Sea of Tranquility(30)

“I’m not saying these things add up to any kind of definite proof that we’re living in a simulation,” Zoey had said, an hour ago in her office. “I’m saying I think there’s enough here to justify an investigation.”

How do you investigate reality? My hunger is a simulation, I told myself, but I wanted a cheeseburger. Cheeseburgers are a simulation. Beef is a simulation. (Actually, that was literally true. Killing an animal for food would get you arrested both on Earth and in the colonies.) I opened my eyes and thought, The roses are a simulation. The scent of roses is a simulation.

“What would an investigation look like?” I’d asked her.

“I think you’d want to visit all those points in time,” Zoey said. “You’d want to speak with the letter writer in 1912, the video artist in 2019 or 2020, and the novelist in 2203.”

I remembered the news stories when time travel was invented and then immediately made illegal outside of government facilities. I remembered a chapter from a criminology textbook dedicated to the near-annihilating nightmare of the so-called Rose Loop, when history had changed twenty-seven times before the rogue traveler was taken out of commission and his damage undone. I knew that one hundred forty-one of the two hundred and five people serving life sentences on the moon were there because they’d attempted time travel. It didn’t matter if they’d been successful or not; the attempt was enough to send you away for life.

“Gaspery,” Zoey had said, “I’m not sure why you look so shocked. What does the sign on the building say?”

“Time Institute,” I admitted.

She looked at me.

“I thought you were a physicist,” I said.

“Well…yes,” she said. There was a knowledge-and-achievement gap the size of the solar system in that pause between words. I heard that old kindness, that familiar sense that she was extending generosity toward me. We can’t all be geniuses, I wanted to tell her, but we’d had that conversation when we were teenagers and it had gone poorly, so I didn’t.

We are living in a simulation, I told myself, as the trolley stopped a block from my apartment, but this fell so far short of, well, of the reality, for lack of a better word. I couldn’t convince myself. I didn’t believe it. There was a scheduled rainfall in—I glanced at my watch—two minutes. I stepped out of the trolley and walked very slowly, on purpose. I’ve always loved rain, and knowing that it isn’t coming from clouds doesn’t make me love it less.





5


In the weeks that followed, I tried to reacclimatize to the rhythms of my life. I rose at five in the afternoon in my tiny apartment, listened to music while I cooked, fed my cat, walked or took the trolley to work. I was at the hotel by seven p.m., gazing out at the lobby from behind dark glasses—most staffers didn’t wear dark glasses, but as a light-sensitive native of the Night City who couldn’t tolerate the diffuse glare of the dome, I had special dispensation from HR—and I stood there thinking of all of the things around me that might not be real. The stone of the lobby floor. The fabric of my clothes. My hands. My glasses. The footsteps of a woman crossing the lobby.

“Evening, Gaspery,” the woman said.

“Talia. Hi.”

“You were taking a very concentrated interest in the lobby floor.”

“Can I ask you an extremely random question?”

“Please do,” she said. “I’ve had a boring day.”

“Do you ever catch yourself thinking about the simulation hypothesis?” It seemed worth asking. It was all I could think about.

She raised her eyebrows. “That’s the idea that we’re possibly living in a simulation, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Actually, yes. I have thought about it. I don’t believe we’re living in a simulation.” Talia was gazing past me, past the lobby, to the street. “I don’t know, maybe this is na?ve of me, but I feel like a simulation should be better, you know? I mean, if you were going to the trouble to simulate that street, for example, couldn’t all of the streetlights work?”

The streetlight across the street had been flickering for a number of weeks.

“I see your point.”

“Well, anyway,” Talia said, “good night.”

“Good night.” I returned to the exercise of noticing everything and telling myself that none of the things I noticed were real, but now I was distracted by her point. Something no one ever talked about in those days was the shabbiness of the moon colonies. I think we were all a little embarrassed by it.

“Yeah, I think it’s fair to say the glamour’s worn off,” Zoey said, when I saw her later that night. My shift ended at two a.m., so I’d called to ask if I could come over and see her. I’d known she’d be up—she’d never fully transitioned out of the Night City either, and, like me, she preferred to stay up all night—and she was taking a couple of days off work, so I took the trolley to her apartment. I’d been to this apartment only a handful of times, and had forgotten how dark it was. She’d painted the walls in a deep shade of gray. She had a collection of old-fashioned paper books—mostly history—and a framed painting on the wall that we’d made together when we were children. I was moved by it. We’d been about four and six, something like that, and we’d painted ourselves: a boy and a girl holding hands under a tree in exuberant colors.