"This is the story of a crime -- of the murder of reality.

And the extermination of an illusion -- the vital illusion, the radical illusion of the world. The real does not disappear into illusion; it is illusion that disappears into integral reality."

And so we begin our investigation of the crime. Baudrillard thinks he has it solved:

"The only suspense which remains is that of knowing how far the world can de-realize itself before succumbing to its reality deficit or, conversely, how far it can hyperrealize itself before succumbing to an excess of reality (the point when, having become perfectly real, truer than true, it will fall into the clutches of total simulation)."