by Richard Cox
“Just so we can go to lunch?”
“Do you have plans?”
She pauses ever so slightly, stabbing me with a dagger of time.
“You’re drunk.”
“And?”
“And you’re trying to make up with me by suggesting lunch.”
“We haven’t been communicating.”
“Baby, I asked you to lunch a thousand times,” Gloria says. “You always had an excuse. Why the sudden change?”
“I was wrong to not go, so I’m trying to make up for it. Do you not want to go?”
“I’ll go.”
For a while I’m able to tolerate the silence raining down on us. But only a little while.
“I was thinking about that show we watched last night, the one about the prison.”
“You were?”
“I was thinking about how my cubicle is smaller than those cells are. Like I’m really in prison and I just don’t realize it.”
“I know the feeling.”
“And it doesn’t help that I get paid to be a peeping Tom.”
“Babe,” Gloria says, smiling now. “How are you a peeping Tom?”
“I review web browsing habits and try to predict how users might purchase in the future, and then—”
“Oh, babe. Stop.”
“But I don’t think you understand the boredom. Every morning I wake up earlier than I want. I shower, dress, leave for battle. Except my battle is to beat traffic lights before they turn red. I hunt and gather in a six-by-eight-foot gray box. The highlight of my day is picking out what food I want in the cafeteria.”
“Babe.” Giggling harder.
“I mean, really. Do you want some Johnny snooping around the Internet, watching every little thing you look at? To send you emails because you looked at a certain sprinkler? If you need a sprinkler, you’ll buy one. Why do you need me to convince you? And the more stuff I convince you to buy, the more I get paid so I can buy more stuff. And if I don’t want very much stuff, then clearly I’m a communist who hates America.”
I’m hoping Gloria will see my position, feel empathy for me. In my wildest dreams she would tell me to quit my job if it bothers me that much, and I would tell her what happened today.
But instead she stops laughing and uses my real name again.
“Thomas.”
“Yes?”
“Are you feeling all right?”
“What do you mean? Do I look sick?”
“I don’t mean physically sick. I mean emotionally. Have you ever thought about talking to someone?”
“I’m talking to you right now.”
“No, baby, I mean a therapist.”
“Why the hell would I need a therapist?”
“Well,” she says. “You seem a little upset—”
“Everyone gets frustrated, Gloria. We all have our freak-out moments.”
“Well, I was going to say—before you cut me off—I was going to say you seem a little upset over nothing. We all get tired of our jobs. We all get tired of fighting traffic. But we don’t all come home on Monday and get drunk and play strange video games.”
“It’s not a video game.”
“What is it, then?”
“A simulation. Sort of like SimCity, I guess. Do you remember when we used to play that?”
“And it’s not a video game?”
“It’s hard to explain. You aren’t building a city but a culture. You use rules to set up a world and see how it evolves. Based on your design.”
“In any case I don’t think you’re handling the stress of everyday life in the best way.”
“You make it sound like I’m crazy.”
“Well, babe, when you sit there and tell me your job is worthless, that you’re a caveman in a cubicle…I mean, that’s not exactly the sort of thing that normally comes out of your mouth. You’re my rock, remember?”
“I guess I don’t really feel like a rock right now.”
For a moment we just stare at each other. I’ve looked into Gloria’s eyes thousands of times, have read in her expression almost every emotion one can imagine, but once again I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her look at me so vacantly, so dispassionately. I would be much happier right now if she were sad or disappointed or even furious with me, but to see nothing in her eyes at all is horrifying.
She sits only inches away from me and yet it feels like a canyon. I want to build a bridge so we can reconnect. I want to reach for her, take her in my arms, hold her like I did when I proposed to her, when her father died, when I sang to her and made her mine. I want her to know everything will be okay, that we will be okay. I want her to need me again. I reach for her hand and she doesn’t reach back. Not resisting me, but not encouraging me, either.
And I wonder, how do I know Gloria isn’t one of them? The people watching me?
Like I said, maybe everyone is watching me.
“I think I should go to bed.”
“I thought you might,” Gloria says. “I’ll get the dishes.”
I lean over to kiss her, wondering if when I do, she’ll place a tracking device on my back. Maybe she’ll look over my shoulder at the Stetson man standing outside the window.
“Baby, I’m sorry you had a rough day,” Gloria says. “Get some rest and tomorrow will be a better day.”
“I hope so.”
FIFTEEN
I wake up sweating.
And my ears are ringing, whooshing, like the sound of a crowded highway at rush hour. The surge of cars grows louder, rising like waves of static, and a wail of violins rises up over these atmospheric sounds, the strum of a chorused guitar, fattened by an overdub or two or ten, and—
I wake up sweating.
The room is dark and crowded with hulking rectangular shapes. That shape over there could be a dresser or an audio mixing console. That other one could be an armoire or a mainframe computer. That could be a television or a two-way telescreen, it could be broadcasting my every move to some faraway server, and I must assume every sound I make is overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
That music, those violins and discordant guitars, it’s from the Ant Farm game. I heard it earlier today or yesterday or whenever that was.
