I take a shower. I cry some more. I order chocolates from the fridge and I stuff myself until I’m about to burst. When I’m done, I turn out the lights and collapse into bed. I’m so exhausted, I’m out before I know it.
I wake up in the middle of the night. It’s pitch black. I don’t have any idea what time it is. But I know I heard something. A creaking sound. Someone’s in here with me.
“Sean?” I say.
He’s not supposed to be in here. That’s what the porter said. Separate instances, separate villas.
I see a shape moving in the dark. I freak. I grab for the lamp, and after a few seconds of scrambling I finally get the light turned on.
Sean’s standing there. He’s not in his pirate outfit anymore. Just a plain black shirt and plain black pants. And he’s not drunk. At least, I think he’s not drunk. But he’s got a weird look in his eyes. Intense.
“I just want a night to myself,” I say. “Let’s talk about this in the morning.”
Sean doesn’t say a word. He just keeps giving me that look. Like I’m a piece of meat. Like he’s about to tear me apart.
“Honey,” I say.
He steps closer. I pull the covers around me. He growls.
“I just want to go to sleep,” I say. “I just want to talk about this in the morning.”
He’s inches from me, his eyes locked with mine so I can’t look away. There’s a hunger in them. At first I think he’s going to hurt me. But pretty soon I know better.
It’s lust. Pure, passionate lust. He grabs my hair, pulling my head close, kissing me like he’s never kissed me before. Tongue against tongue, lips caressing lips. His hands rove around my body, his grip firm. He’s totally in command, and he wants me. And after a few minutes of that, I want him, too.
Make-up sex is always the best kind.
“Let’s try something else from the book,” I say.
He just grunts and flips me over.
The rest of the night’s a blur. I don’t know how many times we go at it. Over and over until I’m totally exhausted. He seems like he could go forever, but finally I beg him to stop, and he does. I hold out my arms to cuddle, but he just growls at me again. He walks downstairs, and I lean back into the pillow, totally spent.
If he could just quit drinking. If he could just think about me a little more. About our marriage, and not about those other girls.
I wake up in the morning sprawled out on the bed. Just me. No Sean.
“Sean?” I shout.
I hear someone moving around downstairs. Maybe he’s making me breakfast. Maybe today’ll be better. We’ll do something together this time instead of going off on our own. It might not be as fun, but we’ll be with each other. We’ll compromise like we’re supposed to. We’ll build our marriage up instead of tearing it down.
But when I get downstairs, it isn’t him. It’s the chef, playing his games again. I check every room in the villa. No Sean. No anybody.
I get dressed and head outside. And there he is, sitting on a bench by the porter, a beer in one hand and a margarita in the other.
“You didn’t,” I say.
“Why the hell not?” says Sean. “Hey porter. Bring me a bottle of Jack.”
“Sir,” says the porter.
“Nah, second thought, stay the fuck out of this,” says Sean. “Babe. I came in here for fun. And I’m gonna have fun, whether you like it or not.”
“I thought we were past this,” I say.
“You need to lighten up,” says Sean. “You need to just let me do my thing. I pay all the bills. I take out the garbage. You don’t let me see my friends, you nag me all the fucking time about everything—”
“I ask you to stop drinking yourself stupid five nights a week,” I say. “I ask you not to cheat on me.”
“And I said I’m sorry about a million times, and you still bring it up every ten fucking seconds,” says Sean. “The past is the past. I dunno what you want me to do.” He chugs the beer, then chucks the bottle out into the water. “You gotta get over that shit and get over the constant bitching.”
“I should have known,” I say. “I can’t believe I thought this was over.”
“Well you gave me time to think,” says Sean. “And time to drink.” He takes a swig of margarita. “And I think you’ve been outta line for a long time. Holding shit over my head, trying to control me. Having the whole night to myself let me see we need to change some shit.”
“The whole night?” I say. “All to yourself?”
