On a sunny afternoon, Rick was dissecting a mouse. When Morty asked what he was doing, he just replied casually, "We need to wreck this CPU quickly." Meanwhile, Morty was receiving praise from teachers and classmates at school for all sorts of unreasonable reasons, while they weirdly asked about the formula for concentrated dark matter. Suddenly, Rick popped up from behind, interrupting him with his signature sarcastic tone: "Genius, what you should be worried about is that we’re living in someone else’s ‘computer game’." Before Morty could react, Rick dragged him out of the school—at that moment, the teachers and students in the campus exuded an eerie enthusiasm, constantly beating around the bush to ask about the "formula for concentrated dark matter." All this made Rick conclude that they had fallen into a virtual reality trap set by the alien Zigerion race.
The Zigerions had spent their entire lives coveting the concentrated dark matter fuel technology mastered by Rick. This virtual reality device was their hunting tool, trapping Rick by simulating an Earth environment in an attempt to extract the formula. Rick quickly figured out the enemy’s weakness—this race’s nervous system couldn’t withstand the visual stimulation of human nudity, and seeing it would cause the simulation system to malfunction. "It’s time to show these alien perverts what human ‘raw humanity’ looks like," Rick said as he tore off his clothes. Morty was forced to do the same in extreme embarrassment. The two walked naked through the campus, and sure enough, the Zigerion virtual projections along the way began lagging, glitching, and even crashing outright.
To completely break through the virtual barrier, Rick took Morty to crash a park concert. He jumped on stage, grabbed the microphone, and announced loudly that he would reveal the concentrated dark matter formula on the spot—on the condition that all the audience simultaneously completed high-intensity mental tasks such as "calculating the first 10,000 digits of pi" and "reciting the periodic table in reverse order." The Zigerion simulation system was already on the verge of overloading from their nudity, and facing the sudden surge in computing demand, the screens instantly filled with garbled code and emitted harsh electric noises. "Now!" Rick seized the opportunity, pulled Morty into a glowing white crack, and the two fell heavily onto a grassy field—what greeted them was the familiar sight of Earth, with Jerry’s figure in the distance.
Just as Rick thought they had successfully escaped and began counting the scientific components stolen from the Zigerion spaceship, he didn’t notice Morty’s eyes had become hollow and mechanical. On the other side, Jerry had already been drawn into this virtual game without realizing it, but the "low-resolution virtual world" he was in had extremely poor computing precision: his colleagues’ faces were often blurred into color blocks, and the contents of documents were all meaningless garbled text. But that didn’t stop Jerry from indulging in the fantasy of a "workplace comeback"—he got promoted based on his "vaguely defined achievements," returned home with a virtual trophy to make out with Beth, and even started planning the blueprint for his "life’s peak."
When Jerry suddenly came to his senses in the post-climax clarity of the virtual world, thinking "all of this is too fake," and took the initiative to resign from his boss, the cracks in reality finally appeared. After being fired, he flew into a rage, slammed the table, and argued with his virtual boss—unexpectedly winning back his job and an "Employee of the Year" trophy. Just as he wept with emotion, sighing that "life is finally complete," the world in front of him suddenly shattered like broken glass, revealing the cold metal interior of the Zigerion spaceship—Rick and Morty stood in front of him, holding out clothes with helpless expressions. "Welcome back to the reality of a loser, Jerry," Rick’s words were like a bucket of cold water, dousing Jerry’s last fantasy.
The three escaped back to Earth in an escape pod, and Rick rushed straight to his study to open the secret safe, preparing to move important items. But as soon as the safe door opened, Zigerion aliens swarmed out of the shadows. The alien leader laughed maniacally: "Rick, did you think you escaped? This has still been our trap since you ‘crashed’ the system with your nudity!" It turned out they had already obtained the basic formula for concentrated dark matter through previous simulations, and this entire setup was just to steal the safe’s password. Rick’s expression changed, and he immediately pulled Jerry and Morty toward the spaceship, urging Morty along the way: "Hurry, mix the concentrated dark matter in this ratio—we need to escape as fast as possible!"
Morty fumbled to finish the mixture, and the spaceship shot into space in an instant. At that moment, Rick suddenly stopped, stared into Morty’s eyes, and said slowly: "You know what? The real Morty wouldn’t remember the mixing ratio I taught him last week—you’ve been virtual from the start." As soon as the words fell, Morty’s body dissolved into a stream of data, and the surrounding space scene twisted again, with the Zigerion control room reappearing. The alien leader held up the formula data triumphantly: "Finally got it!" They immediately ordered the fuel production to start, but the moment the machine operated, the formula triggered a violent explosion, and the entire Zigerion fleet was reduced to ashes in the flames.
The real Rick was sitting on his sofa at home, drinking iced beer and looking at the starry sky outside the window. Jerry huddled in the corner, still moping over his "success" in the virtual world, complaining endlessly that Rick "got tricked just like him." Rick rolled his eyes and threw him a note—on it was the true annotation for the "fuel formula": "Zigerion-exclusive explosive. Thanks for the idiot tax donation." It turned out that from the moment he stepped into the first virtual world, Rick had seen through the trap via a subtle glitch in the retinal scan. All subsequent "escapes" and "panic" were just to make the aliens accept this "death gift" without hesitation.