Sea of Tranquility(29)

I’ve had a very strange time here. No, that’s not quite it. I’ve had a somewhat dull time here—my fault, not Canada’s—except for a strange interlude in the wilderness, which I shall attempt to recount. I had travelled north from Victoria with Niall’s old friend from school, Thomas Maillot, whose surname I’m possibly misspelling. For two or three days we moved north up the coast on a tidy little steamboat, weighed down with provisions, until at last we arrived at Caiette, a village consisting of a church, a pier, a one-room schoolhouse, and a handful of houses. Thomas continued on to a logging camp, a short distance up the coast. I elected to remain for the moment in the boardinghouse in Caiette, for the sake of enjoying the beauty of that place.

One morning in early September, I ventured into the forest, for reasons too tedious to relate, and a few paces in, I came upon a maple tree. I stopped there a moment, to catch my breath, and then there occurred an incident that struck me at the time as some kind of supernatural event, but seems to me in retrospect to have been perhaps some kind of fit.

I was standing there in the forest in the sunlight, and then all at once there was darkness, as abruptly as a candle snuffed out in a room, and in the darkness I heard the notes of a violin, an inscrutable noise, and with this a strange impression of being somehow fleetingly indoors, in some echoing cavernous space like a train station. Then it was over and I stood in the forest. It was as though nothing had happened. I staggered back out to the beach and was violently sick on the rocks. The following morning, concerned for my well-being and determined to quit that place and return to some semblance of civilization, I began the return journey to the little city of Victoria, where I remain.

I have a perfectly adequate room at a boardinghouse by the harbour, and amuse myself with walks, books, chess, and the occasional bit of watercolour painting. As you know, I’ve always adored gardens, and there’s a public garden here in which I’ve found great solace. Not to trouble anyone, but I did consult a doctor, who is confident in his diagnosis of migraine. Seems a peculiar sort of migraine that doesn’t involve any pain in one’s head, but I suppose I’ll accept it in lieu of an alternate explanation. I cannot forget it, however, and the memory unsettles me.

I hope you are well, Bert. Please convey my affection and respect to Mother and Father as well.

Yours,

Edwin



The audio stopped. Zoey swiped the projection into the wall and came to sit with me. There was a heaviness about her that I’d never seen before.

“Zoey,” I said, “you seem more upset than…I’m not sure I completely understand.”

“Which operating system do you use on your device?”

“Zephyr,” I said.

“Same. You remember that weird Zephyr bug a couple years ago, this only lasted a day or two, but sometimes you’d open a text file on your device and you’d hear whatever music you’d been listening to last?”

“Sure. That was annoying.” I only vaguely remembered it.

“It was file corruption.”

I sensed something vast and terrible, swimming just outside of my grasp.

“You’re saying…”

Zoey’s elbows were on the table, and as she spoke, she rested her forehead in her hands.

“If moments from different centuries are bleeding into one another, then, well, one way you could think of those moments, Gaspery, is you could think of them as corrupted files.”

“How is a moment the same as a file?”

She was very still. “Just imagine that they are.”

I tried. A series of corrupted files; a series of corrupted moments; a series of discrete things bleeding into one another when they shouldn’t.

“But if moments are files…” I couldn’t finish the sentence. The room we were in seemed much less real than it had only a moment ago. The desk is real, I told myself. The wilted flowers on the desk are real. The blue paint on the walls. Zoey’s hair. My hands. The carpet.

“You see why I didn’t go out to celebrate my birthday,” she said.

“It’s just…Look, I agree that it’s weird, but we’re talking about Mom’s thing, aren’t we? The simulation thing?”

She sighed. “Believe me, the thought’s occurred to me. It’s very possible that my thinking is clouded. You know she’s the reason I became a scientist.”

I nodded.

“And look,” she continued, “I know it’s all circumstantial, I’m not crazy. It’s just a series of descriptions of some kind of bizarre experience. But the coincidence, Gaspery, the way these moments seem to bleed into one another, I can’t help but see it as some kind of evidence.”





4


If we were living in a simulation, how would we know it was a simulation? I took the trolley home from the university at three in the morning. In the warm light of the moving car, I closed my eyes and marveled at the detail. The gentle vibration of the trolley on its cushion of air. The sounds—the barely perceptible whisper of movement, the soft conversations here and there in the car, the tinny notes of a game escaping from a device somewhere. We are living in a simulation, I told myself, testing the idea, but it still seemed improbable to me, because I could smell the bouquet of yellow roses that the woman sitting beside me held carefully in both hands. We are living in a simulation, but I’m hungry and am I supposed to believe that that’s a simulation too?