Jaysn landed hard on his side with his limbs stretched in every direction, ears ringing from the shockwave of the explosion, and his left shoulder protesting from where he landed on it. He’d half-agreed with Tamana’s choice, but half-hoped some divine act of intervention–whether from the way the disk modified them for this world, or maybe the will of their unseen hosts—would somehow have caused the charge not to work and save his friend from her own pride. He lay face down in the dirt and grass for a moment, consumed with grief, anger, and pain. Instinctively, a part of his mind was screaming for him to get up and keep moving, but his body told him it was through, at least for the few moments he needed to process everything that was happening. Exhausted and defeated, he forced himself to roll over.
Before he even opened his eyes, he felt his world had frozen.
Not just his world, he decided. The universe itself felt like it had paused. Something was drastically wrong. He forced his eyes open. The scene looked like a holophoto of an explosion. Everything was bathed in a sickly orange glow. The dwindling end of a fireball hung, frozen in midair, its unflickering flames illuminating crumbling bits of obelisk suspended around an ugly ball of smoke. The smoke refused to dissipate, merely daring the laws of physics to argue with it.
Villagers, some caught in the blast and frozen mid-burn, others not yet even aware the explosion had occurred, were preserved in their innocence.
“Jaysn?!” The voice was the only sound, seeming to be everywhere at once. It was Novik. “Are you okay?”
Jaysn whirled his head to see the drone walking toward him. Solvig, apparently lucid now, was walking close behind. On his other side, he saw that Clarc and Wolff were still lying on the ground, but also moving as they recovered their senses. The five of them were the only things moving as far as they could see. Everything else in the world had gone silent.
“What is this?” Jaysn said, suddenly realizing the pain from hitting the ground had vanished, as had the ringing in his ears from the explosion. He made his way to Wolff and held out his hand to help him up.
“Are we dead?” Wolff asked.
“Listen to me,” Solvig said impatiently, practically blurting it. “I made contact with the person who is running all of this. None of it is real. We’re inside a simulation.”
The three of them stared at each other. Clarc scowled. “Like the Phrame? Whose idea of a sick joke is this?! Whom did you speak to?”
Solvig was impatient. “It was … he sees himself as an ‘Overseer.’ Not a god, not a control program, more of a custodian or a shepherd. The point is, we’re not supposed to be here. It’s not meant for us. I sense that we’re hurting him by being here.”
Jaysn clasped his hands. “Fine, so let’s have him reconstitute our deceased friends and send us home. We’ll worry about the philosophical implications of being trapped in alien computers from a nice, comfortable conference room, someone over a decent pot of coffee. I don’t suppose he gave you a way to pull up the equivalent of a personal interface HUD and exit back to our real bodies?”
“You mean the bodies suffocating in that cave back on LT-9?” Clarc said, staggering over to him, pointing to the distant cliffs where two of the large ornithoids hovered midair. “At least they were kind enough to pause the game while we think it through.”
Novik’s head was darting around rapidly as sensors attempted to make sense of the scene. “Again, I am very certain I saw your bodies vanish from that cave. There may not be any going back.”
They all looked at each other, confused. Then the universe winked.
It was daylight again. The five stood in a semi-circle with Tamana at the entrance to the village, a few hundred meters from where they had been a second ago.
“What is this?!” Tamana asked.
“Disha?!” Jaysn exclaimed, resisting the urge to hug her out of relief. “I think we’re getting a rollback.”
Tamana said nothing, but pointed at the obelisk, now on the other side of the village from their position, very much still intact and untouched. The charge didn’t go off.”
“Oh, it went off,” Clarc nodded. “Then … it didn’t.”
Tamana looked at the others. Concern crept over her face. “How is that possible?”
Novik’s head continued to scan and record everything around them. “We have reason to believe that we’re inside a simulation. The person controlling it appears to be attempting to undo recent actions.”
There was a familiar scream from the village. A group of villagers appeared from behind a hut, dragging the hysterical form of Umar Amin, driving him back toward the obelisk.