He gives me a blank look. Then his eyes flash with rage. “Don’t even start with that again, bitch. I didn’t do a thing. I thought about it, though. I should have done it.” He’s up in my face, screaming. “I could have anyone in here. I could have spent last night with a model. An actress. Anyone. And instead I sat there alone with my dick in my hands.”
Now I’m the one with the blank look. I’m trying to read him, trying to figure out why he’s acting like this. I look in his eyes, and he looks back. It takes a few seconds, but I know he’s telling the truth. I’m crying as I spit out my next words.
“Well then who the hell was in there with me?”
I’m still crying when they pull us both out, back to the Trip of a Lifetime Login Center. It looks like a doctor’s office. I’m sitting on a metal bed, wearing a patient’s gown. I’ve got little red welts from where they hooked in the wires. Sean’s across the room, sitting on a bed of his own.
There’s a man talking to us, a scientist guy with a tablet and a serious look on his face. He’s faking it, like he’s at a funeral for somebody he didn’t really care about that much. He knows he has to look sad, but he doesn’t really feel a thing.
“You say it looked like your husband?” says the scientist. He taps something into his tablet.
“It wasn’t me,” says Sean. “I was alone the entire night.” He glares at me. “Nobody was in my villa but me.”
I’m still crying. I can barely even talk. The scientist hands me a glass of water. My hands are shaking, but I manage to gulp some of it down.
“It looked like him,” I say. “Maybe it was Captain Sean.”
“Who the fuck is Captain Sean?” says Sean.
“The pirate,” I say.
Sean’s about to start yelling, but the scientist interrupts him again. “And what did this version of your husband do, exactly?”
I choke on my water. I can’t tell the truth. I can’t let Sean know what happened. He’d hold it over my head forever. And if I had sex with a robot version of him, that’s not really cheating anyway. I didn’t know. I didn’t have any idea. I thought it was him, and it can’t be cheating if I thought it was him. Most people don’t even think it’s cheating if you sleep with a computer, anyway. It’s masturbation. It’s nothing.
“We just talked,” I say. “About the ocean. About how nice the resort was. And then he tucked me in and I went to bed.”
“That’s good,” mumbles the scientist to himself. He takes down some notes in the tablet. “Just talking. That’s great. And in English, you said?”
“You fucked that pirate,” snarls Sean. “He came into your room and he spat you that romance novel shit and you let him fuck your brains out.”
“I thought it was you,” I say. “Nothing happened!”
“We’re just glad you’re okay,” says the scientist. “And the Trip of a Lifetime Travel Corporation is deeply, deeply sorry about any inconvenience you may have had. We’re refunding double what you paid, and we’re giving you a full month’s worth of simulated travel experience, gratis. Last night we experienced a minor glitch—"
“A glitch?” says Sean. “Nobody tries to bribe us with that much for a glitch.”
He stands up. He balls his fists. The scientist backs away into the corner. Sean shoves him into the wall, and the guy looks like he’s about to faint.
“A data breach,” admits the scientist. “A hack.”
“What?” I say. “What do you mean a hack?”
“A team of hackers from the Ukraine got into the system last night,” says the scientist. “They were all over the place, messing around with everything. They must have cloned your husband’s avatar. Whoever you were chatting with was one of them. Just a bunch of teenagers playing a prank. They left graffiti all over the docks.”
“Teenager?” I stutter.
“Well, a group of them,” says the scientist. “That’s the interesting thing about avatars. You can clone them, just like an instance. Anyone can use them once they’re stored in the system. You never really know who’s behind the wheel when you’re inside the sim. It might have been one kid running the avatar, it might have been the whole group of them taking turns and you’d never even know the difference—”
My hands go numb. I start bawling again. I drop the glass. It shatters into a million pieces, and my soul along with it.
IRISH GRUDGE
“I think a ten percent raise is more than reasonable,” I say for the eleventh time today.
