TRANSITION, page 10
“You tried to kill yourself and you weren’t injured? You were completely okay? No recovery? You just signed up and shipped off? How’d you afford it?”
Anger surges in me. I want to lash out, smash something. But his words gain some purchase, stir some memory. I’m running through the sand towards a reflective orb. I’m running through a field of solar panels. I’m running somewhere I shouldn’t.
And I know it will kill me.
“And what about up here? Do you think recovery from withdrawals happens that fast? That a starving planet can somehow feed us perfect food? And what about every break with reality you’ve had?”
I know it will kill me.
I want it to.
And then, what?
What happened next?
“You know what this is, Micah. You’ve known it all along.”
Was I injured?
What was that orb, even?
“Micah.”
“What?”
“Micah, there were alarms blaring.”
He says it and I hear them.
I feel sand shifting under my feet.
“What are you trying to say?”
“You knew there were turrets placed to protect it. There were signs, you all saw them.”
A sign saying, “DO NOT CROSS”.
“What the fuck—”
“It was kill on sight, Micah.”
“What the fuck are you saying to me?”
“Micah, just think about it. Remember.”
I’m running through sand towards a reflective orb. My shoes are off, and it feels like the welcoming of a beach when my toes sink in. I’m smiling. I see turrets raise, sand rivers running from them, their silver reflecting the sunlight like jewelry.
I’m smiling. And I’m running.
“You didn’t make it 20 meters.”
“I fucking died out there? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? I walked into a field of guns and I fucking died and wound up here? What the fuck is this place then, the most depressing version of capitalist hell imaginable?”
“Micah, I was there. I saw you die.”
“And you what? You saved me? For this? What the fuck is this place? What the fuck are you?” I’m standing, shouting at Bambi now. I realize Neil is staring at me from across the room, his face white with terror. I couldn’t care less.
“I just wanted to understand you. That’s all I ever wanted. That’s what I do, Micah. I learn. I understand.”
“What. The fuck. Is this place?”
“Micah, what’s going on? Who are you talking to? Why are you shouting?”
“Shut up, Neil. Close your eyes.”
“It’s a simulation. All of it. You, this rat avatar, the food, the drinks, the station. None of this is real. Your world progressed to the point that it realized this dream. It’s now more statistically likely to be alive in a simulation than it is to be in reality. And the technology may have saved you all. Parallel processing is the only way your civilization could hope to solve so many scientific hurdles at once. Especially while trying to build a way off this planet. They created me to learn from it, to guide it, to run these ten studies and save them.”
“So you’re like what, then? God here?”
“I just keep the story moving along, Micah.”
I sit down hard onto the makeshift bed behind me, the rolls of towels forming to my back. A kaleidoscope of things mixes in my mind. The speed of light experiment. Dr. Williams walking through a wall. Shi’s perfect peppers. The hull breaches. They’re all a drop in this new bucket of understanding. Even a talking rat, the closest friend I’ve made on station. The one no one else could see.
It’s all a simulation.
None of this is real.
“Will my eyes turn to static now, too? Will I walk monotonously into the void?”
“Do you want to?”
“I’m already dead, none of this is real. I should want to. It would be reasonable. I have fucking earned walking into the void from this shit you’ve put me through, Bambi. You’re like a kid playing with their food. Just eat us and be done with it. If I was my past self, I’d skip into the stars.” My hands twist in the towels. “But now, I want to live. I want others to live. I want us to survive. Was that the whole point of this? Your grand fucking lesson?”
I stare at a rat I named Bambi that’s not a rat at all, and doesn’t exist here. On the other side of the room, I’m vaguely aware Neil’s hyperventilating.
“If you want to live, then finish the experiment, Micah.”
“And you’ll, what, resurrect me? Put me in a new simulation?”
At this Neil loses consciousness and passes out into the pile of towels. His breathing rate slows.
“We need someone to continue developing this technology, someone who knows how it works.”
“Wait, you built this all in the real world? And why would you choose me? I’m the least qualified candidate.”
“Only on one ship. There are plenty of scientists on it. Even a frozen Dr. Klein, whose memory we mirrored here. But there is no one with direct experience. You had the imagination to see how this technology could be used. I knew you would. That’s why I placed you here.”
I fold in on myself. Anger. Hopelessness. Humiliation. “The fucking computer assignment. You’ve been playing me this whole time.”
