Thomas World

by Richard Cox

  This is nothing like the woman who has pretended to be a homely looking actress struggling to find work in Los Angeles.

  “Hi, Thomas,” she says.

  She extends her arms, and I can’t help myself. I walk forward, hugging her. I am so very tired. We hold each other for five seconds, even ten. Her body is warm beneath the sweatshirt. Her breasts are enormous. She is exactly the opposite of what you would expect of someone who had lied about themselves online.

  And yet isn’t she too perfect? Her curvy figure and her striking face and her willingness to take me in so readily?

  “Thomas,” Sophia says, backing away a little but still holding my arms. “I am so happy to finally meet you. But why did you tell me you were in Arizona if you were much closer than that?”

  “The truth is complicated. As you well know.”

  “I’m sorry I lied to you. It was nothing personal. About a year ago I decided to see what it felt like to be less attractive, like how much less attention would I get if I didn’t look like this? I know it seems horrible and shallow, but I was going to write a book about the effect of beauty in our culture. Then I met you. I had no reason to think anything would come of our friendship. When we became close I didn’t know how to tell you the truth.”

  I’m telling you: She reminds me of Gloria when she was younger. Except for Sophia’s exaggerated curves, they could be twins.

  “Would you like to come inside?”

  “Of course.”

  The interior of the house is alternately dark and bright. Deep, rich wood trim is offset by a lot of windows and light, although the back of the house is noticeably dimmer, since the mountain is in that direction.

  Sophia offers me coffee and a chocolate chip muffin. We sit down at a square wooden table in her dining room.

  “Now tell me,” she says. “What’s going on with you?”

  The enormity of the situation pushes me down, the mass of it. Like before, it feels as though the weight of the entire world is upon me. Maybe I shouldn’t tell her what is going on, try to protect her from it all, but isn’t it too late for that?

  “Well,” I say. “I think I’m being followed.”

  “By who?”

  “Everyone.”

  FORTY-THREE

  I tell her the entire story the best way I know how, which is to relate it in the same way you’ve experienced it, although in abridged form. To Sophia’s credit her face betrays little or no emotion the whole time I’m speaking.

  When I’m finished she says, “So you’re saying I’m also a character.”

  “In a way I guess we all are.”

  “I don’t feel like a character. I feel like a real human being.”

  But while her eyes are looking in my direction, she’s not really seeing me. I could ask her questions, like what her mother’s name is, where she went to high school, what she ate for lunch yesterday, but I suspect she’s already asking those things of herself.

  We sit there for a long time, our knees touching, not saying anything. She reaches out and puts her hands over mine.

  “Obviously they’re watching you somehow. If the people in the coffeehouse knew who you were, someone must have either followed you there or called ahead. They couldn’t have known you would stop at that particular store. They must be watching.”

  “You’re supposed to tell me I’m crazy.”

  “I don’t know, Thomas. I don’t know what to think. But if it’s all scripted, what’s going to happen next?”

  “I kind of expected to find Philip K. Dick here. Since he lived most of his life in Berkeley. I thought maybe you were going to be him.”

  “It is strange, isn’t it?” she says. “I lied to you about my identity, and the place I turned out to live is the home of the science fiction author.”

  “Yes.”

  “The father of artificial reality.”

  Her eyes still have that look, like she’s seeing something far away. I feel terrible for bringing this to her, but in a way I feel like it was always going to happen.

  “I guess it’s true what that guy said, the one you met at the bar. The only way to know the truth is to talk to the writer. The Creator. Find out what it all means.”

  “Gnosis?”

  “I guess.”

  I realize how tense I am, in my shoulders and arms especially, pulled tight and guarding against something, instinctively protecting myself against a threat, though in this case that threat is in my mind. My pursuers aren’t here. I’m safe, or at least as safe as I can manage considering the circumstances. Sophia’s hands are tender, as if she has spent the last hour rubbing lotion into them. Her smile is soft and intimate. She has been such a good friend to me over the past year. We have shared so many jokes and ideas and stories of our lives, on the phone, chatting on the computer, and I have thought on many occasions that if I weren’t married, and if Sophia encouraged a little more physical desire in me, she might be the perfect—

  I lean forward and kiss her. I can’t help myself. An instant passes while I wait for her reaction, and finally she kisses me back. Her lips are soft and swollen against mine, the way Gloria’s were when she was younger. I nibble on them lightly, first with my lips and then with my teeth. She reaches out to me with her tongue, exploring me, and I return that touch with my own. Fire rises up within me, the forgotten lust of my younger years.

  And yes, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking how easy it is for me to betray my wife. But something about this…I don’t know exactly what it is. It doesn’t feel like cheating. It’s like I’ve met Sophia before, known her before, that I have longed for her always. I know I’ve said similar things many times since Sunday, but now, in this moment, the feeling is stronger than ever, so familiar, so real.

