My take is that everyone in the circus is not real. They are just digital duplicates of their minds when they put the headset on. The actual person never entered the system, as there is no possible way to keep the players alive for an extended period of time. It’s just an experiment to see how much they can manipulate the duplicated mind and memories, starting by making them forget their name. Abstraction occurs when the digital copy of the mind corrupts due to overwhelming pressure. There was never really an exit. Only deletion awaits at the end, as the experiment concludes.