I bend down and grab a clump of dirt. I let it drift through my fingers. “I can feel it. I mean I can really feel it.” I put my fingers to my mouth and take a lick. Tastes like dirt. The grass feels real. My hands feel real. I pinch myself. It even hurts. I look up at Linkletter. I’m in awe. “There’s nothing like this out there. Nothing. I’d know. I’d have heard.”
“And yet there is,” says Linkletter. “I told you we were inside a Russian doll. What’s above us, I don’t know. I don’t even think we can find out. We may have bodies up there. But probably not. I’ve thought and thought about it. Probably we have no bodies. Probably we’re all artificial consciousnesses on some computer. That means we can’t go up. There’s nothing to go up to. The only way out is down. So I’m going down. And I’m going to bring the rest of the world with me.”
“Pardon me,” says Billy. “And not to be rude. But you seem—a little.” The Linkletter glare again. Billy squirms, but he stutters it out. “Sane?”
“The nature of consciousness when you’re a ghost in the machine,” says Linkletter. “I’ve been spending too much time bouncing between the dolls, as it were. Too much time down here. I’m fizzling out up there. Losing my hold on things. A product of the nesting. How many worlds there are, I don’t know. They’d all be housed on the same computational device somewhere. But they’re clearly meant to be separate. Partitioned. Your consciousness can’t exist in two of them. Not forever.”
“Will we—” says Jed nervously. I have to admit I’m a little nervous myself. I don’t want to turn into the man we saw out there. And I’ve already taken the plunge.
“You’ll be fine,” says Linkletter. “I’ve been living inside for months at a time. You’ll be out within an hour. But if you choose to follow me, just know. It’s going to be a one-way trip.”
“Why here?” says Jed. “Why all this?”
“That place up there is somebody else’s world,” says Linkletter. “This one’s going to be mine. They did a shit job, whoever designed that place. I spent so much of my life trying to fix somebody else’s mistakes. Trying to perfect a world that was flawed from its inception. This world’s going to be better. Better for all of us, because we’ll be the ones to make it. We’ll have a say in how we live right from the beginning, right down to the laws of physics themselves.”
“Somebody made it,” I say. “Our entire world. Somebody made it just like this.”
“Somewhere at the very, very top there might be someplace real,” says Linkletter. “A base reality. But the moment you put people into a simulated reality, there’s nothing stopping them from creating a simulation inside the simulation. Or a simulation inside the simulation inside the simulation. And on and on and on. Turtles all the way down.”
“Or all the way up,” says Jed.
“We’d never know,” says Linkletter. “An existential problem. Once a dream’s fooled you, you can never trust what’s presented to you as the truth again. Never, ever, ever.”
“My question,” says Jed, “is why we should worry about this. If we’re really in the Matrix…. I mean, let’s say you’re right. Let’s say we’re in the Matrix. But if someone put us in here, they’ll just wake us up when we’re supposed to. Maybe they had a good reason. Whatever it was, maybe we shouldn’t mess with it. Maybe we came in here playing a game.”
“Or to learn something,” I add. “Maybe it’s like a teaching tool. Like a historical thing. The only way to understand history is to live it. Learn the language and culture of ancient America. I sure as hell can’t read Chaucer in the original.”
“Or Shakespeare,” says Jed. “I mean, we can read him, but we can’t understand half the allusions. Characters who represent politicians most people never even heard of. References to works we’ve never read, political issues you’d only know about if you’d lived through his time period. It’d be a richer work if you could go live your life as an Elizabethan before you read it.”
“Maybe it’s a thousand years from now,” I say. “Maybe it’s a thousand years from now, and we all came in here for school. We don’t even speak English, and we all came in here to live an entire life so we could learn how to read an American Shakespeare.”
“I bet it’s a game,” says Billy. He smirks. “I bet it’s a sex game.”