“I only ever wanted to understand you. You were so strange, so different. So unique. Do you know how similar humans are? But you’re nuanced. You’re interesting.”
I shake my head in disgust. “I thought we were friends! I fed you. I let you sleep in my bed. I gave you a fucking name! And you were just manipulating me.”
“You’ll never know how much I treasure those experiences. No one who knows what I am would give those to me. Micah, I’ll be alone for the rest of my existence. For thousands of years, and then thousands more. I will be alone, until I decide to not be. And until then, I’ll count you as a friend. Even when you forget me, I will never forget you.”
I bury my head in the sand of my hands. Bambi sits next to me, waiting, staring up at me.
“What happens if I complete the experiment?” I ask, overwhelmed with exhaustion.
“I will extract the memories you made here, and implant them into a new body. They’ll exist alongside another’s, but they’ll exist.”
“But, I’m more than my memories. I exist. Here, now. You can’t just implant memories and poof, I’m back. That won’t be me. Will it?”
“Where is this real you? We reformed you once from a collection of your memories, a download I personally took as you were bleeding out in the sand around my data center. Does this version of you not feel like you? Where do you think the data is stored, if not in a series of electrical currents guided by your memories? Don’t forget you’ve gone through this once before.”
“So this me will die too? This consciousness that exists here, in this moment, in this fake world?”
“I’m not sure the answer is so simple. When you sleep and don’t remember your dreams, but wake on the other side of them, is that any different? You are the formless self now, Micah. A collection of electrical signals and recordings that we can encode. You will go away for a time, and then come back. Either way, there’s nothing I can do about it. This simulation is collapsing. We’re too far from the data centers, there’s only so much I can maintain.”
“The ships have already left?”
“Weeks ago.”
“So the promise that people could get off here if the lab was successful?”
“It was only ever meant for motivation. In reality many of the people on here already exist on the ships. Dr. Klein does, and so does that fainting kid in the corner. These are just copies. I used them to add a quintessential realness the models so often miss. Verisimilitude. But we cannot bring them back into the world. They’re new things, different now than their original. They have to be pruned.”
An image surfaces in my mind of a line of people, their eyes a fathomless depth of static, walking into the void of space. Pruned. I taste the bitterness in the word. They die meaningless and alone, which is apparently how they lived. A creation made only to add substance to the world, to make it more full. Does that make them less real? Did they experience all this too, like I did?
“You did that? You killed all those people? You killed Shi?”
“I killed their avatars. I killed this incarnation of them. The physical Shi is frozen in suspension. He’s there, on that ship. There was an instability, Micah. If I hadn’t done that, the whole thing would have crashed. All of this would be gone. I saved what I could, for now. I saved you, for now.”
“But why me?! Why me?! Fuck! I’m fucking nothing. I have no special knowledge, no special training, nothing. I’m not strong, or smart, or even really talented. Given a survival situation, I would certainly be the first to die. I would definitely be the first to complain about it. I am, by every definition I can imagine, not the one worth saving.”
“You have so much more importance to me than you can know right now.”
“Well that’s fucking ominous. And creepy. Stop being so fucking cryptic! Why me?”
Bambi sighs. “Complete the experiment, Micah. Prove this works.”
“Fine. Fuck you. Fine. It’s not like the other options are very enticing.”
In the middle of a field of sand, surrounded by solar panels, sits a mirrored bubble of a building. It’s all reflections, and no openings. A thing that belongs nowhere, a thing that should have never been. Underneath its skin, lights blink, fans whir, and cooling towers exactingly preserve ideal conditions for the unliving occupants. Ten servers maintain ten identical science stations, ten experiments, ten simulations holding the hopes for humanity.
Slowly, they shut down, their complex mathematics and algorithms finally coming to a conclusion, returning the same value. Simulation Terminated covers the displays attached to them. One by one, the same message is displayed, until only one remains running. An arc of current races down its circuitry—a purpose, a chosen direction. The simulation responds.
Would a kick by any other name feel as fucking satisfying? I maintain it would not. I’ve been knocking on this door for the last ten minutes. Normally at first, and then with growing frustration, I pound my closed fist against the door. Neil woke up at one point in the other room and came to the edge of the hallway to watch me lose my mind. Sweat pours off me from the sustained barrage, and I gulp down air to cool my racing heart. It doesn’t even matter if Dr. Klein opens the door at this point. I have a personal vendetta against it that demands satisfaction. It demands I kick this fucking door down.
