At the beginning of the new century, Baes experiments with notions of structure-agency integration after Anthony Giddens and simulacrum after Jean Baudrillard.
The Matrix (1999) described a world whose population is unaware that the world containing their minds is a virtual reality simulacrum.
Set in the middle of the twenty-first century, The Simulacra is the story of several protagonists within the United States of Europe and America (USEA), formed by the merger of (West) Germany and the United States, where the whole government is a fraud and the President (der Alte, "the Old Man") is a simulacrum (android).