"There won't be any more weather?” Heather was a gardener, and she had relatives who ran a working farm—I think she grasped the implications quicker than I did. “What does that even mean?"
"The weather ... just won't change. Where it's raining now, it will continue to rain. Where it's not raining, it won't rain again. And so on. There was some talk of stopping the Earth's rotation, but that's comparatively simple to model, and it was felt by the committee that eternal night for half the planet would be unnecessarily psychologically debilitating. Likewise, the tides will continue."
I stared at him. “So our choices are to live in places of permanent flooding or permanent drought? We'll all starve to death!"
"Ah, no, you don't need to eat anymore. To require you to do so would be monstrous. There will likely be some movement of the population away from climactically inhospitable areas, but with no new children being born, overcrowding in temperate areas should only be a temporary—"
"No more children?"
He frowned. “Of course not. The study is over. We need no more subjects."
I looked at my girlfriend, and saw the same bleakness in her eyes that I felt behind my own. We were in our twenties and had only been living together for a month, hadn't even talked about marriage, and we'd certainly never talked about children—but I think we both thought someday we'd talk about children.
"Let me see if I understand,” I said slowly. “We'll just go on living, not needing to eat, with no more kids being born, until we all ... die of old age?"
"Yes. Or accidents. Or ... well ... we suspect some may decide they prefer not to live, given their new understanding of reality."
"What about disease?” my girlfriend said.
He made a seesawing gesture with his hand. “Not global pandemics—also surprisingly hard to accurately simulate—but most diseases will remain, yes."
"Why don't you get rid of disease!” She looked pissed. Her father had died of emphysema before we met.
"Ah, well, the basic forms of your bodies and the frailties therein are already established, built into the simulation as it were, and changing them all...” He shrugged. “Not for a study that's over. If there are no further questions ... Then that's all."
"What do you mean that's all?"
"I have nothing else to tell you. The study is over. You're free to live your lives however you see fit."
"What lives?"
"That's a question you'll have to settle for yourselves.” He blinked his eyes. Then he blinked out of existence.
My girlfriend and I reached out and held each other on the couch, silently. Outside, in the streets of Oakland, dogs barked and sirens wailed.
* * * *
The next thing I remember seeing on the TV was the image of falling bodies as the passengers and crew of Flight 11 opened the cabin door and tossed the struggling hijackers to their deaths. Some of the reporters gasped. Others cheered.
The survivors of the flights said that when he arrived the Ambassador disarmed the hijackers with a wave of his hand, rounded them up, and asked them a series of questions. None of the survivors understood the language being spoken during that conversation. When I asked Dawson what he thought Future Man and the hijackers had talked about, he just shrugged and said, “Exit interview. Not uncommon in a psychological experiment.” Then he went back to digging.
* * * *
I don't know about you, but I was most impatient with the disbelievers. A bunch of Flat-Earth, the moon-landing-was-faked, Holocaust-denier types, sure, but ordinary people too. (Then again, it's hard not to have sympathy for the wacky conspiracy theorists, especially since some small subset of them were proved right—the world is fake, and everything we know really is a lie.) Humans are driven by engines of denial, obstinance, and short-sightedness, whether we're simulated or not. Government officials telling us to disbelieve the evidence of our eyes. Experts talking about mass hysteria, even as other experts—experts at piloting helicopters—hovered over New York rescuing the passengers who were stuck on those frozen planes in New York, and the other plane stopped a handsbreadth from the Pentagon. Flight 93 was close enough to the ground in Pennsylvania when it froze that the local fire department just rescued the passengers with hook-and-ladder trucks and big inflatable pads to cushion the ones too scared or old or frail to climb. And still people argued, shouted on TV, blamed terrorists or Western imperialists, called it a hoax. The scientists tried to be rational, to tell us how deep space had gone suddenly static, no more pulsars pulsing, no more stars exploding—more non-essential services taken offline—but nobody listens to scientists in America. After a few weeks with no babies born, though, with people realizing they didn't get hungry anymore, with the weather never changing, it began to sink in. The first wave of suicides was pretty brutal. Maybe as much as ten percent of the population, dead by their own hands. Nihilism is tough to live with. Me, I was always an atheist. Finding out there was no point to our existence, besides whatever point we create, wasn't too tough for me. Though I did wonder if I'd been robbed of a destiny. I never believed in destiny before, but now I knew there was literally a different life I was meant to lead, that I would never have now.