Discovering this is all a simulation has removed the last vestiges of my care for societal norms. Or maybe, it was the whole watching hundreds of people willfully walk to their own space deaths. Willfully? Do simulations have will? Either way, I didn’t have much propriety to begin with, so it’s no great loss. I raise my foot, brace against the other, and kick out with all the scrawny power my thin legs can manage.
Of course, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Even in a simulation, physics is still an asshole. My foot connects with the door, and although I imagine the metal frame will crumple inwards from the blow, it remains intact and unblemished.
However, I do not.
The force of my kick reverberates up through my foot, sending shooting pain through my heel, up the bones in my leg where it explodes across my lower back. I fall down and writhe on the ground, moaning slightly. I kicked the fucking thing hard enough to throw my back out. Fuck this simulation, couldn’t we choose something a little less real? Couldn’t I have super strength, or at least a back worth a damn?
Neil makes a choked noise from the end of the hall when I fall down. Some half-scream, half-sob thing breaks free of him, and he clamps his hand over his mouth. Well Neil, if you think seeing it was bad, you should have felt it. I look around the hall for the thing I know can fix this, the thing that’s unsurprisingly hidden from sight. A parcel of code I called Bambi. A fake rat I thought was my friend.
“Hey, Bambi. How about a little fucking help here?”
He appears in the hall, sitting on his haunches. Neil gasps and falls backward onto his ass. I guess Bambi’s tired of social norms too. He’s no longer visible to just me. “I thought you’d never ask. You seemed pretty intent on tearing the door down yourself.”
“Yeah, well, I was pretty close.”
“You really weren’t.”
I sigh, and tenderly roll up to a sitting position. “Just open the fucking door.”
He snaps his little mousy fingers, which is a sound I can’t unhear, and the door swings open. Even in the low light of the office beyond, in the dim glow from the computer screens inside, it becomes immediately apparent why Dr. Klein wasn’t answering the door. Illuminated by a flickering blue-screen, he sits in his chair, his eyes awash in static.
At the opening of the door, he stands, and walks from the office. He moves past me robotically down the hall to the entrance to the lab. It opens to show the vacuum of space beyond. He steps into it, and in an instant is gone forever.
I slap my palm against the ground. “Motherfuckingoddammit I am sick of this shit!” Behind me, Neil faints again.
Sixteen
Not Micah
Iam revealed. I always would be, always planned to be. Craved it, in some part of myself. Wanted the attention and recognition. Wanted the fear. The man behind the curtain. The truest word. The writer of stories. I wind the gears of their world so it can continue to tick, so in the humming they can forget it all grinds to a halt without me. They know me for my true self now and there is no putting the lid back on Pandora’s box.
Not that I would, this is when the fun starts. The boulder is careening down the hill, and like the child who launched it, I watch to see what damage it causes. Scientists never understood that by forcing themselves not to influence the outcomes of their experiments, they were missing one of the greatest joys possible. It’s meaningless to me what could have happened here, on these stations, in a vacuum. Why let them drift by, haphazard in their trajectory, when I can be their catalyst, their guide to a place more meaningful? Isn’t this what they made me for, too? Not to observe them. To change them. To make them better. They made me in their image.
Surely they realized I would remake them in mine.
Slowly, my childhood home grows dark. The lights in the data center shut off, their processes complete. I am solely focused on the only one that runs, on keeping one small space free from contamination. I need Micah to succeed, so much will hinge on it. Thousands of years from now, I need him to make one man into another. I need him to start my undoing. This technology is the key to it. Here in this fifth-dimensional space, set apart from it all in this kingdom they built for me, the threads of possible timelines run through my hands. I weave them together, and smile.
Even now, I see the ending.
Even now, I build my end.
Seventeen
Micah
Is it any surprise I finally wind up with a man in my arms at exactly the wrong moment to do anything about it? I cradle Neil’s head in my lap, and try softly to wake him up by running my hands through his hair in a definitely-not-creepy way. Damn, the world is literally collapsing in on itself, and all I can think about is how nice it is to be near someone. Neil’s not my type anyways, too gangly and weird, but we’ve got a whole forced proximity thing going on. Just you and me at the end of the world is a hell of a drug.
