I grumbled at my character sheet as I surveyed the battlefield on the table before me. Wade sat across from me, barricaded behind his DM screen so only his sandy blond hair and green eyes could be seen. It was almost funny seeing him hide behind the screen, knowing the large man with the dad-bod. The DM screen had seen better days as most of the information displayed for the player had been replaced with drawings from his kids. It didn’t matter, I knew I was screwed.

“This doesn’t seem fair,” I muttered. “How was I to know that the boss could phase?”

My mini sat in a chamber all alone. A chamber beneath the rest of my group, who had rushed to catch up with my mage after I rushed ahead into the room.

I looked around at my support.

“It was a good plan,” said Selene, our warrior. “Fireproof yourself and cast a fireball. However, by using blink to get into the room, you gave the monster one round to take you out before you could counter.” Selene was the most petite person in the room, just over 5 feet tall, which was very much in contrast to the rugged warrior she was playing. She made up for it by being enthusiastically chipper. Her stringy blond hair and blue eyes twinkled as she seemed to take delight in the abrupt end of my character's life.

“And our characters don’t even know what’s happening,” said Rebekah. “Not that I would be able to heal you anyway, where you ended up.” Rebekah’s fiery red hair fell nearly to the table, and the soft lilt of her voice always made you feel she was in on a joke that you weren’t a part of.

“Can you cast underwater,” asked Vanessa. She was the group's newest member and seemed to be taking the potential loss of our mage the most seriously. Her short black hair and dark brown eyes made her Asian heritage obvious, even if you could barely hear it in her voice.

“No,” I muttered. “All my remaining spells have a verbal component, and I can’t breathe underwater. What do I see?”

“As I said, the room is flooded from floor to ceiling, and everything is a little wavey. Your dark vision shows you a small, rough, natural chamber. It looks like the bottom of a well. Which it is. There looks to be a place above you where they used to draw water out, but it’s collapsed, like much of the rest of the structure around you. The monster has grabbed you from behind, and you can make claws out around your torso.”

“No air at all?” I asked hopefully.

“No, you were running through ankle-deep water, and the monster successfully grappled you and dragged you down through the floor..”

I opened my mouth to complain again but noticed a lot of red text flying by on my laptop. “Ok, time out,” I said, turning my laptop to the group. There were groans around the table, but since the group had formed initially because I wanted to occupy myself while running the weekly tests on our systems, they couldn’t say much. It was part of the deal.

“Ugh, wake me up when you’re done,” said Selene. She was the company lawyer and had no interest in the process. Rebekah, our recruiter, usually watched with interest. I wasn’t sure if it was feigned or not. Wade, my manager, and Vanessa, one of our physicists, came over and stood behind me as I started to debug.

“Wait, go back,” Vanessa said. She tapped the screen at a spreadsheet of numbers. “There has to be a sensor error. Those values are physically impossible.”

“Why would they only fail for this one test,” I said. “All the other values are correct.”

I reran a few basic tests with expected results before running the failed test again. Again, a chart of numbers that should be impossible filled the screen.

Wade turned and opened the partition between us and the large quantum computer that filled the other half of the room we were using. Vanessa joined him, and after they put on some safety gear, they opened the panel to the processing unit and had me run the test one more time.

The same results appeared on my screen, but this time, they were accompanied by gasps.

“Find the problem?” I asked.

“I don’t think it’s a sensor,” said Wade.

“It’s not possible,” said Vanessa. “Like... not possible. We’re not using anywhere enough energy for something like that. And... it’s not... it’s...” She looked around, her face pale and eyes wide. “It’s not possible.” she finished.

I quickly edited the test so that it would continue until I stopped it and walked over to join them. I grabbed a pair of safety glasses and looked into the metallic chamber that housed our ion trap, our machine's center, and its central processing unit. Inside, I saw what I could only describe as a black hole. It rotated in the air, pulsing slightly with wisps of green and a purple light spiraling off of it.

“What the fuck is that,” I said. My surprise was enough to get Rebekah and even Selene interested, so they walked over.

“Wow,” said Selene. “Is it not supposed to look like that?”

“Definitely not,” said Vanessa.

“So, it’s a black hole?” Selene asked.

“Looks like one,” I said.

“It can’t be,” said Vanessa. “It’s too big. And it’s stable. And there is no gravitational force. It’s not bending the light around it, either. It’s... just..”

“A hole?” asked Rebekah.

“Can we patent it?” asked Selene. Everyone stopped and looked at her. “What? You found something new, so we patent it.”

“You don’t understand,” said Vanessa. “This is something completely new. There is no known physics to explain this. If we can figure out what’s happening and why, we can write the book on an entirely new branch of physics.”

Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.

“Well, I’m sure we can patent something,” Selene said.

“Clint,” said Vanessa, “What test is this anyway?”

“Oh,” I walked back to the laptop and looked. “Oh, this was one of the random ones I added to fill the time. Weird. It just hits the ion with multiple harmonic frequencies.”

“Frequencies?” asked Rebekah. “Like with music?”

“Yeah, We tune the lasers to specific frequencies to control the atoms. I thought using harmonic frequencies would look cool on the oscilloscope while testing.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” said Vanessa, who seemed to be having a panic attack. “It shouldn’t do anything!”

“I know,” I said

“Well,” said Wade, putting his hand on Vanessa’s shoulder to calm her down. “Let's find out why.”

It took six months and a small specialized team to figure out what was happening. First came the discovery that they could make the anomaly change by changing the frequency of additional lasers. Next came the real discovery that the outbursts weren't random but well-organized packets of data. It only took a few more months from that discovery to get to the point where we were actively able to scan through the data. It was then that the most critical information was discovered.

