The ASES, or, the All-Seeing Eye Society, met every Wednesday night in the basement of an old building downtown. Now that I was known to the group, or more specifically, to the elderly woman in the wheelchair who stationed herself at the end of the shadowy marble-tiled corridor, I was allowed to bring a guest.

I pulled out my membership card with the society’s logo of that flying eyeball in the clouds. I held up the card, but the woman was looking at my face and not my card.

“Ah,” she said, smiling up at me. “You’re Fran’s friend from the other night. I never forget. And,” she pointed a bony finger towards Nora, “I see that you’ve brought a new initiate into our conclave of brethren and sistren. Another who seeks the truth.”

“I’m so happy to be here,” Nora said with a little curtsy.

“We’ll fix you up with your own membership card.” The woman turned to the folding table beside her and opened a small polished teak box. She removed a card which she gave to Nora. “No dues to be paid, no oaths to be made.” She passed Nora a pen. “Please, write your name on the verso. I’ll avert my head while you write. We respect anonymity.”

“That’s so sweet,” Nora chirped. She scribbled on the back of the card and slipped it into the breast pocket of her coverall.

The woman pulled from the side pocket of her wheelchair a bedraggled peacock feather, which she then waved feebly in the air above Nora’s head. Once the simple ritual was complete, she gestured for us to enter the meeting hall.

I felt somehow slighted, as no one had given me a feather benediction.

The grand wood-paneled room was dimly lit by a pair of red crystal chandeliers high above. The maroon carpet muffled our footsteps as we made our way past the rows of folding chairs which faced a slightly raised stage. I counted seventeen people scattered about the room on the hundred or so chairs. We chose a couple of chairs in the back row, near a table holding a large coffee urn and a solitary box of cookies.

We sat in silence, surrounded by the polite murmuring of conversations. I felt Nora’s elbow in my ribs.

“Falafel man,” she hissed. “Two o’clock.”

I tilted my head. There in the front row was Charlemagne DeWinter, unmistakable in his fez and rose-tinted glasses.

“I do believe you’re right,” I said.

I looked around the room and saw some other familiar faces from my previous visit.

“Remember how I told you the other day that they shoot a TV show in my building?” Nora’s voice remained low, still in her conspiratorial whisper.

“Sure.”

“Well, that man walking in right now works on the show.”

“Well, of course,” I said, absently. “You’d probably know them all by now.”

“What?”

“Because of your job,” I clarified. “I mean, everyone has to get on the elevator.”

“Now wait just a minute!” Nora’s voice rose as she cut her eyes at me. “I told you, I’m a technician. I’m not some darn operator, trapped in a little room all day, tipping my hat, morning sir, morning madam, what floor will it be? I’m a trained and respected specialist, servicing the upper transoms, greasing the back sides of the landing doors, checking the cable tension of the car slings. Yesterday we had to shut down shaft B, and I was hanging by a harness for about an hour tightening the bolts to the guide rail bracket. I’m an integral part of building operations, sir. Integral!”

“Of course.”

“He’s Raul,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“The man who just came in. Well, he’s sitting down, now. Right next to our friend, Charlemagne Falafel.”

“You say he works on that Serpientes y Escaleras show?”

Once this fellow Raul had situated himself next to the falafel vendor, he immediately became as nondescript as the folding chair in which he sat—the danger that comes from sitting beside someone much more flamboyant than yourself. But, when I looked closer, I saw there was something special about Raul. Handsome, certainly, with his pleasant face and dark complexion. And undeniably distinguished with a touch of gray at his temples and the stylish taper to his sport coat.

“Yes,” Nora said. “He works on the show. Costume department. Raul Somethingorother. Probably I could track down his last name.”

“I believe we’re to respect everyone’s anonymity here,” I cautioned her, at the very moment Fran walked up and clapped me on the back.

“My good friend, Morris! I see you’ve brought a guest.”

“I have,” I told him. “Fran, allow me to introduce—” I reached into Nora’s pocket and removed her All-Seeing Eye Society membership card. I suspected she was playing at being someone else. I turned it over and read aloud: “Shelvia Woolridge.”

