Part 3: Final Boss / Chapter 30

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“It’s crazy, but . . . maybe it’s not,” Darla said. “Maybe it really is a simulation.”

“Maybe what’s a simulation?”

“All of it,” she answered cryptically as she retrieved the scattered, blood-soaked pages of the printout from the floor around the card table. Last time I’d seen it, it was lying on the desk in our hotel room.

“How did that—”

But she waved off the question before I could finish it, as she organized the printout into a tidy stack and started flipping through the pages, searchingly.

“When the Russians were about to stage my death by maritime mishap—”

“What?”

“It’s not important. What’s important is what happened in my head.”

“Something happened in your head?”

“Something about fear or heightened emotions,” she said as she scanned the pages. “It like . . . unlocked my brain.”

“Can you read more of that stuff?”

“I can read all of it. In fact, I’m the only one who can read any of it.”

She held up one of the pages and I saw a passage highlighted—a passage of pure gibberish.

“Okay,” I said. “So . . . what exactly is the printout?”

“It’s like my uncle somehow hacked into a data lake and pulled down a bunch of bits and pieces of news stories. They’re jumbled, out of order, but . . . ”

She paused, as she found the passage she was after. She read it aloud.

“With Goliath’s ’Project Do-Over’ beta, players see themselves relive life better.”

She looked at me, with a wide-eyed expression of trepidation. I looked back, clueless.

“I don’t . . . what’s Project Do-Over?”

She nodded uncomfortably, then continued reading.

“Leveraging NeuroVista’s resurgent brain scan tech, Goliath’s new AI engine produces digital doppelgangers with true consciousness, who believe themselves to be real people, living in the eighty-some years between 1959 and the present.”

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“Eighty-some years between . . . ” I said. “That would make the present two thousand forty-something.”

“Maybe it is,” she said. “In the real world.”

She waited for it to sink in. And then it did.

“Are you telling me . . . ” I started, but didn’t know how to phrase it. “You think we’re the digital dopplegangers? You don’t think this is real? You don’t think we’re real?”

She shrugged, at a loss.

“I mean . . . this printout makes a lot of predictions. And a bunch of them haven’t panned out. But . . . ”

“A bunch of them have.”

She nodded.

“When I read it, I thought it was ridiculous—some kind of elaborate prank,” she said. “But underneath that it felt like . . . ”

“Like what?”

“Like it felt when I saw you. Genuine. True.”

The subtext warmed my heart. But the main text was a problem.

“So I’m supposed to believe we’re not real people?”

“No,” Darla answered. “I . . . I think we are. I mean I think there’s a version of us that is. And they got scanned and . . . ”

“No,” I said. “No. This is impossible.”

“More impossible than your RIP stuff really happening in a real world?”

That stopped me cold. She was right. The things that had happened in the last forty-eight hours had broken every law of reality as I knew it. But was the only explanation that I was living in the Matrix or the Oasis or whatever sci-fi trope you want to pick?

“So you and me, we’re just avatars of the real us, somewhere up there?” I said pointing to the sky. “And what about everybody else?”

I looked around at the bodies all over the warehouse. “These guys? Merrick? My sister?” I couldn’t bring myself to add Robbie to the list, as if saying his name out loud would make him more likely to be a figment of some MMO server’s imagination.

“I don’t know,” she answered, looking down at the printout. “This is a jumbled mess and I haven’t even read the whole thing.”

But I wasn’t listening.

“And how is RIP supposed to fit into that equation?” I railed. “Why is it happening to me? And why are you some kind of prophet?”

She just shrugged timidly but I pressed on, starting to shout now.

“You want me to believe that we’re not even here? That nothing really exists? Nothing really matters? There’s another explanation. There’s a hundred other explanations!”

“You’re right,” she said. But while her words agreed with me, her face didn’t. And I wanted her face to agree with me.

“It’s all a dream!” I posited. “Or I’m hallucinating all of this and you’re having a concurrent paranoid schizophrenic episode. All the real evidence is plain as day. Your uncle was nuts and you are too.”

She recoiled at that, anguish surfacing in her eyes. I finally understood that I was beating up on the only person I had to hang on to in a world gone mad. But I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t accept what she was saying. I could conceive of my own mind going screwy. I could even half-way believe some magical being was intruding on reality, manipulating it. But the notion that our whole world didn’t even exist? It was a bridge too far. Still, as Darla took a step back from me, I wished I hadn’t said what I’d said.

“Darla, I didn’t mean to . . . ”

“I know,” she said.

“I just . . . ”

I didn’t know what else to say. But a moment later my phone rang and our conversation stopped mattering.

Robbie was in a coma.