“That’s not the way it happened,” Wolff observed. We were over there, right next to them. You four weren’t even here.”
“It doesn’t matter. This may be our chance to save him!” Jaysn said as he and Wolff both broke into a run towards the scene. Wolff had already drawn his sidearm and was aiming it, waiting for a clear shot.
There was another flash, and the universe blinked again.
They were back on the other side of the village. It was night again. This time, Tamana was standing on the other side of the group, positioned between them and the still-intact obelisk. She held the explosive charge in one hand, her detonator in the other. Amin and his assailants had vanished. The remaining humanoids watched her intently.
“Disha,” Jaysn pleaded. “You need to put the charge down. You did something. I don’t know what, but I don’t think it was a good thing.”
Tamana regarded the brick of explosives in her hand, puzzled, then back to Jaysn and the others. “I know exactly what I’m doing. I remember doing it. So, I must have done it.”
Clarc looked closely at the obelisk. “I don’t think that obelisk is just a tool for controlling villagers and constructing bricks out of matter. I must be part of the machinery that is key to this simulation.”
A sound like synthetic thunder cracked through the air.
It was dusk, or possibly dawn. Torrential rain poured down from above, but not the kind Jaysn had ever seen on any planet. It fell with a hiss of white noise, like a thousand voices whispering at once. The village was already knee-deep in water, which slowly rose and inched toward the six of them. Villager huts slumped on their sides, fell over, and disintegrated to glittering motes that settled into the water, except that it wasn’t quite water. It had a metallic shimmer that wasn’t random and waves that moved with intent and purpose. He knew instantly that the flood was somehow a living thing.
Jaysn noted that, despite standing in a torrential downpour, he remained dry. The drops, which fell straight down, rolled off him and down the hill where they joined the creeping advance of the floodwaters. None of the drops falling from the sky made so much as a ripple when they hit the surface of the water.
Jaysn found he had to shout to be heard over the din. “Lev, what is this?”
“They appear to be some kind of nanoparticle swarm. They’re reacting like a caustic acid reacting with everything they touch, except for the six of us.”
“Acid rain?” Clarc asked.
“Not precisely. They behave like acid, but I’m not detecting any chemical reactions or byproducts. It’s more like they’re just erasing matter. Probably converting it to stored energy.”
They watched as a tendril of the water rose and climbed up a large tree in front of them, completely engulfing it, then gradually receded. The tree stood firm for a moment before it began slowly dissolving into tiny particles moments after the liquid tide retreated.
One of the ornithoid creatures roared in the distance. They all turned and watched it struggle, fall, and disintegrate into dust before it hit the ground.
“This is not good,” Clarc said, scanning their only direction of retreat. “We should probably think about getting back to the archway and re-enter the city.”
There was a hiss as the waters rose up to form a giant wave, and the universe blinked once again.
It was night. The six of them stood in a wide circle at their camp near the gateway back to the city, kilometers away from where they had been a few seconds ago. They all looked around, attempting to reorient themselves.
Solvig was the first to scream in surprise and shock.
Jaysn turned. She was holding her hands in front of her face and squinting at something in the middle of their camp that only she could see, but was blinding her. “Dr. Solvig, what is it?” He looked at the others. They were all staring at the ground in the middle of the circle, each with a different expression. Novik was still tilting his head as he ran scans.
“It’s like the sun,” she whispered. “It’s so bright. I think it’s him, the Overseer.”
“That’s no overseer. It’s feral. Nobody move,” Clarc said deliberately and calmly. She stood motionless, looking skyward into nothingness. “Its pupils aren’t dilating, but they aren’t constricting either.”
“Pupils!?” Novik asked.
“Hello there,” Clarc said to nothingness. “You’re a very impressive predator. We’re not prey, though. We were just leaving.”
“Predator?” Jaysn insisted that he couldn’t see anything where she was looking, just grass and dirt.
“I’m sorry, I don’t recognize your authority, Sir,” Wolff said. He was standing tall, at attention, speaking directly to someone in front of him.
