking is (like others he explained and built on) right, there was no "before" the Big Bang, because the Big Bang created the space-time continuum.

Which got me thinking about the simulation hypothesis. If we live in a simulated reality, it's by no means obvious that our space-time continuum is, or acts like, whatever "higher" reality our simulation is running in. Which raises questions of how time might work in other simulations or "higher" realities, including vis a vis causality and its attendant relationships.

At which point a story element popped into my mind. Since I never get this stuff written in fictional form, I'll just throw it out there (with apologies to anyone who might have come up with it, and maybe even novelized it, outside my attention span).

The protagonist learns that he lives in a simulated reality, presumably through contact with its "higher"
 reality or an adjacent simulation.

But he eventually learns that there isn't, or at least may not be, any "higher" or "previous" involved.

In point of fact, the relationship of Reality A to Reality B might be that someone in Reality A, which was created by someone in reality B, creates Reality B ... not one "before" or "after" the other, but because time and causality and such work completely differently in various realities, up to and including some primordial reality which may or may not exist (and which may have been created by one of its descendant realities).

Maybe I'm just babbling, but it's been ... well, days ... since I've indulged in any particularly psychoactive substances, and much longer than that since I've had any really strong ones.

Also, it does seem like a pretty complicated thing to work into a plot.