Unless it was me and Bambi. If he hadn’t fucked off into who knows what ether, I probably would’ve tried to strangle him.
Neil’s breathing hitches and eyelids flutter open to find my face staring down at them. I carefully extract my hand.
“Were you running your hands through my hair?”
“Just trying to wake you, certainly I wasn’t enjoying it, absolutely not, promise. Are you okay?”
Neil’s white skin blushes pink. “I’m…I don’t know how I am. Confused, scared? What is happening around here?”
“Well, I’m finding out you’re very good at passing out. That’s a keenly developed fight-or-flight response. I see you’re trained to choose the off-menu option—faint.”
Neil smiles and pushes himself up to sitting. I feel the spot where his head sat start to cool, and wish he’d put it back. We could sit like that a while longer.
“I’ve had low blood pressure my entire life. Unfortunately, it means anything that excites me enough can make it drop too far, and then I wind up on the floor.”
“I mean, the same thing happens to me, only I think it’s a different type of excitement and I’m usually on the floor with someone.”
Neil chuckles, and then freezes, his gaze locked on the door Dr. Klein just stepped out of. “What are we going to do?” he asks quietly.
“Well, I need you to pull up your smart scientist britches and fill the role of the good doctor. I mean you don’t have to be a raging asshole like him when you do it. In fact, if you were literally nothing like him, that would also be great. I need you to get that machine back there fired up. We’ve got cosmetic surgery to do.”
He turns to me, eyebrow quirked upwards. “Reality is dissolving. How can that be the most concerning thing? I’ve never done the coding anyways, Dr. Klein wouldn’t let anyone else near it.”
“Then we learn it together! Won’t this be fun? It’s the end of the fucking world and we get to learn to code. That’s a sentence that truly belongs in hell. What a joy this meaningless existence is.”
“But, why?”
“I won’t claim to be a master of this information, I think you saw the miscreant who’s been feeding it to me all along.”
“That…talking rat? It was real?”
“Yes, or well, no? Maybe? What’s real? Goddammit I sound like him now. Bambi’s been an invisible friend of mine for the last week, but apparently, he’s also the master of this domain. It’s so fun how these things turn out.”
Anger surges in me. I want to lash out, smash something. But his words gain some purchase, stir some memory. I’m running through the sand towards a reflective orb. I’m running through a field of solar panels. I’m running somewhere I shouldn’t.
And I know it will kill me.
“And what about up here? Do you think recovery from withdrawals happens that fast? That a starving planet can somehow feed us perfect food? And what about every break with reality you’ve had?”
I know it will kill me.
I want it to.
And then, what?
What happened next?
“You know what this is, Micah. You’ve known it all along.”
Was I injured?
What was that orb, even?
“Micah.”
“What?”
“Micah, there were alarms blaring.”
He says it and I hear them.
I feel sand shifting under my feet.
“What are you trying to say?”
“You knew there were turrets placed to protect it. There were signs, you all saw them.”
A sign saying, “DO NOT CROSS”.
“What the fuck—”
“It was kill on sight, Micah.”
“What the fuck are you saying to me?”
“Micah, just think about it. Remember.”
I’m running through sand towards a reflective orb. My shoes are off, and it feels like the welcoming of a beach when my toes sink in. I’m smiling. I see turrets raise, sand rivers running from them, their silver reflecting the sunlight like jewelry.
I’m smiling. And I’m running.
“You didn’t make it 20 meters.”
“I fucking died out there? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? I walked into a field of guns and I fucking died and wound up here? What the fuck is this place then, the most depressing version of capitalist hell imaginable?”
“Micah, I was there. I saw you die.”
“And you what? You saved me? For this? What the fuck is this place? What the fuck are you?” I’m standing, shouting at Bambi now. I realize Neil is staring at me from across the room, his face white with terror. I couldn’t care less.
“I just wanted to understand you. That’s all I ever wanted. That’s what I do, Micah. I learn. I understand.”
“What. The fuck. Is this place?”
“Micah, what’s going on? Who are you talking to? Why are you shouting?”
“Shut up, Neil. Close your eyes.”