Jaysn arched an eyebrow. “Okay, this is very odd. Lev, what are they looking at? Do your scans pick up anything?”
Novik rolled backward and regarded Jaysn. “An … abstraction? A rule? The kind of thing whose underlying equation would take more lines to represent than language contains, so you just call it ‘knowledge’ to let yourself sleep at night.”
“Not helpful, old friend.”
Novik’s head turned directly toward Jaysn. “An impossible object with six dimensions attempting to exist in our three-dimensional space, or possibly a projection of something even more complex, similar to how the disk appeared to have higher dimensions. It’s an elegant solution, however, and I would hardly call it a predator or blinding. What do you see?”
Jaysn squinted and tilted his head. There still wasn’t anything there as near as he could tell. Tamana stood next to him again, having suddenly returned to the group after running off two hiccups ago. The charge and detonator in her hands said she was ready to destroy whatever form decided to appear before her; her eyes showed only calm wonder.
“What do you see, Disha?”
“The mother tree. The heart of the mycorrhizal network. She’s beautiful.”
Jaysn looked into the nothingness, hoping to catch a glimpse of whatever the others were seeing. Seconds later, out of what looked like a fold in the middle of reality, he found himself staring directly into the expressionless eyes of an ivory mask. It almost looked like one of the old Japanese Ko-omote masks, whose expression was meant to change subtly through the actor’s movements. It regarded him, its orientation shifting multiple times as it sized him up.
“Nobody moves,” Clarc said, slowly stepping backward.
The mask vanished. Jaysn stood ready to face whatever predator had finally scared Clarc, but saw nothing. However, he felt the terror this time. Grass prickled like fur. Trees bent as if preparing to leap. The valley around them, everything they stood in the middle of, had awakened, the the six of them were now the focus of its attention. Jaysn was no zoologist, but even he could sense, not really hostility, but sheer power. “It’s sizing us up,” he said, understanding now. “It’s telling us that it can take us any time it wants and wants to see what we’re going to do.”
Instantly, a miniature sun appeared in the center of their circle, a ball of intense light. The light became a uniformed man holding a clipboard. The man became a swirling mass of lines and curves. The curves became a giant tree bearing multiple types of fruit that ripened, fell off, and regrew while he watched. Then, without explanation, the expressionless mask reappeared.
“So, let me guess, you’re none of those things,” Jaysn said to the mask, half laughing.
“Same stimulus, six distinct narratives,” a hollow voice answered. “You’d probably call it ‘rich symbolic cognition’ and then bore your colleagues into peer-reviewing your paper on it. I just call it ‘selective perception,’” the mask said.
The others turned and looked at Jaysn.
“I heard him. Yours talks to you? Why does yours talk?” Tamana asked.
Novik’s voice remained analytical. “What do you see, Jaysn?”
“I think his answer was meant to imply: ‘Whatever gets our attention.’”
The mask turned to orient itself at Tamana. “You’re an aggravatingly diverse species, and incredibly noisy.”
“Noisy?” Clarc asked.
There was a sudden explosion, instantly recognizable as the charge they had heard a few moments ago, which blew up the obelisk in the village. Tamana flushed slightly.
“It was quiet before you showed up,” the mask continued, then spun to face Solvig. “Then you go test things you shouldn’t, out of sheer curiosity.”
Solvig frowned. “You’re the Overseer. The one who tried to talk to me?”
The mask tilted upward slightly. “More like I kept you from making stifado out of your cerebral cortex when you tried to take in everything at once.”
“Stifado?! That’s a family dish.” Jaysn looked incredulously at the mask. “You’ve imprinted on me, specifically?”
“Yes, you are the easiest to interpret of them. I mostly get metaphors from your colleagues — except the Nirmata, of course, but he is of a different order than you.” The mask nodded toward Novik. “That makes you my primer: Anthropologist. Wine connoisseur. Part-time philosopher. Scientist. Terribly biased sample, but you do talk to yourself a lot, so it’s a good frame of reference.”