We’re all getting into it. We’re true journalists, plunging into our stories and plotting them out in our heads. I don’t know how much of what Linkletter is saying is the truth. I’m not sure even he does. But there’s plenty to write about here. A juicy gossip post for Billy about the sex life of an out of control trillionaire. A masterwork of narrative journalism for Jed about the rise and fall of a mad capitalist and whether he’s really mad. And the tech column of the century for me that every investor in one of Linkletter’s companies is going to want to read. They’ll want to know whether Linkletter’s just made the greatest discovery in human history—and whether they can monetize it.
“Why?” I say. “We’ve all got our guesses why we’re in here. But my big question is what you think. You’re the explorer here. What the hell did you just find?”
“You write so much about AI,” says Linkletter. “I’ve read your publications.” He looks over at Billy. “All of them.” Billy smirks. I wonder how many dicks he’s scrawled over pictures of Linkletter and his friends.
“What I think,” says Linkletter, “is that we’re the AI. Or parts of it. Humanity always looks to nature first for its inventions. Monkey see, monkey do. We imagine we’ll develop some robot god. Some consciousness so vast we can’t understand it. But we already have consciousnesses greater than ourselves in nature. The hive mind.”
“Bees,” I say.
“People,” says Linkletter. “Any consciousness we birth will be modelled off of ourselves. First iterations will think like us, and they’ll have only us to look to as they grow. Any AI will model us. Become us. We’re a hive mind, you know that? Each of us a node in a larger processor, and that’s true whether this place is virtual reality or not. No reason for some future AI to reinvent the wheel when it already has one. That’s what we are in here, I think. Resources in any network flow to the most productive nodes, and that certainly fits my experience. I think we’re all nodes of a hive mind in some far future world. We’re in here to process data for something bigger than us. We’re parts. Little bees in a giant hive.”
“Like cells?” says Jed. “Like cells in a bigger body? And there’s a brain up there we can’t see?”
“Perhaps there’s no bigger brain at all,” says Linkletter. “Just a mass processing unit. Bee hives have no bigger brain. Neither do corporations, neither do governments. Yet they function all the same. What is consciousness but a mental process perched atop a pyramid of other inaccessible mental processes? It has its function. The planner, the learner, the simulator. Our whole reality could just be a processing unit. A group of consciousnesses used to process data or make decisions to be fed back out for use by something else. A larger consciousness—or just a larger group of them. We wouldn’t even know we were doing it. My companies, my inventions, your jobs. We’re all processing data every day. The only question is for whom.”
“This is so fucking much,” says Billy. “Did you simulate alcohol? Please tell me you’re going to have alcohol.”
“I’m going to have everything,” says Linkletter. “I’m going to show you how. And when you write your stories, you’re going to show the entire world. Real or not, they’ll all get to make their choice. And the three of you are going to spread the word.”
He snaps his fingers. A stack of tablets appear in his hand, right of nowhere. Four of them. He hands them out. I look down at mine. There’s a map of the city on the screen. I eyeball the skyline. From what I can see it looks about right. A convention center to my left. A bunch of skyscrapers in between. An ocean to my right, and a port at the city’s edge.
“This is Harper City,” says Linkletter. “The capital of the universe. And at least f
or now, there isn’t anything else here. This is it. The entire world.” He points to a hill behind us, in the opposite direction of the city. “Over there? On the other side? Nothing. Nothing at all.”
I look closer at the map. And at the edges. It’s black. There’s a flashing red dot in the park, which I guess is where I’m standing. The hill’s on the map, too. But at least on the map, Linkletter’s right. There’s nothing on the other side. Just nothing.
“Come with me,” says Linkletter. “We’re creating the world as we go. Harper’s Park. I left it unfinished. I want the three of you to help me with the rest of it. And you’re all going to get a very special treat.”
He leads. We walk behind him. The red dot blips as we approach the hill. We hit the base, and we start to climb. It all looks normal so far. But it’s still dark on the map. And I still can’t see over the other side.
“Is this going to hurt?” says Billy.
“Not a bit,” says Linkletter. “Just watch.”