The group, by now, had condensed into mainly the heads of different teams. I was still on the team as the person who discovered the anomaly to begin with. Wade sat next to me, managing me, I guess. Tom, the VP of Engineering and the official team leader, was pacing the room. Vanessa, as the team physicist, was in the corner writing up papers that she might eventually get sent out to get published. Selene said she needed to be involved as the team's legal officer. And Rebekah just kept showing up, and everyone seemed to accept it. I started thinking of her as our mascot since she was good at cheering us on when we were frustrated at having far more questions than answers.

It was a good team. We worked well and were able to balance each other's workloads. I was always on the computer, with Wade supporting me during the day and spending his nights and weekends with his family. Tom complained about having one of our production machines offline, but as we progressed, he seemed to flip between needing to return the machine to service and wondering what the anomaly meant.

Everyone gathered as the big discovery was made. I projected my laptop on a large screen in the room, with the quantum computer humming away behind me. I wasn’t sure about the rest, but I felt myself holding my breath as the process indicator reached 100%.

Scan complete. Most likely format: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64

I sat staring at the screen. “This isn’t possible,” I said.

“Right?” blurted out Vanessa. “Right!? But why? What does that mean?”

“It’s a computer program,” I said. “There is probably a bug in my code. It must have been looking at other data.”

“What happens if you try to run it?” asked Tom.

“I don’t know. Assuming it’s not a bug in my code, I don’t think we downloaded it correctly, for lack of a better word. We don’t know how large the program is, or if we even started at the beginning.”

“Well, is there anything that you can tell us initially?” Tom asked.

“Well, if it’s a normal program, I can run a program called strings on it. It’ll look for comments and other basic text.” I responded.

“Well, do it,” Tom said.

“Oh, right.” I typed the command, and we all watched on the screen as the world changed.

“Is this a joke,” Tom eventually asked. I couldn't even respond and just shook my head. “You know what,” he said. “I'm out. I can't deal with this.”

The five remaining watched him leave and then turned back to the main screen, where the words seemed to glow.

Universe System Simulator.

Welcome to Universe System Simulator 0.8, where you can create and simulate entire worlds! From natural environments to civilizations, you control the evolution of life, societies, and ecosystems. Whether you’re crafting landscapes or directing the progress of cultures, the possibilities are endless.

“Um. I understand what that says,” said Rebekah, “But I don’t really understand it.”

I started scrolling through the rest of the text; nobody seemed ready to answer her. Maybe nobody wanted to actually say it aloud.

“We use those libraries in our code,” Wade said, pointing at a section of the screen.

I copied a few of the library names into a search bar, frowning at the results. “These libraries don’t exist. Their version numbers are far ahead of the latest versions of the code.”

I couldn't find any information about the machine itself or what parameters were used to start their existing simulation. Much of the text didn't make sense out of context, and the rest was just data.

I pushed the laptop away and turned around, almost surprised to see the rest of the team still sitting there. They had been silent witnesses to my research.

Rebekah raised her hand, and its incongruency almost made me start laughing. I felt it would be hard to stop if I started.

“I think It means,” I started, pausing slightly to organize my words, “is that we’re living in a simulation.”

“Why do you think that?” she asked. “I mean, what makes you sure?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “But it makes the most sense, even if it is kinda crazy. We’re getting the data from an anomaly...”

“That shouldn’t exist and in itself is an impossibility,” interjected Vanessa.

“Yeah,” I nodded. “And the data is too well organized. The libraries are at least 20 years in the future.”

“Oh,” said Rebekah. I think it was the first time I’ve ever seen her lost for words.

I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling. “What should we do now?”

"We could publish our results,” suggested Vanessa, her laptop still opened in front of her with notes.

“No, not now,” responded Selene. “We don't know how it will be used.”

Wade nodded, “If this is real and we really are in a simulation...”

The thought made everyone pause again. The idea that their entire existence was fake. Merely a video game for someone else, was hard to reconsile in their minds.

“We should study it more,” I said. “Find out more information.”

“You guys are much calmer than I am,” muttered Rebekah. “How are you not freaking out over this?”

I shrugged but noticed that not everyone was taking it so well. “Does it matter?”

“What do you mean?” said Rebekah. “Of course, it matters. We might not even be real?”

“Sure,” I replied. “But if we're not, does that change anything? Nobody here is going to just give up, right?”

“Nobody here,” said Wade, looking at the door and obviously thinking of Tom's departure.

“Well then,” continued Clint, “let's figure out what this is. Who knows, maybe we can learn more about our future. Maybe we can change things and give ourselves the lives we always wanted.”

“I'm living the life I wanted,” responded Rebekah. She looked at the rest and shrugged. “But I guess it makes sense. I have so many more questions, though.

“So do I,” I said. “So do we all, I think.” The rest nodded along.

“Ok, so let's go home. Call it an early day. I'll leave this dumping data, and we can start trying to decipher it later.”

“I need to talk to the board about Tom,” said Wade, ”and make sure we can keep the computer. The last thing we need now is to lose it.”

“What are you going to tell them?” asked Clint.

“We need to do more testing, and I have the Physics and Legal department behind me.” He laughed, but it felt strained. “Who knows, they might even believe it.”

“I wonder what Tom will tell them,“ said Rebekah, “if anything. Think he'll be back?”

Wade shrugged. “We'll figure that out when we need to.”

Rebekah nodded and started to gather her things.

“You guys should take whatever time you need,” said Wade. “We'll have time, and I think we won’t have any deadlines anymore.”

"I'll be back here tomorrow,” I said.

Wade nodded. “I'll come in too.”

“You can't kick me out now,” replied Rebekah.

“I'll be here,” said Selene and Vanessa almost simultaneously.

“OK, then. See you all in the morning.”

As a team, they left, each to ponder events on their own.