“Well, Ms. Woolridge, or if I may, Shelvia—don’t really use surnames here—we have a treat in store for you tonight.” Fran gave her a wink. “Our guest speaker has some intriguing theories to challenge and perplex your worldview. Oh, and it looks like it’s time for the presentation!”

Fran hurried off.

“Maybe it’s going to be your friend from the show,” I said to Nora.

“I’m betting on the falafel guy,” she said, taking her membership card back from me.

“I doubt it. He spoke at the last meeting. It was all about the impending arrival of our alien overlords.”

“Looks like we’re both wrong,” Nora whispered, nodding her head towards the man walking down the aisle towards the lectern.

He was rail-thin, and in his hopsack blazer and light blue speckled cravat, he radiated the air of a southern lawyer. He moved with the focused energy of a younger man, but when he reached the front of the room, I saw him wince as he climbed the two steps to the stage on arthritic joints.

There was a scattering of polite applause.

Fran arrived too late to assist the guest speaker, but he crossed the stage with the older man. They both stood at the lectern for a moment, waiting for the room to fall silent.

“What a nice turnout this evening,” Fran said into the microphone. He scanned the audience with approval. “Most of you in this room have known me for years, but I do see a few fresh faces. And to those I say, welcome. My name is Francis, but please call me Fran. The All-Seeing Eye Society is run strictly by volunteers, so, if you have a small donation to cover our refreshments, there’s a little jar on the table beside the coffee carafe. Our restrooms are out the door, and immediately to the left. And for those newcomers, we do all hope you return. Think of this room as a zone of tolerance for all ideas, no matter how far-fetched or implausible. As we all know, we live in implausible times. No doubt we all have people in our lives with no interest in our inquiries as to what has happened to the world. They care little when we speak of our notions concerning the Changes.”

Morris saw heads bobbing, and he heard murmurs of agreement.

“That’s why our organization is important,” Fran continued. “Without the All Seeing Eye Society, we would—each one of us—feel so very alone. Of course there are other groups scattered about. But they are narrow in their assessment as to what is going on—or, what they gather is going on. And because most of those groups hold deeply dogmatic tenants, they seem to many of us in this room as religions more than anything else. But we are seekers, not zealots. Each one of us gathered tonight might have strong feelings of one theory above another as to the true nature of the world after the Changes, but not one person who I have met and spoken to in this room feels he or she has a complete picture. So, please, listen with an open mind to our guest speaker. Some of his words, his ideas, might be just what you came here tonight to hear. Without further preamble, allow me to introduce Warren P.”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

As Fran backed away, giving a slight bow to the audience, the guest speaker stepped to the lectern.

“Warren P.,” the man muttered with a smile. “Makes me feel like we’re in some sort of support group. Which I guess we are. My name’s Warren Pruitt. I’m an electrical engineer and software developer by trade. Not much call for such work these days, so I suppose I’m retired.

“Me being up here in front of you fine folks has been a long time coming. I’ve known Fran for a years. He’s been chipping away at my resolve. And, well, here I am.”

Warren paused a moment to look down at Fran who had made himself comfortable in a chair on the front row.

“Back before the Changes,” he said, continuing, “I worked in a government-funded lab known as the Center for Quantum Information and Control. And now the laboratory, and, to the best of my knowledge, the United States of America, are no longer viable institutions, I feel I am no longer bound by the raft of non-disclosure forms I signed during my tenure.”

I noticed that most of the audience members leaned forward in silent fascination, ready to learn classified secrets. I realized I was doing the same.

“We were tasked with utilizing an obscure property of quantum coupling so we might observe particles or events below the Planck length,” he continued. “I called this property quantum lensing. Co-authored a paper on it, even. There was the possibility that we might discover that we do not live in a naturally occurring universe, but in fact inside a computer simulation. Strange to think that trained men of science would pursue such questions for a living. Now if all this sounds bizarre, you don’t know quantum mechanics.”

Warren chuckled, looking out into the audience as would a standup comedian who had just delivered a dependable punchline.

