What is happening right now:
We are increasingly able to simulate what we perceive as reality. The Simulation Argument might just as well turn out to be a prediction rather than a hypothesis.
So, who knows?
Wild tinfoil-hat speculation:
It might turn out that we were once on the outside, then (for whatever reason) moved into the „pod“, jacked in and since then might just have forgotten that we had chosen to go here. Each death a re-spawn into another avatar. Each scientific discovery a peel-back of yet another layer of reality as we know it.