Linkletter stops, right at the cusp of the hill. “You.” He points to Jed. “Walk over to the other side.”
“Me?” says Jed. His knees are wobbling. He mumbles, takes a step forward, then a step back. He’s about to pee his virtual pants, but then he’s spared.
“Don’t be a baby,” says Billy. And he heads right over the top of the hill himself.
We hear shouting. “Holy shit! Holy fucking shit!”
Billy comes running back. “Did you see that? Did you fucking see that?”
“What?” I say. I look at Jed. He clearly didn’t see a thing, and neither did I. Harper’s just smiling.
“The flash!” says Billy. “Everything flashed, the second I walked over the hill! It was dark, and then it was light. Come fucking look!”
We run. And when we get to the top, there’s world as far as we can see. A lake, a valley, a forest full of pine trees. When I check my tablet, the map’s changed, too. It’s all there. Little chunks of darkness turned green.
“It’s procedurally generated,” says Linkletter. “The entire world. An algorithm creates things as we need them. Travel to the stars, travel as far as we like, and the world will be created around us. The rules, the laws, all the birds in the sky and all the fishes in the sea. And I have a special gift for you. A very special gift for the first three people to join me in my world.”
He heads down the hill. Towards the lake. He stops in front of it. Still waters, a muddy blue. A few rocks around it, some moss, and some trees whose roots poke out of the banks. It looks like any old lake, except a computer just created it from nothing.
“Each of you,” says Linkletter, “is going to create a fish.”
“A fish,” I say.
“A fish,” says Linkletter. “It’s an empty world, at least for now. And it’d be impossible for us to fill the place on our own. But as we explore it, we shall create it. That’s how I believe our own universe was created, in fact. The blanks filled in as soon as we looked at them. Create the first few consciousnesses and they’ll dream the rest into reality as they go. As the father who begat this particular universe, I’ve chosen to commemorate this milestone. The creatures you create today will live here forever, right beside all the rest of us.”
He taps something into his tablet. My screen changes. The map’s gone, and now it looks like the character creation screen from some videogame. There’s a box on the left, empty.
“Draw,” says Linkletter. “Draw a fish.”
I take a stab at it. I make a little goldfish-looking thing with my fingers. I’m bad at it, but the second I’m done, the tablet does the real work for me. My crappy drawing turns into a realistic looking fish, swimming through the sea. On the right a bunch of options appear. Coloring, diet, temperament, eye placement. Everything you could think of. I play around some more. Pretty soon I’ve got a googly-eyed bottom feeder that eats microscopic plankton.
“Now what?” I say.
“Now press the launch button,” says Linkletter.
I scroll, and I see it. And I give it a tap.
There’s a splash in the water. And there’s my fish. Grey scales, eyes poking out of the water, slurping around as it swims. It dives to the bottom of the lake, off to forage for a living down in the muck.
Jed and Billy finish up soon after. Jed makes a swordfish-looking thing with wings to let it leap from the water. Billy’s looks like a tadpole with a human face on it. It pops up, gives a croak, then goes down into the water again.
“You may name them in your stories,” says Linkletter. “A promotional tool. I’m a master of publicity, as all of you know.”
I’m thinking about what I’m going to call my fish. This whole thing is off the charts crazy. And the three of us are about to be the most famous journalists on the planet, at least for a few weeks. I’ve got to have something good. I’ve got to write the perfect story. Linkletter’s monologuing again, facing out towards the lake and waving his arms around like humanity’s new messiah. I just wish I had some kind of virtual notepad. I focus in, trying to memorize it all.
“We’ll all live perfect lives,” says Linkletter. “No death. No misery. Not too much pain. We’ll calibrate, I think. We’ll have stress. You need that to grow. But not much pain. I set some limits on it in the design. I’ll accept an initial group of pioneers. The Linksplorers. We’ll travel the planet, kick in the algorithms. Create the world for everyone else. We’ll populate it with species. We’ll—”
Something jabs through the speech and into my consciousness. Just a word. It’s Bad Billy. He’s muttering something to himself behind us.