Not as many religious nuts killed themselves as I expected. Those people are adaptable. They came up with whole new weird explanations, most involving the UN and the Antichrist. Just as boring and incomprehensible as the old weird explanations, really.
* * * *
It was the end of the world, sort of, so I decided to take a road trip. My relationship with Heather didn't even last until the end of September—she was worried about her mom, living all alone in the middle of the country, in the middle of increasing unrest and craziness, and she made arrangements to catch a ride back home with some old friends. There was no discussion of my going with her. In those last days it was like she couldn't see me at all, she just looked beyond me, moved around me without noticing my presence. To be fair, I was probably the same to her. Our world of possibilities had been beheaded. There was nothing else keeping me in Oakland. I'd lived there for about a month, having relocated from Santa Cruz when my old contract job ran out and Heather agreed to let me live with her, so I'd hardly put down roots. I'd only been working at my new job as an editorial assistant for a trade publishing magazine for a few weeks, and the few friends I had weren't close enough to stay for, or else they'd scattered.
So I loaded up my silver Nissan with my worldly possessions—that only just filled the back seat and the trunk, and it was mostly books—and set out East, reversing the course I'd taken thirteen months before, when I left the mountains of North Carolina to seek my fortune.
There were a lot of cars out on the road, a lot of people trying to get to one place from another for whatever reasons of their own. I passed a few crashes, maybe two or three a day, and there were places in the mountains or over rivers where people had clearly just lost their shit, decided there was no point anymore and crashed through guardrails, dropping their simulated cars into simulated rivers and gulches. The radio, especially in the dead stretches at night, was full of preachers, and I listened, because it was that or country-and-western music, and I've got my limits.
I won't lie to you, it was a depressing goddamn journey. I looked into that empty sky and what I missed most were the clouds. The way they used to slide across the sky, like they had someplace to go, but weren't in any particular hurry to get there. That was me, I guess—moving cloudwise, knowing I'd get where I was going eventually. I didn't have a cell phone, which was okay, since they didn't work reliably anymore anyway—neither did pay phones, so I couldn't let Dawson know I was coming, though I tried a few times. I couldn't even be sure he was still there, living in the house we'd shared with a few friends in Boone—he had family farther east, maybe he'd gone to join them in these times of tribulation. But he was one of my dearest friends, the guy who always seemed to know how to deal with anything, from flat tires to financial catastrophe to muggers to bad trips, wi
thout even blinking. We'd met at a writing workshop freshmen year, when he decided he wasn't really a writer and I decided I really was, and we'd been tight ever since, and were roommates for years. He was a Chinese-Hawaiian military brat who'd trained in more martial arts than I could remember the names for, owned about five swords, smoked incessantly, liked to stay up all night talking about movies, and was no better at playing chess than I was, though he loved it just as much. Who better to spend the end of the world with? Of course, Dawson wasn't perfect. He was shit at romance and creative writing. We used to joke that I was a lover and he was a fighter. Fighting didn't sound bad to me, but what could we possibly fight for? Or with? Or against?
* * * *
It was a pretty mellow apocalypse, all in all. I mean, nothing was broken. Nothing exploded. Driving through Texas I was a little weirded out to see somebody had attacked the second largest cross in the Western hemisphere, something of a landmark in the area, and one of its arms was hanging broken. Sometimes cars went past me the other way fast, and military vehicles, and cops, but I figured they were dealing with little local disasters. I wondered how long people would last in that part of Texas. It was always pretty dry, but there was a difference between ‘always pretty dry’ and ‘absolutely never getting any rain at all, ever again, never'. Even cacti die of thirst eventually, right?
