Veritas (text)
- You may be looking for the species.
The Veritas (TV: Extremis) or The Veritas, (PROSE: Whotopia: The Ultimate Guide to the Whoniverse) literally The Truth, was a book which existed inside the Shadow World, a digital simulation of the planet Earth created by the Monks to plan their invasion. The pages of the Veritas supposedly contained an ultimate truth, so true that anyone who ever read it committed suicide. (TV: Extremis) That truth was that the Shadow World was merely a simulation and not the real universe. (PROSE: Whotopia: The Ultimate Guide to the Whoniverse)
It told the story of a demon who, to conquer Earth, creates a replica of it to practice and play with. The book was sealed inside the Haereticum, a forbidden library under the Vatican.
The replicas of real people who populated the Shadow World could confirm what the text revealed by trying to say a sequence of random numbers. In truth, since they were all part of the same program, they could only generate pseudorandom numbers, thus confirming they were nothing more than artificial intelligences and not real people. They would then choose to commit suicide instead of being reused and abused by the Monks. As the Shadow World Doctor put it, it was like Super Mario becoming self-aware and deleting himself from a video game to try and avoid dying at the player's hands again. (TV: Extremis)
One source later wrote that, because The Veritas was about the simulation world, it did not exist within the real universe, only to end its paragraph with the question "Or does it?" (PROSE: Whotopia: The Ultimate Guide to the Whoniverse)