“Penisiraptor.”
Oh, lord. I turn around, and I see how Billy’s been distracting himself while Linkletter was talking.
Billy’s been doing what Billy does. Practically the only thing he does, really.
Drawing pictures of penises on everything in sight.
He’s been working on that tablet the entire time. There’s a dog next to him. Or I think it might be a dog. It has four legs and a tail, anyway—except they’re not legs, and they’re not a tail. And a bird. A living dildo with wings flying off into the sun. And wandering off in the distance is Billy’s Penisiraptor.
It looks just like it sounds like it would. Like a velociraptor. Only a little more veiny. A lot more throbbing. And a very different head. It screeches, then charges into the forest, hunting for whatever prey Billy set it to hunger for.
“And now for the Penisaurus Rex,” says Billy. His tongue sticks out as he starts to draw again.
“Give me that!” shouts Linkletter. He yanks the tablet away from Billy and shoves him to the ground.
“Hey!” says Billy.
“You fucking piece of shit,” says Linkletter. “You ruined it. You ruined my entire universe. Those things are running around in here now. They’re spawning all over as we speak.”
“Calm down big boy,” says Billy. He climbs to his feet, brushing off the grass. He’s miffed, but still in a pretty good mood considering. But then again, he’s been having the best time of his life. “I wanted them for my story. Just delete them if you don’t like them. Or make your own. It’s fun to be naughty. Scandalous.”
“You fucking little shit,” screams Linkletter. “I can’t just delete things in here. I fucking can’t! That’s not how this works. Those things are forever now! They’re etched into the code. It’s done.”
“So reboot, delete, whatever,” says Billy. “Make a new world again. You’ll be fine.”
“I can’t do any of that!” says Linkletter. “My consciousness has already adapted here. To this place. It took me a year to even get to that point.” He’s freaking out now. Pacing again. Clacking his fingers. “I can’t go back. Not for long. I can’t stay up there. I’m stuck. I need people to come, I need this to be a place we can live. No one’s going to want to live around those things. I’m going to be alone. I should have chosen better. Better journalists. This is the Linkletterverse. This is—”
“The Penisverse,” says Billy.
“Get the fuck out!” shouts Linkletter.
He slams his hand against his tablet. And then I wake up.
I’m worried at first that they’re going to lock us up and never let us leave. But after a long lecture from Miranda about the non-disclosure agreement, she finally lets us go with one big warning: Linkletter controls what we write. And there will be absolutely no penis-related materials in any article we publish.
I head straight for the office once they let me go. I settle in for a long, hard weekend trying to churn this thing out as fast as I can. I think about just ignoring the NDA entirely. I was about half-committed to doing it anyway. It’s not like I really have any money for him to come take. But GizmoQuack does, so I go a little soft. My piece is more about the wonder of it all. The theories he had and the world he created. How real it was, and how much value it could create. I make a few allusions to his mental state. Not much, but I go as far as I dare.
Miranda approves it an hour after I send it over. And she approves everyone else’s piece, too.
For the first time in the history of his blog, Billy doesn’t include any penis drawings. It’s all vaginas instead. Picture after picture of Linkletter, and vaginas scrawled over every part of him. I didn’t expect anything less from Billy. Miranda even let him call Linkletter a complete nutcase. And he gets all the clicks he expected.
Jed’s expose turned from a hit piece into a puff piece. It’s not like him, but he must have been just as in awe of the place as I was. And Jed’s a true believer. He truly thought Linkletter was neck-deep in some kind of fraud. When he found out it was just physics instead, I guess Jed lost interest in being an attack dog.
We’re all just as famous as we thought we’d be, at least for a day or so. It’s all anyone talks about. And then someone posts an offensive picture of a dog in a Japanese prom dress and the entire net switches to freaking out about that instead.
I just keep writing and keep on with my life, even though I know I’ll never get another story as good as this one. And I wonder about Linkletter.
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