by Douglas Lain
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 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 us 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?”
“A life without risks is no life at all, Tim.”
We go a lot of places, but we can’t go everywhere, so we made this little ’zine, this chain letter, and started sending it around. If you’ve read this, you already know the important thing: the researchers are lying to us. They’ve got a hidden agenda. Just having that knowledge in your head helps ruin their study—whatever it is. We hope you’ll make a copy of this, handwritten or otherwise if you’ve still got access to working tech, and that you’ll pass it on. Or start digging your own hole, and see if you hit a shortcut, and tell whoever you find on the other side. The shortcuts are all over. Maybe they’re part of the experiment, Dawson says it’s possible, anything is, the researchers are smarter than us, but he told me something else I take comfort in. He said if we were really a historical simulation before, we were constrained by whatev
er we’d actually done in our original lives, controlled by historical imperatives. But now history is broken, the future is wide open, and we’re free. For the first time, we’re free. We’d better start acting like it.
Because this shit can’t go on. We’re not rats, we’re not worms, we’re not fruit flies—we’re sentient. Maybe the researchers made us that way, but every abused kid should know you don’t owe unconditional loyalty to the ones that made you, and our makers haven’t earned our respect. So let’s fuck up their game. Let’s smash their study. Let’s break the experiment. Let’s climb on our rooftops and shout, “We know, you bastards, we know you’re lying to us.” We’ll have the world’s largest sit-in, or the world’s biggest riot, and maybe the experimenters will pull the plug on us, or maybe they’ll erase our memories and put us back in the old maze to live out our old lives, but the minute they do something—that’s when we know we’ve won.
And even if they just ignore us, hell—what else do you have to do with the time you’ve got left on this imaginary Earth?
On my road trip, I spent a lot of time wondering what happened to the real me. The unsimulated Tim. Did I stay with Heather? Did we get married, have children, were we happy? I’ve always been fascinated by roads left untaken, possibilities unfulfilled, and now I was living in the ultimate wrong path. I used to write stories about regret and parallel universes and many-worlds theory and the god of the crossroads, and now I’m living in one.
Mostly—and I know it’s shallow, but if I can’t be honest with the anonymous masses of the world, who can I be honest with?—I wondered whether or not the real me ever became a famous writer. If maybe people even in Professor Fuckwit’s time read the books I hadn’t quite gotten around to writing yet in late 2001. I always wanted to be a famous writer, or, more specifically, I wanted to be a writer so good that fame was just an inevitable side effect—a writer that everyone would read, that everyone would feel compelled to read, a writer who was important, a writer who was great. I mentioned that old ambition to Dawson, just now, and he said, “That’s a classic example of ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ bro.”
I guess he’s got a point. Because you’re reading this, aren’t you?
David Friedman is a former professional poker player who has placed in many major tournaments including coming in first at the No Limit Hold’em tournament at LA’s Hawaiian Gardens Casino back in 2004. He is also a screenwriter and film editor whose work includes everything from documentary films (The Shoe Store) to softcore porn (Erotic Confessions). He is the author of the novel Rat House. This is his second published short story.
“Out of My Sight, Out of My Mind” explores the devastating after-effects of the 9/11 attacks, as seen from inside the mind of a poker-playing telepath.
OUT OF MY SIGHT, OUT OF MY MIND
David W. Friedman
The view out of the plane’s window was obscured by clouds. I finished my whiskey and soda and waved at the attendant for another. Hell, why not a double? Flying always scared me. Now, two months after the 9/11 attacks, I was more scared than ever. I didn’t know if there would be another hijacking, another plane flying into a building with me strapped into my seat, burned and dead. So, why not a double whiskey and soda?
Traveling, especially on a plane, is grueling for me because I’m telepathic. Ideally, people’s thoughts are background chatter, a kind of endless noise that hums like a refrigerator, seldom noticed unless deliberately focused on. However, when there are lots of people in a relatively small space, I can have trouble blocking out the thoughts. Like on this plane. Another reason I drink when I fly, to try to keep the thoughts at bay.
I was flying from San Francisco to New Orleans for a Hold’em poker tournament. The top prize was guaranteed to be two hundred fifty thousand dollars. I planned on getting that money and some extra from the ring games. There were going to be plenty of fish at those tables waiting to get hooked. That was the only reason I risked flying this time, because of all the fish.
I spend more time trying not to read people’s minds than reading them. Most people’s thoughts aren’t interesting. They’re thinking about what to buy at the grocery store, where they can find a sale price for a television they really like, whether they locked the front door or not. To get all those random thoughts to just sit in the background takes a lot of energy. As a result I’m not much of a talker. I can get irritated easily if I’m not careful. Knowing a person’s most mundane thoughts is a demanding, wearying process. People also see me as being cold and aloof, distant, even taciturn, and I am. It helps with my table image. After all, obfuscation is the hallmark of a good poker player.