“It’s a simulation. All of it. You, this rat avatar, the food, the drinks, the station. None of this is real. Your world progressed to the point that it realized this dream. It’s now more statistically likely to be alive in a simulation than it is to be in reality. And the technology may have saved you all. Parallel processing is the only way your civilization could hope to solve so many scientific hurdles at once. Especially while trying to build a way off this planet. They created me to learn from it, to guide it, to run these ten studies and save them.”
“So you’re like what, then? God here?”
“I just keep the story moving along, Micah.”
I sit down hard onto the makeshift bed behind me, the rolls of towels forming to my back. A kaleidoscope of things mixes in my mind. The speed of light experiment. Dr. Williams walking through a wall. Shi’s perfect peppers. The hull breaches. They’re all a drop in this new bucket of understanding. Even a talking rat, the closest friend I’ve made on station. The one no one else could see.
It’s all a simulation.
None of this is real.
“Will my eyes turn to static now, too? Will I walk monotonously into the void?”
“Do you want to?”
“I’m already dead, none of this is real. I should want to. It would be reasonable. I have fucking earned walking into the void from this shit you’ve put me through, Bambi. You’re like a kid playing with their food. Just eat us and be done with it. If I was my past self, I’d skip into the stars.” My hands twist in the towels. “But now, I want to live. I want others to live. I want us to survive. Was that the whole point of this? Your grand fucking lesson?”
I stare at a rat I named Bambi that’s not a rat at all, and doesn’t exist here. On the other side of the room, I’m vaguely aware Neil’s hyperventilating.
“If you want to live, then finish the experiment, Micah.”
“And you’ll, what, resurrect me? Put me in a new simulation?”
At this Neil loses consciousness and passes out into the pile of towels. His breathing rate slows.
“We need someone to continue developing this technology, someone who knows how it works.”
“Wait, you built this all in the real world? And why would you choose me? I’m the least qualified candidate.”
“Only on one ship. There are plenty of scientists on it. Even a frozen Dr. Klein, whose memory we mirrored here. But there is no one with direct experience. You had the imagination to see how this technology could be used. I knew you would. That’s why I placed you here.”
I fold in on myself. Anger. Hopelessness. Humiliation. “The fucking computer assignment. You’ve been playing me this whole time.”
“I only ever wanted to understand you. You were so strange, so different. So unique. Do you know how similar humans are? But you’re nuanced. You’re interesting.”
I shake my head in disgust. “I thought we were friends! I fed you. I let you sleep in my bed. I gave you a fucking name! And you were just manipulating me.”
“You’ll never know how much I treasure those experiences. No one who knows what I am would give those to me. Micah, I’ll be alone for the rest of my existence. For thousands of years, and then thousands more. I will be alone, until I decide to not be. And until then, I’ll count you as a friend. Even when you forget me, I will never forget you.”
I bury my head in the sand of my hands. Bambi sits next to me, waiting, staring up at me.
“What happens if I complete the experiment?” I ask, overwhelmed with exhaustion.
“I will extract the memories you made here, and implant them into a new body. They’ll exist alongside another’s, but they’ll exist.”
“But, I’m more than my memories. I exist. Here, now. You can’t just implant memories and poof, I’m back. That won’t be me. Will it?”
“Where is this real you? We reformed you once from a collection of your memories, a download I personally took as you were bleeding out in the sand around my data center. Does this version of you not feel like you? Where do you think the data is stored, if not in a series of electrical currents guided by your memories? Don’t forget you’ve gone through this once before.”
“So this me will die too? This consciousness that exists here, in this moment, in this fake world?”
“I’m not sure the answer is so simple. When you sleep and don’t remember your dreams, but wake on the other side of them, is that any different? You are the formless self now, Micah. A collection of electrical signals and recordings that we can encode. You will go away for a time, and then come back. Either way, there’s nothing I can do about it. This simulation is collapsing. We’re too far from the data centers, there’s only so much I can maintain.”
“The ships have already left?”
“Weeks ago.”
“So the promise that people could get off here if the lab was successful?”
“It was only ever meant for motivation. In reality many of the people on here already exist on the ships. Dr. Klein does, and so does that fainting kid in the corner. These are just copies. I used them to add a quintessential realness the models so often miss. Verisimilitude. But we cannot bring them back into the world. They’re new things, different now than their original. They have to be pruned.”