“Oh my goodness,” Nora whispered in my ear. “He’s adorable!”

“Put aside, for a moment, the existential implications. We were not concerned with matters of philosophy. We were engineers. Besides, if we proved that the universe was a vast digital simulation, the practical applications to be exploited were absolutely staggering. Of course, that was a big if. You see, this could only exist if space-time were quantized, meaning that at some infinitesimally short duration, time was discrete. Can you imagine that? That the universe might be composed of an outrageously large number of frozen moments, like a multidimensional flip book?

“It was all fringe theory, I should make this clear. We had no real expectations that it would turn out to be true. Indeed, the study was wrapping up, with no interesting data discovered. To the very outer limit of our technology, there seemed no indication that space-time was quantized. Even using my quantum lensing techniques. We were just at the point of putting to rest once and for all the notion of a simulated universe, when the Changes happened.

“Now, we all know, it’s hard to get any two people to agree on what happened during the early, chaotic days of the Changes. It seems like each one of us has had unique experiences, often quite divergent from others. This makes it difficult to generate a robust empirical model, phenomenologically speaking. What I, personally, can attest is that in our laboratory we began to witness what appeared to be an emerging quantization of time. A granular quality began to coalesce around 7 femtoseconds. This phenomenon had not been there before. But it was real, I assure you. We had a sister lab in Sweden replicate our results. This was April of 2020. Before any of the anomalous manifestations that soon came to dominate everyone’s life. This was two or three weeks before all hell began to break loose.”

My attention began to wander sometime around the phrase “an emerging quantization of time,” and as Warren Pruitt began delving into a version of string theory with “eleven spatial dimensions, and two temporal dimensions,” I was wondering if I could manage not to attract too much attention with a trip to the snack table.

Nora seemed of the same mind. We both rose to our feet and snuck to the back of the room. As we sipped coffee and nibbled on cookies we watched the audience mesmerized by the man at the lectern. He began to expound upon his theory, speculating that before the Changes, we all lived in a simulation.

“A video game of such sophistication as to be beyond human comprehension. That’s why we missed it in the lab. It had been running at such a level of speed and complexity that our equipment couldn’t detect it. And then something happened. System failure? User error? It was like playing some seamless 3D video game with 128-bit graphics and something happened and everything dropped to an 8-bit processing rate. Anyone here remember Space Invaders? Of course, such analogies are moot. Computer games are all gone, now. Thanks to the Changes. Gone like the internet and the compact disc.

“It’s unsettling, I know, to think that each one of us is in actuality an artificial mind generated by ones and zeros. Whether we have free will or not, I have no idea. But I am convinced that before the Changes we shared this simulated world with millions, billions of people who weren’t people. Not sentient like us. What is it that the kids would call the characters who moved around their computer games like so many extras in a movie scene? Non-player characters? Yes. NPCs for short. And I would postulate that as those novel and irrational events—what we called the Changes—were a clear indication that somewhere outside of our universe, perhaps in some other dimension, something had gone wrong. Something went screwy on that super-duper supercomputer running our cosmos. Hardware, software? Maybe a power outage? That system failure reduced our universe to only the real players—the sentient ones. Us. All of those secondary characters in our lives had all been deleted, purged from the memory. Those cities and countries we had never visited? Gone. Were they ever there at all? And for the worst period of the Changes, before the chaos settled down—well, for the most part—we were at the whims of the principal players, those of us who remained. All of the nonsense we might believe in became manifest, be it ghosts, telepathy, even house cats with the power of human speech. There were no safeguards in the programming.”

He paused for a moment to let his words sink in.

“Well,” Warren said, scanning the room. “I was asked to set aside time for questions from the audience.”

Immediately half a dozen hands shot up.

“Don’t you want to raise your hand?” Nora asked. “Get some clarification?”

“About talking cats? Or quantum lensing?”

Before Nora could respond, Fran walked up, leaning in to snag a cookie.

“Some wonderful words, wouldn’t you agree?” he asked us both.

“I do believe you said the same thing last week,” I said, “about that Charlemagne fellow and his alien theories.”