Now, with poker I want to read minds. I’m open to every stray thought. I focus on them, figuring out who’s not paying attention to their hand, who is looking for the cocktail waitress, who just thought of pocket Kings. Not everyone can have their mind read. Many times I’ve misread someone’s thoughts. They can have a monster hand and simply not let on. That’s poker; nothing is a sure thing, even when you can see what your opponents have in their hands.
Usually if I concentrate and blot out the background thoughts I can really home in on my targets. I make exceptionally difficult folds or surprising raises. However, lately, everything has backfired. My top pair turns out to be a loser when someone with a weak hand does the unusual play and runs out a flush. I’ve had my pocket Aces cracked by some idiot with a seven and a deuce catch a river for two pair. My mind reading sees their cards, but I’m having trouble seeing beyond that, to read how they’re going to play those cards. I’ve become lazy, depending on a surface read. I believe that the harder it is to drown out others’ thoughts the more difficult it is to read players’ thoughts. I’ve been running bad and I really need to win this upcoming tournament.
The attendant brought me a fresh drink and I downed it. The racket of minds on the plane was annoying, more so than even a baby crying, and I hoped to drown them out with alcohol. I heard the thoughts of the passenger to my right, who was worried that his marriage was collapsing because he traveled so frequently for his job. The woman in front of me was concerned she’d never get pregnant, and the man behind me and to my right was full of dread over his upcoming cancer screening. I popped a Xanax and hoped I’d fall asleep and let the babble of voices stop for a while.
Soon the whiskey and Xanax started doing their job. I was dozing off, my head tilted to the left, toward the window and the clouds. I felt comfortable, those inner voices receding into the background, my own thoughts dimming as sleep approached. Suddenly, a horrible idea came to me with urgency and immediacy: There was a bomb on the plane. I groggily rose out of my chair, standing bent over under the overhead compartment, the better to scan the cabin, to look intently at each passenger, trying to find even a faint whisper of an act of terror. That whisper turned to a shout as I looked at each person. I felt panic coming from everyone, a fear that the bomb threat was real, yet I couldn’t identify the bomber from reading thoughts. Finally I conceded I couldn’t read every passenger in time, if there was a bomb; it would take too long. I looked at the man to my right. He was mindlessly thumbing through Business Week and worrying about his marriage. He wasn’t panicked, he wasn’t even conscious. What had I been thinking, where did the thought of danger come from? I don’t think my ability is unreliable. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but I’ve never had it give me false information.
“Sir, you’ll have to sit down,” the flight attendant said. “The captain has put on the seatbelt sign.” She thought I was just another drunken passenger who couldn’t hold his liquor. What I’d just experienced wouldn’t be believed and no one could know about my telepathy. Knowledge of that would ruin my poker career, or I would be mocked as a fraud. Either way, it would be trouble if anyone knew. I sat down and looked out the window, there was nothing but clouds.
I arrived at the downtown Harrah’s hotel where the tournament was being held. It was a balmy New Orleans evening in November and it almost b
lotted out the horrors I’d experienced on the flight over. I was still on edge, despite the Xanax and the booze. As I was checking in, Doc and Mel, two players I knew from the poker circuit, came up to me. They’d driven from Houston and were waiting for their rooms. Doc was an inveterate sports bettor who didn’t say much and Mel was a mediocre poker player who liked to cheat on his wife.
“Hey, buddy, how are you? Looking forward to a big win?” Mel said. “You’re going to have to do better than that tourney in Atlantic City. Getting crushed by a pair of eights must have stung!” He laughed.
Doc said nothing. He was like Harpo Marx or Teller from Penn & Teller, only without the humor. Mel was joking, but it still hurt.
“I hope to do better this time,” I said and turned toward the front desk.
Mel grabbed my arm. I looked at him with a mixture of curiosity and disdain. What did he want? Was it to irritate me further? Did he want to criticize my play some more? I needed to lie down, relax, and get my mind off the flight and onto poker. I was spooked. That terror vision on the plane was something new to me. I didn’t know how it happened or what it meant.
“Come out for a drink. The tournament doesn’t start until tomorrow. I’ll buy you a drink,” Mel offered.
I shrugged. I didn’t want to carouse. I wanted to lie on the bed in my room and decompress from the flight.
Doc looked at me with a wry smile. I sensed his overwhelming desire to watch basketball. Doc had bet on several games and needed to watch them.
“I don’t feel like it. I had a rough flight,” I said.
Mel said, “I have a business proposition I’d like to talk about.”