  Yes, I’ve known Sophia online. Not this face, not this body, but the essence of her. The laughter we shared, the film references and funny quotes and silly voices—all those things draw me to her even more than her fantasy physical experience. And yet even that is not the Sophia I’ve always known. There is something more, something I can’t put my finger on, that draws me to her. That has always drawn me to her.

  My lips drift to the corner of her mouth, along the ridge of her chin, tickling her ear, breathing into it, and then I drop lower, down to her neck. I haven’t felt this combination of friendship and physical arousal since the first time I made out with Gloria. She breathes out a huge sigh, a sound that ignites me, fuels my arousal again, and my hands go to her breasts, round and young and full. She doesn’t move away from me. In fact she seems to push her breasts into me, so I sneak one of my hands under her shirt and reach carefully for her, first one breast and then the other, stopping to admire the deep crevasse between them. Her hands drops to my waist, to the bulge in my pants, and that’s when I stop her and pull away.

  “What is it?” Sophia asks.

  “Where’s the bedroom?”

  She smiles and points behind her. I stand up and put one hand beneath her legs, another behind her back. She throws her arms around my neck as I pick her up.

  We retreat to her bedroom, and for a few moments, as desire electrifies me, I manage to forget about this artificial life, about Gloria betraying me on the phone, about everything.

  A little while later our clothes are on the floor, and Sophia takes me into her hand.

  “Oh my God,” she says.

  “What?”

  “You’re huge.”

  “I am?”

  “Unreasonably.”

  For a moment I am taken back to the church bathroom, my ears ringing, the old man glaring at me, the man with the black moustache and gray beard, the man otherwise known as Philip K. Dick, architect of simulated worlds, inspiration for my life. Desire threatens to drain out of me.

  Then I realize I am about to have her, finally, intimately, and I push away those dreadful thoughts. I’m about to make love to Sophia.

  She is finally mine.

  FORTY-FOUR

&n
bsp; A little while later I wake up and Sophia is not there. I lie still for a minute, staring up at the ceiling, imagining the swirls of white paint are galaxies. A soft whirring sound hypnotizes me, and for a while I’m lost in the expanding endlessness of a ceiling universe.

  Finally I realize the whirring sound is the cooling fan of a computer. I look down, away from the ceiling, and see a flat-screen monitor standing on a desk to my right.

  I keep thinking Sophia is going to come back, but when she doesn’t, I manage to crawl out of bed and walk over to where the computer is. The leather seat is cold against my bare ass. I open a Web browser, bring up Google, and key in:

  Philip K. Dick

  The first return is the author’s official site, but the second is a Wikipedia entry. The first line says:

  Philip Kindred Dick (December 16, 1928 – March 2, 1982) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist whose published work is almost entirely in the science fiction genre. Dick explored sociological, political and metaphysical themes in novels dominated by monopolistic corporations, authoritarian governments and altered states.

  Farther down I read this:

  Dick’s stories typically focus on the fragile nature of what is “real” and the construction of personal identity. His stories often become surreal fantasies as the main characters slowly discover that their everyday world is actually an illusion constructed by powerful external entities (such as in Ubik), vast political conspiracies, or simply from the vicissitudes of an unreliable narrator.

  The vicissitudes of an unreliable narrator. Where you can’t necessarily know if the guy telling you the story is getting it right.

  Then I read:

  Dick has influenced many writers, including William Gibson, Jonathan Lethem, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Dick has also influenced filmmakers, his work being compared to films such as The Matrix, Videodrome, eXistenZ, and Spider, Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Dark City, The Truman Show, Gattaca, 12 Monkeys, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Mulholland Drive, Fight Club, Vanilla Sky, Pi, Donnie Darko and Southland Tales, and Memento and Inception.

  And below that is a section called:

  Ant Farm

  Philip K. Dick has also been credited by Thomas Phillips and Dick Stanton, creators of the popular and controversial “immersive reality” simulation known as Ant Farm, as the inspiration for their work. Phillips, an aspiring screenwriter, and Stanton, a software engineer, teamed together to create the Ant Farm simulation, which was originally designed to run on desktop computers. The game used a special headset to project images and sound, as well as various attachments (including sexual paraphernalia) to simulate sensory information. Stanton wrote the original code, and Phillips created a series of stories, similar to screenplays, that served as the adventures for the game.

  In February 2031 their startup company, Blue Orb World Media, became a publicly traded corporation. Three years later the company introduced Ant Farm 2.0, a vastly upgraded simulation that employed a brain-computer interface (BCI) to run the simulation directly in the user’s mind. Ant Farm 2.0 also featured Phillips’ patented “Dynamic Films,” otherwise known as “Swiss cheese” films, virtual stories with a skeleton-like structure that enabled the user’s mind to plug in the holes. In this way, the user’s own life could be combined with fictional adventures to create a seamless blend of fantasy and real life.