“Metaphors,” Jaysn nodded. “So, Tamana sees the mother tree. Clarc sees the apex predator. Those seem to be opposing concepts. Which of them is interpreting you incorrectly?”
The mask chuckled softly. “Tamana sees a guardian node, a nurturing network. Clarc perceives an ecological optimizer. Can’t I be both, as well as Wolff’s bureaucratic authority and Solvig’s ancient symbol of power and renewal?”
Jaysn nodded, “Archetypes, like the serpents, and fire columns, and shadows. I’m not familiar with the significance of the theater mask, however.”
The mask nodded. “This is you. The shifting perception. Right now, you’re trying very hard not to judge me, because you’re afraid of being wrong in the paper you’re going to write. It’s your oldest trick: Multiple hypotheses; no commitment until the data forces your hand.”
Jaysn rolled his eyes. “I always knew God would have my sense of humor, if not my entire personality, it seems.”
“Not, God, not even a god. I am ‘Overseer’ to Dr. Solvig there.”
“So, what are you? Evolved being? The supercomputer that built this place?”
“If I were either of those things, we wouldn’t need to be having this discussion right now. I’d be able to handle the repercussions of the noise and fix the problems you’re causing.”
Jaysn held up his hands. “To be fair, we didn’t know our presence bothered you. However, we’re not making noise right now. We’ve stopped blowing things up, and we’re speaking very calmly. Not even shouting.”
“No, it’s done. I’ve just paused the moment so we may speak.” The mask’s tone was beginning to sound frustrated and possibly a little unhinged. “You’re so difficult. Before you arrived, there were no metaphors. It was order: eat, sleep, reproduce, die. No noise. No suffering.”
“No suffering?!” Tamana scoffed. “Well, I’m sorry I freed all your happily ignorant slaves, but if you know Jaysn’s mind, you know why I did it.”
“We had a covenant. They had a purpose. There was acceptance.”
“You were killing those people and using them for building blocks toward their own extinction.”
“They weren’t people. You’ve made them people, and now we have noise. You’ve given this valley questions and stimuli that it isn’t prepared to process. They’re no longer suffering with purpose. A large percentage of them are going to go insane because of what you did.”
“How large?” Tamana asked.
“Does it matter? Do you have a preferred number in mind? One that tips what you’ve done from a bad outcome for all of them to something your pride can justify?” The Overseer sounded frustrated for the first time.
“There isn’t a hard number, but there is a number.” Jaysn offered.
“That may be, but you’re playing under my rules now. There is only one decision.”
“Those flashes we had.” This time it was Novik who spoke up. “You’re rolling back causality. You want her to change her mind about blowing up the obelisk. You tried to go as far back as undoing Dr. Amin’s death to incentivize her, but something in the system prevented you from doing that. There are rules to this universe that even you can’t break. I suspect the same rules also keep you from simply changing her mind. She has to agree to this, and she has to do it now while none of the villagers have registered what she did.”
The mask turned to Novik and nodded subtly. “Of course. I assumed you knew this.”
“If she does agree, does that fix everything? We simply get a do-over? Is that permitted in the rules of the simulation?”
“There is no time for questions. She must decide now. My control has limits.”
“Disha, I don’t want to watch you die a second time,” Jaysn pleaded. “This may not have been the heroic act you thought it was. Just put the charge down, and we’ll find another way to fix all this.”
Tamana looked at him apologetically. “I made a decision. It was the right one. If this thing is right, at least some good does come from it. Truth. Knowledge. That’s what my life is, not the whim of dictators like him. They were suffering, whether they knew it or not.”
“Tamana, they’re just bits in a program. They’re not even real. Your sacrifice doesn’t really mean anything.”
Tamana glared at Jaysn accusingly. “I can’t believe you would say that. You of all people. That’s your gift, Jaysn. You live for moments. You love without the guarantee of reciprocation.” She pointed toward Novik, then turned back. “Whether this is a simulation or not doesn’t negate my choice. It makes it imperative.”
Jaysn shook his head. “I don’t understand.”