I look over at the alarm clock and the blue numbers read: 3:14.
Gloria is sleeping next to me, on her side, facing away, breathing slowly. I carefully slither out of bed and watch for her reaction, but she doesn’t stir at all. I could probably do cartwheels on the bed and she wouldn’t wake up, so powerful is the Ambien effect on her.
My head throbs and swims. I take a step forward and list immediately to the right, nearly running into the doorframe as I pass through it. In the hallway I stop and put my hands on my knees, but that makes me feel like throwing up. I stand up straight and lean against the wall. My mouth is sticky and cottony. I’m starving.
I lurch toward the kitchen and flip on the light. I take a large cup out of the cabinet. It’s an awesome cup, issued at the first home game ever played at Dallas Cowboys stadium in Arlington. I fill it with ice and water and stand at the island, sucking it down. You know that feeling you get when you’re hungover, where it seems like no amount of water will ever be enough?
This kitchen island is where Gloria and I maintain the endless supply of mail that enters our house every week. Victoria’s Secret and 3.9% financing and Get the Cash You Need Now! and Entertainment Weekly and Glamour and Bazaar and Golf Digest and Come Back to DirecTV, Come Back to AT&T, You’re Paying Too Much, Your Children Aren’t Safe, Get Out of Debt Now! Every day I toss nearly all of this paper into the recycle bin and still our island is covered with mountains of it.
In the middle of everything sits Gloria’s laptop, where she usually leaves it before bed, and for the millionth time in a row I resist the urge to open it. I could probably get details about Jack if I wanted to badly enough. Figure out her password or even install software to record her keystrokes. But going down that road is the path t
o the Dark Side, the path to self-loathing and despair and the distrust of humanity as a whole.
Still, my jealousy is powerful, and so is the urge to snoop—powerful enough that I take my cup of water and head for the study just to get away from her computer. Back to my own computer.
And the game.
The monitor is in standby mode and blinks on when I shake the mouse. The computer thinks and seems to hang for a minute. The half-rendered Windows toolbar stretches across the bottom of the screen, but everything else is black.
My head still throbs, but at least it’s a hangover headache and not the dreaded migraine. I should get some Advil, before the headache gets worse, but now the cockpit chart is finally loading.
I hear a footstep behind me, the sound of a heel on hardwood. Someone breathing.
My skin turns cold.
I don’t want to turn around but I do anyway, slowly, and the man in the Stetson hat is standing in the doorway. Staring at me.
“Phillips,” he says. “What are you doing?”
Someone laughs. Someone in another room, perhaps the guest bedroom. Or is it Gloria?
The man in the hat isn’t in the doorway anymore. That’s because he was never there in the first place.
I hear fingers on a keyboard, someone typing in intermittent bursts. A patter of feet, like someone running away. I walk into the hallway and look into the master bedroom. Gloria appears to be sound asleep.
I walk into the kitchen and no one is there.
The living room is empty.
How many times am I going to search my house before I realize no one has broken in?
Finally I make it back to the study and sit down in front of the computer. The Ant Farm game is now onscreen.
Interestingly, something is different. The ant population is now 70,525, but all the other indicators, like Safety and Life Meaning and whatever else, have an underlined X where the number should be. I roll the mouse over the X and a little box pops up that says:
Your ants have experienced a schism. Click the X for more details.
So I click and see this:
Your ants have achieved a period in their intellectual development equivalent to our Age of Enlightenment. The application of physical sciences such as chemistry, biology, and physics have caused a decline in religious belief. At this time more than 40 percent of your ants have serious questions about the validity of your belief manual. To accurately portray the nature of your world, the indicators for these secular ants will be calculated separately from the ants who carry more traditional beliefs.
For instance, Safety for the secular ants is 74 compared to 49 for the religious ants. Life Meaning is 75 for the religious ants and 50 for the secular. Transcendence for the believers is a whopping 88 to only 31 for the non-believers, while Love is reversed—69 for secular ants to only 40 for religious ones. Aestheticism isn’t even a contest: 91 for non-believers versus 18 for believers.
The religious ants seem to think their lives mean more, but the secular ants appear to get more out of life. Am I to assume the believers are just biding their time until afterlife begins, whereas the rest are making the most of what they have?
That seems awfully simplistic, of course, and I still haven’t looked up the exact definition of aestheticism. But I wonder: What if God showed Himself to me? Why does He work in mysterious ways when He could easily work in obvious ways?
Gradually the soundtrack music downshifts from driving and powerful to slow and peaceful. Waves of static wash in the background, and deep in the mix I hear a man yelling something incomprehensible into a megaphone. Is he trying to tell me something? Warn me about something? I can’t make out the words.