I’m sitting across from my boss, Gutierrez. Not the real one. Simulated Gutierrez. Lexia whipped up a skin from some photos of him on the agency website, and she copied his voice from a speech he gave at an advertising conference. The office plans came from the building blueprints. The furniture isn’t exactly right, but between Lexia’s guesses and my memories we got it pretty close. Mahogany desk, a mess of papers he never cleans up, and a singing trout mounted on the wall behind him. It’s enough like the real thing that I can lose myself in the scenario.
“Ten percent,” says Simulated Gutierrez with a simulated chuckle. He’s been a little more condescending the last few run-throughs, but he gets that way sometimes. And there’s a lot of money on the line if I get this raise. I’ve gotta be ready for anything.
“I’m more than worth it,” I say. “My billings are up twenty percent. The JiffyPop campaign was a huge success, and you know I worked up the creative on that. I’ve been a huge asset to the agency.”
“Your billings have been great,” says Simulated Gutierrez. “But the year overall.” He frowns. “It’s been rough agency-wide. We’re tightening our belts—”
“I can make a pretty good guess about how well the agency’s really doing from the public data,” I say with a knowing smile. A practiced smile. Not too cocky, not too submissive. I know I get it just right. Lexia would have interrupted me if I didn’t. “And I’m guessing you can more than afford what I want.”
Simulated Gutierrez sighs. He leans back in his chair. He looks uncomfortable. He’s working around the words in his head—or rather, the avatar’s pretending to. I wait politely for whatever Lexia’s about to throw at me.
“The problem, Mr. Kerr,” says Simulated Gutierrez, “is that you’re too fat. Much, much too fat. We have an image we’re projecting here to the clients. Your face could use a little gen-eng, too. Take a few years off, raise the nose a bit—"
This is such bullshit. I glare up at the ceiling. “Really, Lexia? Really?”
“It’s an admittedly unlikely scenario,” says Lexia, her disembodied voice seeming to come from nowhere and everywhere at once. “But we’ve already been through Mr. Gutierrez’s most probable responses, and your performance has been excellent. With our remaining time I’d like to hone your preparation by focusing on black swan scenarios—”
“Let’s not,” I say. “In fact, let’s take a break.”
The meeting’s only a couple of hours away, anyway. I’ve been running these scenarios with Lexia for nearly a month. If I’m ready, I’m ready. If I’m not, I’m not. And that’s that.
I can’t believe people used to do this in their heads. These simulations. Lexia says it’s one of the main reasons we even evolved a consciousness at all. It’s a huge evolutionary advantage, being able to fantasize about the future. Imagining what you’d do if you were attacked by a sabre toothed tiger, or how you’d survive the plague. What you’ll say if your wife catches you cheating, or how you’ll bluff the other guys at cards.
You sit there and think through it all. You imagine the worst, and you imagine how you’d handle it. And if the situation you spend all that time imagining actually comes true—well, you already know what to do. You’re acting on reflex. Call it what you like: dream, fantasy, or simulation. It’s all the same game of pretend.
Only now we can do it in here, in virtual reality. And it’s about a million times more effective than some fantasy in my head.
I have Lexia whip up a simulation like this for pretty much anything important. Meetings with clients. Speeches. Presentations. Even first dates. Especially first dates.
She runs me through possible scenarios again and again. As many times as I need until I’m comfortable. Until I know I can handle whatever could possibly happen. And whatever actually comes at me, I’m a champion. By the time I’m out there in the real world I’ve seen it all, I’ve done it all, and nothing can possibly faze me.
I’m gonna get the raise. I know it. Really, it all comes down to preparation, and Gutierrez isn’t going to prep for this. My raise just isn’t that important to him. He’ll be spending his time simulating something else, something he cares about just as deeply as I care about this. It always works like that. The guy who simulates the meeting kicks the crap out of the guy who tries to wing it. It all comes down to who cares the most, who preps the most. But I’ve been working on this one for so long I don’t even think it’s helping me anymore.