“I did indeed. An open mind will not stagnate. And as we live in wondrous times, it stands to reason that a multiplicity of small truths might move us to the greater truth.” Fran pivoted around and looked out across the room. He lifted a hand in a paternal manner. “Each of us has a piece to the puzzle. See that gentleman down front? The one I was sitting beside?”

“Raul?” Nora asked.

“So you’ve met him,” Fran said, eyeing Nora with newfound respect. “He has some very interesting information. He’s hesitant, but I’ll get him on stage eventually. And I’ll have you each at the podium, too. Just watch.”

At that point, voices were being raised at the front of the room.

Fran hurried away from us.

Nora and I followed.

A young man stood on the floor at the edge of the stage looking up at the speaker.

“So, let me get this straight, Pruitt,” he was saying with his hands on his hips. “All the people who have disappeared because of the Changes were, what was the phrase, non-player characters? Just some digital fabrications? Little more than set design? Well, I can assure you, my grandmother was nothing of the sort. She was sound in mind, body, and spirit when she vanished during the Changes. Not only will I not have some armchair theorizer slander my family’s good name, I will also not quietly sit here as you gin out some preposterous speculations which are so easy to disprove!”

Fran stepped up on stage and eased himself beside Warren Pruitt so he could speak into the microphone.

“I think we’ve run out of time for this evening’s convocation. Let’s have a big round of applause for Warren P.”

Mr. Pruitt bowed to the warm applause and left the stage.

“I should remind our audience,” Fran continued, “it is unlikely that any one of our speakers will bring with him or her the single and complete answer to the questions we all have. We share ideas, here. This is a forum for the free exchange of information.” Fran looked down at the young man who still held his ground at the edge of the stage. “And if anyone has any issues with the content of these meetings, please discuss them privately with myself or Ms. Maribel V., who you meet at the door.”

The young man snorted at that and walked off.

“There are still plenty of refreshments at the back of the room,” Fran said. He then added something about raffle tickets before he left the stage.

I decided to sit down in an empty chair next to Raul. Nora remained standing just a few feet away, watching me with mild curiosity.

“I understand we have a mutual friend,” I said to the man beside me.

Raul blinked. He realized he was being spoken to, and he turned around.

“Pardon?” Raul looked at me, scanning my face, my hands, my clothes. And then he noticed Nora.

“Ah,” Raul said with a smile. He then raised his voice loud enough so she could hear as well. “If it isn’t the assistant to the building superintendent at La Vida Tower.”

“Elevator technician will do just fine,” Nora said with a dip of her head.

“Oh, no,” I corrected Raul. “Not her.”

“Hey!” said Nora, crossing her arms.

“I’m speaking of Silverio Moreno.”

“Well,” Raul said with a wry smile. “A friend of Silverio Moreno? A rare bird, indeed, I’d think.”

“Morris Fisher,” I said, giving him my name.

Raul introduced himself, as well, and he shook my hand.

“And this is Shelvia,” I said.

“Shelvia is my All-Seeing name,” Nora said. “My real name is Nora.”

“Of course it is,” Raul said with a warm grin. “It’s stitched on your coveralls.”

“What?” She blushed when she looked down and saw Nora embroidered on her chest.

“Fran was telling me you have some interesting theories about the Changes,” I said to Raul.

“Silverio Moreno, Rose, and now Fran? Sir, it looks like we have quite a few friends in common. As for my so-called interesting theories, well, that seems quite a stretch. What I would enjoy, would be the opportunity to discover what other people or things we might have in common. Let’s meet for drinks or dinner some evening.” He scribbled his phone number on a piece of paper and gave it to me. Then he stood up. “However, it’s getting late, and I’m no night owl.”

Raul patted me on the shoulder, gave Nora a gentlemanly bow, and he politely excused himself.

“Had enough of the All-Seeing Eye Society Tonight?” I asked, turning to Nora.

“Let’s give it ten more minutes. The angry guy’s still skulking around. He’s gonna sucker punch Mr. Pruitt any minute, wanna bet?”