But I didn't. I'd gotten used to not eating—I was never hungry, so it just didn't occur to me—but I was filling up the overheated radiator at a filling station in the desert when I realized I hadn't had a drop of anything to drink in a couple of days, not even a caffeinated soda. Didn't much miss drinking, either. I did miss pissing and taking craps, though. I'd done some good thinking while pissing and taking craps. I still could eat but it seemed like a lot of hassle, and it's not like many of the highway fast food joints were open. When the world's falling apart, you don't keep your gig as a drive-through attendant.
I'd been sleeping in my car on the side of the road, but I wasn't exactly tired, either. Was sleep just a habit, too? That night I drove straight through, and wasn't tired a bit, and didn't notice any bleariness or weariness or psychotic breaks. Maybe there were perks to this apocalypse after all. No sleep meant more time to do ... Oh, right. There was no point in doing anything. So much for silver linings.
* * * *
I got to Boone in late afternoon and pulled into the old familiar driveway, the same one I'd pulled away from a bit over a year before. Back then, right after college, I'd shared the little brick house and split the rent with four other guys, and after graduation we'd all gone our separate ways ... except for Dawson, who'd kept the whole place for himself. He'd studied clinical psych in college, even co-authored a couple of papers (one controversial one about whether violent videogames primed people for real-life violent behavior), but pretty soon after graduating he got into traditional Chinese medicine and started training in acupuncture.
Dawson was sitting on the porch, wearing overalls and all spattered with mud, drinking a beer. He raised his hand to me in a little wave when I pulled into the driveway, like I'd just run out to the store or something. I turned off the car and went up the steps, and he stood up and hugged me. He didn't mind my days-on-the-road stink and I didn't mind his mud smears. I used to say Dawson was one of the few people in the world who, if he called me and said he needed help, I'd hop the next plane, no questions asked. Nowadays the planes aren't flying anymore, but the principle's the same.
"Welcome back, bro,” he said. “We shouldn't talk here. Come with me to the basement.” He went down the steps and around the house, and I followed for about a dozen paces before I remembered that this house didn't have a basement.
* * * *
"So I've been digging this hole in the ground,” Dawson said, nodding to a messy tarp spread out in the backyard. “But the moles started it. You know we always had trouble with them digging tunnels in the yard. I was walking back here, and one of the holes ... looked funny. It wasn't dark inside. It was bright. So I got a shovel, and started expanding it, and, well...” He bent down, grabbed the edge of the tarp, and whipped it aside.
A slanted tunnel drove down into the earth, shored up here and there with two-by-fours, and at the bottom there was ... a big white glowing nothing.
"What the fuck is that?"
Dawson shrugged. “Do I look like a godlike programmer from beyond the simulation? I'm not sure. But you know how sometimes, when you're playing a video game, you hit a buggy section and suddenly you're moving under the terrain? Where you can see the polygons and the colors are reversed or there are no colors at all, because it's not something players are ever meant to see, it's unfinished virtual space? I think this is like that. Come on down."
He slipped into the hole—hence the muddiness—and soon vanished from sight, and after a second I followed him, as I'd followed him into innumerable parties, smoky bars, and dark woods in the years of our friendship. It was a weird descent, half climb, half slide, and eventually we wound up in a cavern about seven feet high and ten feet across, partly dirt, partly that white glowing null-space. There was a shovel and a pickaxe and a few buckets—Dawson was expanding the cavern, chipping away the dirt and roots to expand the whiteness. A couple of tarps hung on the walls, held on with tent spikes driven into the corners. There were also a pair of filthy folding chairs, and Dawson and I sat down.