“She’s correct, Jaysn,” he said calmly. “Our discovery here has implications far beyond this valley.” He turned his optics toward the suspended fireball and the frozen villagers. “We have unambiguously discovered that an alien civilization has created a simulation this detailed. The statistical argument of whether our universe is also a simulation changes dramatically.”
Clarc frowned. “You’re saying because they built one…?”
“Yes. If one technological species is capable of running a universe-scale simulation, then it becomes increasingly likely that many such simulations exist.” Novik paused to find the right words. “At least one of three propositions must be true. Almost no civilization reaches a level where it can produce such a simulation. Or, civilizations that reach that level chose not to run simulations of ancestors. Or, we’re almost certainly the simulation in one of those two examples. If most civilizations run even a small number of these simulations, already simulated minds outnumber biological minds, or put another way, the odds are greater that the observer is in one of millions of simulations and not a singular base reality.”
Tamana’s eyes were nothing more than steadfast resolve now. “Either way, it doesn’t matter. Those humanoids are as real as you and I, and they’re at least as alive as Lev. I’m giving them their chance. They need to be able to answer their suffering. I’m sorry if you disagree with me. I’m sorry if I’ve betrayed you in doing this, but… they were suffering. They’re still going to suffer now, but at least now they can answer it.”
“This is your pride again, Disha. This is you deciding you know what’s best for everyone.”
“Or maybe,” she said calmly, tilting her head cautiously to the Overseer, “I’m only saying they should have the right to decide that for themselves.”
Jaysn felt his eyes well up. No matter what he said, he was not winning this argument.
“If I have indeed made a mistake,” she continued, “then I have a feeling you’re meant to be the one to clean it up.” She hefted the explosive in her left hand, regarded it for a moment, then turned and walked down the path to the village. The others stood still, watching.
“You don’t necessarily disagree with her, do you?” the Overseer asked.
Jaysn wiped a tear from his eye before it fell. “You’ve imprinted on me. You know I trust her and regard her as a mentor.” He scoffed. “No, I really can’t find fault with her argument, and I admire her courage for making that stand and for not backing down when offered a do-over. I doubt I would have been so resolute.”
There was a pause, then the Overseer’s voice changed tone. “Well then, I’m sorry for what must come next. I offered you a chance. You squandered it.”
Solvig gasped. “No, wait, you can’t.”
“Sorry, Doctor, you know what has to happen next.” The Overseer’s voice contained neither remorse nor malice.
Jaysn suddenly pieced it together. “The flood. That nanite rain. You would destroy this entire valley and all of the humanoids in it!?”
“It’s the reason I showed her the tree.” The mask nodded.
“So, wait …what?!” Clarc pulled at her hair. “I get that it’s all connected. The trees, the fungi, the wildlife, the humanoids. If she messes with one, the repercussions spread to every ecosystem on the planet. Even if a large percentage of the humanoids die off, and their crops stop getting planted, the insect life will just shift to find new plants to pollinate. Without the steady supply of seeds, the birds’ diet will change, and they’ll just migrate in search of ample food. Using less water for agriculture will cause geographic and ecological shifts, but different fish species will thrive. Life will adapt. It’s what life does. If you just give it a few—”
“It is noise. It is trauma.”
“It’s nature!” Solvig insisted. “What’s the point of this experiment if you don’t respect the outcome and destroy it?”
“This is not an experiment,” the Overseer said calmly, then turned back to Jaysn. “Your childhood pet. A dog, if I remember correctly. It grew old and ill and had to be euthanized. You cried. You were emotionally hurt for weeks afterward. Yet you still did it, and now you accept that it was the right thing to do, because it was mercy, just as this is. I’ve learned that mercy from you.”
Before Jaysn could protest, the universe blinked again.
Jaysn was lying on his side where he hit the ground. His shoulder ached. His ears were ringing. He forced himself to roll over in time to see the last remnant of the fireball fold in on itself, the smoke dissipated, and the last few pieces of the shattered obelisk hit the ground like rain.