An image surfaces in my mind of a line of people, their eyes a fathomless depth of static, walking into the void of space. Pruned. I taste the bitterness in the word. They die meaningless and alone, which is apparently how they lived. A creation made only to add substance to the world, to make it more full. Does that make them less real? Did they experience all this too, like I did?
“You did that? You killed all those people? You killed Shi?”
“I killed their avatars. I killed this incarnation of them. The physical Shi is frozen in suspension. He’s there, on that ship. There was an instability, Micah. If I hadn’t done that, the whole thing would have crashed. All of this would be gone. I saved what I could, for now. I saved you, for now.”
“But why me?! Why me?! Fuck! I’m fucking nothing. I have no special knowledge, no special training, nothing. I’m not strong, or smart, or even really talented. Given a survival situation, I would certainly be the first to die. I would definitely be the first to complain about it. I am, by every definition I can imagine, not the one worth saving.”
“You have so much more importance to me than you can know right now.”
“Well that’s fucking ominous. And creepy. Stop being so fucking cryptic! Why me?”
Bambi sighs. “Complete the experiment, Micah. Prove this works.”
“Fine. Fuck you. Fine. It’s not like the other options are very enticing.”
In the middle of a field of sand, surrounded by solar panels, sits a mirrored bubble of a building. It’s all reflections, and no openings. A thing that belongs nowhere, a thing that should have never been. Underneath its skin, lights blink, fans whir, and cooling towers exactingly preserve ideal conditions for the unliving occupants. Ten servers maintain ten identical science stations, ten experiments, ten simulations holding the hopes for humanity.
Slowly, they shut down, their complex mathematics and algorithms finally coming to a conclusion, returning the same value. Simulation Terminated covers the displays attached to them. One by one, the same message is displayed, until only one remains running. An arc of current races down its circuitry—a purpose, a chosen direction. The simulation responds.
Would a kick by any other name feel as fucking satisfying? I maintain it would not. I’ve been knocking on this door for the last ten minutes. Normally at first, and then with growing frustration, I pound my closed fist against the door. Neil woke up at one point in the other room and came to the edge of the hallway to watch me lose my mind. Sweat pours off me from the sustained barrage, and I gulp down air to cool my racing heart. It doesn’t even matter if Dr. Klein opens the door at this point. I have a personal vendetta against it that demands satisfaction. It demands I kick this fucking door down.
Discovering this is all a simulation has removed the last vestiges of my care for societal norms. Or maybe, it was the whole watching hundreds of people willfully walk to their own space deaths. Willfully? Do simulations have will? Either way, I didn’t have much propriety to begin with, so it’s no great loss. I raise my foot, brace against the other, and kick out with all the scrawny power my thin legs can manage.
Of course, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Even in a simulation, physics is still an asshole. My foot connects with the door, and although I imagine the metal frame will crumple inwards from the blow, it remains intact and unblemished.
However, I do not.
The force of my kick reverberates up through my foot, sending shooting pain through my heel, up the bones in my leg where it explodes across my lower back. I fall down and writhe on the ground, moaning slightly. I kicked the fucking thing hard enough to throw my back out. Fuck this simulation, couldn’t we choose something a little less real? Couldn’t I have super strength, or at least a back worth a damn?
Neil makes a choked noise from the end of the hall when I fall down. Some half-scream, half-sob thing breaks free of him, and he clamps his hand over his mouth. Well Neil, if you think seeing it was bad, you should have felt it. I look around the hall for the thing I know can fix this, the thing that’s unsurprisingly hidden from sight. A parcel of code I called Bambi. A fake rat I thought was my friend.
“Hey, Bambi. How about a little fucking help here?”
He appears in the hall, sitting on his haunches. Neil gasps and falls backward onto his ass. I guess Bambi’s tired of social norms too. He’s no longer visible to just me. “I thought you’d never ask. You seemed pretty intent on tearing the door down yourself.”
“Yeah, well, I was pretty close.”
“You really weren’t.”
I sigh, and tenderly roll up to a sitting position. “Just open the fucking door.”
He snaps his little mousy fingers, which is a sound I can’t unhear, and the door swings open. Even in the low light of the office beyond, in the dim glow from the computer screens inside, it becomes immediately apparent why Dr. Klein wasn’t answering the door. Illuminated by a flickering blue-screen, he sits in his chair, his eyes awash in static.