I looked around. The nullness didn't get any less weird under examination—it was white light that was also physical space. “Guess you found a project to keep yourself occupied in the post-apocalypse."
"I could be wrong, but I think it's possible we can talk here without being monitored,” Dawson said, leaning forward earnestly. “I think this little room is technically outside the simulation—or under it, anyway. They might not be able to hear us."
"They? Bro, they're not listening. They're gone. They left us here."
Dawson sighed. “I got you into a couple of psychological studies back when we were undergrads, remember?"
"Sure.” Mostly filling out questionnaires and answering hypothetical questions and the like. No Stanford Prison Experiment-level weirdness or anything.
"What's the first thing to remember when you become part of an experiment?"
"I was an English major, Dawson, you'll have to refresh my memory."
"The researchers lie to you. They tell you the experiment is about one thing—but it's really about another. Because if the research subjects know the true purpose of the experiment, they might not act naturally, and the experiment would be contaminated. So they tell you they want to ask you some questions about your buying habits, then lock you in a room alone for hours with nothing but a pitcher of water, because they really want to see how long it takes before you overcome your societal training and piss in the corner. Or they tell you they're studying the pain threshold of test subjects receiving electric shocks, when they're really testing to see how much pain you're willing to inflict on a stranger just because some guy in a lab coat told you to."
I frowned. “But ... the study's over..."
Dawson shook his head. “I doubt it. The explanation they gave totally falls apart when you start to examine it. They can make it so we don't have babies, don't get hungry, don't get thirsty, and don't sleep, but they can't get rid of disease? They have so much power they're able to convincingly simulate an entire planet, but they can't afford to leave the simulation running quietly in the background, or to download our minds into bodies in the real world, outside the simulation? Somebody somewhere on an ethics committee is unwilling to just let us vanish into oblivion, but isn't troubled by the cruel-and-unusual implications of letting us go slowly insane in our fishbowl world? I call bullshit. There's something else going on here."
I felt like I'd had my world turned inside out ... again. “Like what? What do you think their real purpose is?"
"Who knows? A rat in a maze can't hope to understand the fundamental underpinnings of behavioral science. Maybe it's beyond u
s entirely."
"So what do we do?"
Dawson grinned. “Well, we can be good rats, and keep running the maze they've built for us."
"Or?"
"Or...” He stood and pulled down a tarp on the wall with a flourish, revealing another tunnel—but this one didn't lead to whiteness. It led to trees, lots of trees, a forest of trees ... sideways trees, the ground to the left, the sky to the right. My head hurt just looking at it.
"Ta da,” Dawson said. “The world isn't a globe, Tim, not really. This is all map, no territory. Geography is an illusion here. I was just digging out of curiosity at first, to see how deep the whiteness went, but I found ... I don't know. A warp. A shortcut to another map. Go through that tunnel, and you pop out sideways in Germany, near the Black Forest. I found another tunnel that leads to Perth, in Australia. International travel is a thing of the past for most people, and the whole communications infrastructure of the world has crumbled. Gas is running out since the oil wells are all empty now. We're going back to basics here. I gotta think, whatever the researchers are really interested in, they want us all isolated, localized, tribal, fragmented. Maybe they want to study the collapse of a civilization? Who knows. But we don't have to collapse. We don't have to be fragments. We can keep digging, maybe find more tunnels, and you and me..."
"We could walk the earth,” I said.
"We could spread the word. Spread the good news. Or the bad news, I guess."
"But even if the researchers can't hear us in this place, they'll notice eventually. What if they fix the bug? Close the shortcuts?"
"Ah,” he said, smiling that big broad smile I loved. “Then I'll know I'm right. Then I'll have proof we aren't just an abandoned simulation, that they're still monitoring us. It's win-win."
I laughed. “And what if they just erase us? Or if the next hole you dig opens up in the bottom of the ocean and we drown?"
Interzone Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine #222 Page 4