  The use of a BCI in conjunction with an immersive simulated environment caused great controversy after widespread reports of addiction were reported, and led to the introduction of a bill by U.S. Rep Tom Mix (HB 3141) to limit or ban their use. The bill gained additional attention when it was made public that one of the simulation’s creators, Thomas Phillips, was “locked” inside the game. According to a team of physicians and mental health professionals, Phillips has experienced a repeating story of his own design since March 1, 2032, or over three years as of this writing. Phillips’ body is bedridden and he is fed with an IV. He—

  “Thomas?”

  Someone is behind me. I turn around and find Sophia, wearing a light blue T-shirt, nothing more.

  She is beautiful. Her skin so smooth, her features sharp and soft all at the same time. Her eyes are blue and bright. Her smile is electric, radiant, her teeth are pearlescent. Her blonde hair is the color of flax and the texture of silk.

  She’s a screenwriting professor.

  She has said all the right things, has made me feel at home even though she’s not the woman I have come to know over the past year.

  Sophia isn’t real.

  She blinks at me innocently.

  I stand up.

  “Thomas?” she asks.

  Remember the woman on the road? The violinist, Sophie Trudeau? She asked me, What happens when the androids decide they don’t want to play along anymore?

  Ever since all this began I’ve been worried only about what was happening to me, and why I had been chosen for this great adventure. Even as the story wore on, when it became clear that everyone around me was a two-dimensional character, I hardly cared about what it meant for them. I’m not sure I’ve done one selfless thing since all this began. It’s all been for me.

  Because I built this world.

  I remember once (or at least I think I remember), many years ago, when Gloria came home from work and found me drunk, stretched across the living room couch, listening to loud music in the dark, depressed because another one of my screenplays had been rejected. She sat down and rubbed my head and carefully explained her opinion about my work. She had never done that before, had never been so bald in her criticism, and to be honest I was not prepared to listen.

  Your stories lack humanness, Gloria told me. You don’t let your characters feel anything. Even in the most basic action thriller, the Hollywood crap you hate, the protagonist experiences something, even if it’s clichéd and overwrought and stupid. The emotion is still there. Your plots are always exciting and thought-provoking, but the people within them might as well be robots. They don’t feel anything or care about anything or anyone. And I don’t know why that is, because you certainly seem to feel things.

  Gloria went on to suggest that I write a story populated with real human beings, characters who loved and hated and longed for people, who were devastated by loss and thrilled by accomplishment and so on. She said if I tried to find truth in my characters, instead of putting them through the motions of some convoluted plot, I could separate myself from the thousands of other writers who all churned out the same soulless films hoping to hit it big. To her, the only way I would ever be able to do this would be to leave my computer behind, to go out into the world and learn the stories of real people. She suggested I volunteer for charity work, join social groups, play teams sports instead of golf, anything that would put me in touch with actual people.

  But instead of leaving my computer behind, I have apparently crawled inside it. I have no idea what is real and what isn’t. I’m not even sure who I am, because I certainly don’t remember writing any “dynamic” films.

  Still, the imperfect Creator is me.

  “Thomas,” Sophia says again. I had forgotten she was there. “Look at me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “What are you sorry for?”

  “Everything.”

  “Baby, what do you mean?”

  “I’ve used you. All of you.”

  “The FBI agents are outside,” she says. “They have been tracking you across the country. They’re going to frame you for murder and lock you in prison so they can keep an eye on you. So they will continue to have a reason to exist.”

  My characters are rebelling against me, and I don’t blame them.

  “But that’s not going to happen, baby. If you die or otherwise get stuck in a negative situation, the game will reset itself.”

  I hardly know what to say or do.

  “Baby,” Sophia says. “There’s something I have to tell you.”

  “Wh
o does? Me? You?”

  “You’re sick, baby. Very sick. You’re in pain and you don’t know how to leave the game.”

  “You mean I’m physically ill? Or mentally?”

  “They said I’d never be able to talk to you again. I had given up hope. But Dick finally found a developer who could rewrite the code and patch me in through this character.”

  “Patched in? You mean you’re Gloria? Like for real?”

  I reach for her, but she steps away from me.

  “Gloria?”

  “Baby, this is going to be hard for you to understand. You have to listen to me very carefully. You have to stay calm, okay? You don’t want to make things any worse.”

  “What? What is it?”

  “Baby, my name is Gloria, but I’m not who you think I am. You’ve got me mixed up with someone else.”

  “What?”

  “The person you remember meeting in college, those memories are of someone else.”

  Something falls into place, like tumblers in a lock. I think I know what she’s going to say.

  “You met a girl in college. Her name was Sophia. You fell in love with her. She was dating someone else, a young man named Jack, and you guys became close. She almost left Jack to be with you.”

  The skin on my back is itchy, like I’m sweating, like ants are crawling up and down my spine.

  “But, Thomas, she didn’t. She didn’t leave him.”

  “But Gloria. I mean, we’re married, right? How—”

  “Thomas, no. Not anymore.”