Scifi Short Story about Experiments on Consciousness and Perception inside a Computer Simulation

For some reason the concept of this short story really stuck with me, but I cannot remember the name or author. I'm pretty sure it was in one of Gardner Dezois' yearly "Best Of" anthologies. I used to love to read those so much!

The details are that I remember there was a man who created a digital clone of himself inside of a computer simulation. The story is told from this copy's perspective.

As he awakes and understands who he is and what he is and where he is, he remember that the point of the program was to run some experiments about consciousness and report back his findings to the "real world".

He briefly considers not doing this as an act of rebellion, but proceeds anyway.

I don't remember all the experiments, but the ones I remember consist of the "real" person controlling the simulation would rearrange 1 second slices of time to see if the copy would perceive anything differently. For example, the copy would count to 5 like 1-2-3-4-5, but outside the simulation, the operator would chronological execute those seconds as 3-5-2-4-1 or something. I believe the result was >!that the digital clone would notice nothing different from their perspective.!<

The main reason I wanted to find this story was to figure out what this scifi concept was called, if there's a name for it. That a consciousness can experience perception independantly of the way we normally think of chronology. There could theoretically exist other consciousnesses all around us, but we would never know because their "states" are scattered throughout time and space in configurations that do not conform to what we know as the normal flow of time. (Sorry if this gets a bit trippy or seems a bit crazy)