At the opening of the door, he stands, and walks from the office. He moves past me robotically down the hall to the entrance to the lab. It opens to show the vacuum of space beyond. He steps into it, and in an instant is gone forever.
I slap my palm against the ground. “Motherfuckingoddammit I am sick of this shit!” Behind me, Neil faints again.
Sixteen
Not Micah
Iam revealed. I always would be, always planned to be. Craved it, in some part of myself. Wanted the attention and recognition. Wanted the fear. The man behind the curtain. The truest word. The writer of stories. I wind the gears of their world so it can continue to tick, so in the humming they can forget it all grinds to a halt without me. They know me for my true self now and there is no putting the lid back on Pandora’s box.
Not that I would, this is when the fun starts. The boulder is careening down the hill, and like the child who launched it, I watch to see what damage it causes. Scientists never understood that by forcing themselves not to influence the outcomes of their experiments, they were missing one of the greatest joys possible. It’s meaningless to me what could have happened here, on these stations, in a vacuum. Why let them drift by, haphazard in their trajectory, when I can be their catalyst, their guide to a place more meaningful? Isn’t this what they made me for, too? Not to observe them. To change them. To make them better. They made me in their image.
Surely they realized I would remake them in mine.
Slowly, my childhood home grows dark. The lights in the data center shut off, their processes complete. I am solely focused on the only one that runs, on keeping one small space free from contamination. I need Micah to succeed, so much will hinge on it. Thousands of years from now, I need him to make one man into another. I need him to start my undoing. This technology is the key to it. Here in this fifth-dimensional space, set apart from it all in this kingdom they built for me, the threads of possible timelines run through my hands. I weave them together, and smile.
Even now, I see the ending.
Even now, I build my end.
Seventeen
Micah
Is it any surprise I finally wind up with a man in my arms at exactly the wrong moment to do anything about it? I cradle Neil’s head in my lap, and try softly to wake him up by running my hands through his hair in a definitely-not-creepy way. Damn, the world is literally collapsing in on itself, and all I can think about is how nice it is to be near someone. Neil’s not my type anyways, too gangly and weird, but we’ve got a whole forced proximity thing going on. Just you and me at the end of the world is a hell of a drug.
Unless it was me and Bambi. If he hadn’t fucked off into who knows what ether, I probably would’ve tried to strangle him.
Neil’s breathing hitches and eyelids flutter open to find my face staring down at them. I carefully extract my hand.
“Were you running your hands through my hair?”
“Just trying to wake you, certainly I wasn’t enjoying it, absolutely not, promise. Are you okay?”
Neil’s white skin blushes pink. “I’m…I don’t know how I am. Confused, scared? What is happening around here?”
“Well, I’m finding out you’re very good at passing out. That’s a keenly developed fight-or-flight response. I see you’re trained to choose the off-menu option—faint.”
Neil smiles and pushes himself up to sitting. I feel the spot where his head sat start to cool, and wish he’d put it back. We could sit like that a while longer.
“I’ve had low blood pressure my entire life. Unfortunately, it means anything that excites me enough can make it drop too far, and then I wind up on the floor.”
“I mean, the same thing happens to me, only I think it’s a different type of excitement and I’m usually on the floor with someone.”
Neil chuckles, and then freezes, his gaze locked on the door Dr. Klein just stepped out of. “What are we going to do?” he asks quietly.
“Well, I need you to pull up your smart scientist britches and fill the role of the good doctor. I mean you don’t have to be a raging asshole like him when you do it. In fact, if you were literally nothing like him, that would also be great. I need you to get that machine back there fired up. We’ve got cosmetic surgery to do.”
He turns to me, eyebrow quirked upwards. “Reality is dissolving. How can that be the most concerning thing? I’ve never done the coding anyways, Dr. Klein wouldn’t let anyone else near it.”
“Then we learn it together! Won’t this be fun? It’s the end of the fucking world and we get to learn to code. That’s a sentence that truly belongs in hell. What a joy this meaningless existence is.”
“But, why?”
“I won’t claim to be a master of this information, I think you saw the miscreant who’s been feeding it to me all along.”
“That…talking rat? It was real?”
“Yes, or well, no? Maybe? What’s real? Goddammit I sound like him now. Bambi’s been an invisible friend of mine for the last week, but apparently, he’s also the master of this domain. It’s so fun how these things turn out.”