What I need is a break. I need to do something else for a while. Take my mind off of things and go into the meeting fresh. Relaxed.
“Lexia,” I say. “Run the Cathy simulation.”
The room disappears. And then it’s thirty years ago, in another time, another place.
The future isn’t the only thing our consciousness evolved to simulate. The past, too. There actually isn’t even a past, if you think about it. It’s all gone. The present’s all there is, and everything else is just a fantasy in our heads. When we remember something, it’s all reconstructed. Imagined. Not much more than a dream. We’re simulating it, just like we simulate the future. A low-tech biological simulation, but that’s what it is at the end of the day.
We had pretty good reasons to evolve to do this stuff. It’s Lexia’s favorite topic if you let her get going on it. It’s why she exists, so I’m not surprised she likes to talk about it. She says fantasizing about the future helps you get ready for it. Fantasizing about the past helps you learn from your mistakes. All those things you fucked up, those things you wish you did. You can do them in your head, over and over and over. You can learn. Come up with a better strategy. Be ready if it ever happens again.
It’s a good ability to have. I get that. But you can lose yourself in it, too. You can get caught in a loop sometimes. And sometimes you can’t ever get out.
I’m in an upscale Mexican restaurant. We rented out the whole place for a celebration. Some company anniversary, and everyone’s there for the salsa and the free booze. I’m sitting at the table with a bunch of my old co-workers, listening to them chat about taglines and client presentations and which ad campaign is going to win which award. The same shit we always talked about: work, and nothing else.
In the middle of the room is Cathy, looking just like I remember her. Young. Beautiful. The prettiest girl I ever laid eyes on. She used to make my heart flutter just thinking about her. I thought she hung the moon. I thought we were good friends, too.
But I was lying to myself about who she was. I was lying to myself about everything. You do that when you’re in love with someone. Pretend the faults aren’t there, look past them even when they’re staring you right in the face. Forgive the things you shouldn’t, no matter how many times you keep having to forgive.
I shouldn’t have forgiven her. I wouldn’t have gotten hurt so much if I hadn’t kept forgiving her.
It’s about a couple years after it happened. One drunken night and two of us. It didn’t change anything. Not for a long time. We wer
e still friends, at least I thought. We were still co-workers, and we still got along the way we had before. I wanted it, but she didn’t, so we both acted like nothing happened and went on with our friendship.
For a while, at least. When exactly things changed, I don’t know. But somewhere along the line they did. Somewhere along the line a switch flipped and I didn’t mean anything to her anymore. This was just the night I noticed.
I should have figured it out a hell of a lot earlier. I saw the signs. But I didn’t believe them. I didn’t want to. And I saw the way she treated other people, not just me. Badmouthing her other friends behind their backs. Using them up and cutting them off when they weren’t so useful anymore. Getting away with it because there was always a fresh batch of people who wanted to be around her.
It’s like that when you’re beautiful. But beauty can create a real ugliness in people if they let it go to their heads. I should have known. I should have known that if she treated all those other people that way, she’d treat me that way too someday.
I’ve run this scenario a thousand times. It’s a ritual at this point. A bad habit. Maybe even an addiction. I don’t even remember how it really was. Not anymore. The people sitting with me were my co-workers back then, but I don’t know if they were really the ones at the table. Lexia found some data from them online and whipped up the sim from their photos. They might have been there, they might not have been.
It doesn’t really matter. Memories are like that, even the real ones. Just dreams about the past, and dreams are vapor. And all I really remember about that night anymore is this scenario. I’ve done it so many times it’s replaced the memory of the real thing. But this is better than a memory, in a way. It feels just like it’s real. Just like it’s really happening. I can relive little parts of my life again and again, living the moment just like it was the present.
But that realism makes it a hell of a lot more dangerous than a memory. A human memory fades. A simulated one never does. Lexia’s got it saved in her databanks somewhere, and her memory’s not like mine. It’s perfect. And it never goes away. Never, ever, ever.
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