I feel horrible. My head hurts and my body is in dehydrated shock and it seems like nothing in the world is ever going to get better. Like everything is shit and will always be shit. So I get up and make myself a drink. A strong one. Or two, I don’t know. Time turns elastic while I consume these cocktails, but eventually my headache evaporates and my hangover disappears. Fatigue settles over my skin, into my head, bleeds into my bones. I wander back into the bedroom and crawl under the comforter and listen to Gloria’s inexorable breathing. I stare at the blackness above me, out of which the ceiling eventually emerges. I think about my life, how different it is than I might have predicted back in college. No children. A career-driven wife. Her college boyfriend boss. My best friend is a struggling actress I met on the Internet. I look to my left, at the windows, and see a face staring at me through the window.
No, I don’t.
I hear the sound of cars on a freeway, the sound of screeching brakes.
I’m going to die.
Reality, it seems, is not something you would call stable. It rolls under my feet in waves, like the ground during an earthquake. I am helpless against this feeling. All I want is to go to sleep and put all of this out of my mind. In the morning I’ll have to confront my newfound unemployment. At some point I will be forced to admit the truth to my wife. If I could just get some sleep now, perhaps it would be easier to confront these hurdles…and yet at this point I couldn’t be more awake if I had just snorted ten likes of cocaine. I might never fall asleep again.
Unless…
I crawl out of bed, carefully, and listen for a change in Gloria’s breathing. Still sound asleep. On tiptoes I head for the bathroom, where her Ambien bottle looms beside a Nasonex dispenser and a tube of toothpaste. The label on it instructs me to take one pill ten minutes before bedtime, and apparently I’m not supposed to do anything afterwards that requires coordination or reason. Also, I’m pretty sure Gloria breaks these tablets in half, but since I outweigh her by sixty pounds, I go ahead and swallow a whole one.
For whatever reason it doesn’t go down very easily, and I need something to wash it down. Why not use the drink I left in the study?
I tiptoe out of the bedroom. Since I’m going to finish the drink, I might as well sit down and have another look at the ant farm. I drag the mouse around the cockpit chart and find a list of subjects labeled EXPLORE FURTHER, where there are titles like MITHRAS and HORUS and GNOSITICISM. The last one is ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION? This page describes the genesis of the Ant Farm game. If you want the details, you can visit the web site here: http://www.simulation-argument.com, but the main idea is this: A guy named Nick Bostrom developed a thought experiment that at first glance seems farfetched, but which is actually fairly airtight. In this argument, you must conclude that at least one of the following propositions are true:
1. Almost all civilizations at our level of development become extinct before becoming technologically mature. We all hope this isn’t true, right? Surely we won’t blow ourselves up anytime soon.
2. The fraction of technologically mature civilizations that are interested in creating ancestor simulations is almost zero. This is probably not true since there is one on my computer right now, and I’m certainly not the first to play it. As computers become more capable, you would expect the number of simulations to go up, not down.
3. We are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. If a civilization eventually acquires the ability to create these simulations, and it runs a lot of them, it means there are many more simulated worlds than real ones. Right? In fact, if there are just two simulation games, that’s already twice as many artificial worlds as real worlds. And if there are many simulations out there (thousands? millions?) what’s the likelihood that any one world is the real one?
Right now I imagine you’re thinking how absurd the idea is. After all, you’d know it if this world were fake, right? It would be obvious, right?
But how exactly would it be obvious? If you’re in the game, how do you know you’re in the game?
And if this world, our world, really is a simulation, it means the ant farm is simply a sim-within-a-sim.
And so on.
As I sit here reading these details, I imagine what it might be like to completely uncouple myself from reality.
Like if I were to become a separate entity from myself. What if I were able to observe myself from some other point of view, like if I were the architect of this simulation? What is the real world like? Is everything different?
As I consider this, the characters on my computer monitor begin to vibrate. Not visibly vibrate, but like I can hear them, like they’re humming. Or even singing. The letters together sing a kind of song, shimmering like a gospel choir, complete with organ music and trees. A forest of sound.
The pitter patter of little consonant feet.
An orgasm of vowels.
Okay, that’s it. I’ve got to get away from this computer. I’ve got to get control of myself. But when I try to stand, I nearly fall. Someone has turned gravity up too high…like my mass is trying to pull me to the floor. I stumble out of the room and down the hall, into the kitchen. There is a large plate-glass window in our breakfast room. I turn off the light in the kitchen and the adjacent hallway and stand by the window. Our backyard is large, and toward the edge of our property a couple of old oak trees stand proud. As my eyes become adjusted to the dark I am able to resolve them in more detail. I marvel at their graceful, twisted shapes. It’s amazing, don’t you think, how the trees all begin with the same basic DNA blueprint, and yet become unique when forced to live in the unpredictable environment?
Do my ants become unique? I set rules for them, of course, but do they evolve beyond those basic instructions? And if they really are unique and sentient electronic creatures, is it genocide to shut down the game without saving it?
Or what about this: If someone came up to you right this minute and said he had just spoken to the creator of our simulation, would you think he was crazy? What if he instead told you he had heard the word of the Lord? Would that make it different?
I’m still staring at the trees in my backyard, and even though it’s not windy, those dark, skeletal monsters could almost be moving. Their branches seem to warp and slither toward each other like snakes. I don’t like it.
