In the Shadow of the Towers

by Douglas Lain

  “Tim,” Heather said. “Is it . . . some kind of publicity thing? Or like a David Copperfield magician trick? Or . . .”

  I flipped channels. The same images were on all the channels, the same repeating camera angles, from helicopters, from the ground—

  only the yelling was different. “I don’t think—” I began, and then the second plane entered the frame from the left, cruising along the skyline with the easy grace of a shark, seeming to move deceptively slowly, and I braced myself, expecting it to slam into the Trade Center’s second tower. Reporters on the ground stopped yelling and started screaming.

  But the plane just stopped, and hung there, nose tipped at a slight angle, mere feet from the side of the building.

  And that’s when the figure—the one people call the Ambassador, or the Doctor, or the Outsider, or the Professor, or a hundred other names—appeared. Just a middle-aged man in a white lab coat, with steel-rimmed glasses and graying hair. His image filled the air above the jetliner, like the dome of the sky had been transformed into an IMAX movie screen, which only added to the sense of special-effects-laden unreality. “What’s he saying?” Heather asked, the same thing the reporters on the ground were saying, and it was a moment before his moving lips synched up with booming sound.

  He said, “People of Earth, I have a message for you.”

  “Hi there,” a voice said from the far side of our living room. We wrenched around on the couch and saw a man sitting on the stained old loveseat left behind by a prior tenant.

  “Who the fuck are you? Get out of here!” We lived in a lousy part of town near 40th and Telegraph Ave., over by the MacArthur BART commuter train station, and there were times we couldn’t come in through our front gate because the cops had drug dealers handcuffed and sitting on the sidewalk in the way, so a crazy homeless guy sneaking into our living room seemed plausible.

  But my girlfriend put her hand on my arm and said, “Tim, that’s the guy from the TV.”

  I settled back down, though I was hardly comforted. She was right, though—same glasses, same lab coat, same vaguely affable expression.

  “People of . . . this house,” he said. “I have a message for you.”

  Later we heard about how he’d appeared all over the world, in everybody’s living room, or hut, or yurt, or bathysphere, or mountaintop temple, or patch of dirt. Sometimes he was a white guy in a lab coat, sometimes he was a black guy in a three-piece suit, sometimes he was a woman in a headscarf, sometimes he was a god—he looked different to everyone, and even his image in the sky over the WTC didn’t look the same to all the people there. But his message was pretty much the same for everyone. I wonder about those uncontacted, remote tribes in Papua New Guinea and the South American rain forests—how did he explain the situation to them, when they had no technological context for understanding? Or do those undiscovered peoples even exist, here, since they aren’t part of the global community, since they were utterly unaffected by the Age of Global Terror—were they outside the bounds of the study? Maybe Dawson and I should look into it, though jungle exploring is a little tricky these days, unless you find the right hole.

  “You have been participants in a long-running and very successful historical and sociological study,” Professor Apocalypse said. “And that study has now come to an end.” He gestured at the TV screen. “In actual recorded history, those planes crashed into those towers in an attack orchestrated by religious fundamentalists. This morning ushered in what my people call the Age of Global Terror. We’ve been studying the roots of that age by reproducing the sum of human history up until that moment. And now.” He shrugged minutely. “We’re finished.”

  I think my thoughts were something like, Oh, shit, probably the same as your thoughts, though it’s hard to remember what I really felt, then. Of course I wanted to disbelieve, but, you understand. Planes hanging in mid-air. Future-guy appearing in our living room. It was pretty persuasive.

  “Your world is just a simulation, running on computers—what you would call computers—in the far future. That is, it’s the present, for me, but from your point of view . . . I’m sorry if this is confusing. This is not my native semiotic level. The world you know, the lives you’ve led, they are . . . a dramatization of the past, as accurate as we could make it, peopled by all the same individuals who lived in the real history, doing all the same things their original counterparts did, guided not by rote programming but by perfectly reproduced pressures of nature and nurture, the combination of initial conditions and environment.” Professor Badnews glanced around and pointed at one of the prints hanging on our off-white walls—that Waterhouse painting, “Nymphs Finding the Head of Orpheus.” He said, “Ah, you see, this painting—it’s a print, a reproduction of the original. You are the same, a reproduction of—”

  “We understand what you mean.” I was pissed off that he considered us so slow, primitive, whatever he thought. “We’re science fiction writers.” Or trying to be. I’d met Heather at a brunch thrown by the organizers of an online magazine we’d both contributed to. “You mean we’re living in a simulation. Like that movie The Matrix.”

  He nodded. “That is a comparison many in this nation make. Are making. Except . . . you have no real bodies tucked away in vats somewhere else. You are nothing but simulations. Like characters on a holodeck, some of your peers have said.”

  “We’re not real?” Heather said.

  “Not strictly speaking. But, arguably, you are sentient. That’s why I’m here. Normally in a historical simulation of this kind, when the study is over, we simply, ah, you would say ‘pull the plug.’ But this is a very advanced program, inhabited by artificial but nevertheless rational actors—by which I mean all the simulated humans, along with some of the larger sea mammals—and our ethics committee has ruled we cannot simply ‘pull the plug’ on your existence. A majority of the committee believes that would constitute genocide.”

  “If you’re not ending the experiment, why appear to us at all? Why not just let us go on living as we were?” I’m not normally a vocal proponent of the idea that ignorance is bliss, but I was beginning to come around to the argument.

  “Yes. A valid question. The scale of this study is large, as you can imagine, and the resources necessary to accurately simulate an entire planet and all its six billion inhabitants are staggering. Since the study is over, we can’t justify the amount of processing power required to continue at the current level of resolution, and so I’ve come to let everyone know about certain, ah, reductions in non-essential services.”

  “Non-essential services” is a phrase to chill the blood. I imagined dead pixels in the surface of the moon, frozen tides, the sun switched off like a lamp. “Such as?”

  “Well.” He shifted uncomfortably, and I resented the psychological manipulation—he was a projected image, he wasn’t uncomfortable, and I suspect he was just trying to make me feel bad for him in his role as bearer of bad news. (Dawson figures I was right about that, by the way.) “Weather is the main thing. Simulating weather is hugely resource-intensive, we’ve only been able to accurately model such chaotic systems for a few decades, and they take up enormous quantities of processing power. So that has to stop.”

  “There won’t be any more weather?” Heather was a gardener, and she had relatives who ran a working farm—I think she grasped the implications quicker than I did. “What does that even mean?”

  “The weather . . . just won’t change. Where it’s raining now, it will continue to rain. Where it’s not raining, it won’t rain again. And so on. There was some talk of stopping the Earth’s rotation, but that’s comparatively simple to model, and it was felt by the committee that eternal night for half the planet would be unnecessarily psychologically debilitating. Likewise, the tides will continue.”

  I stared at him. “So our choices are to live in places of permanent flooding or permanent drought? We’ll all starve to death!”

  “Ah, no, you don’t need to eat anymore. To requ
ire you to do so would be monstrous. There will likely be some movement of the population away from climatically inhospitable areas, but with no new children being born, overcrowding in temperate areas should only be a temporary—”

  “No more children?”

  He frowned. “Of course not. The study is over. We need no more subjects.”

  I looked at my girlfriend, and saw the same bleakness in her eyes that I felt behind my own. We’d only been living together for a month, dating five times that, hadn’t even talked about marriage, we were in our twenties, we’d certainly never talked about children—but I think we both thought someday we’d talk about children.

  “Let me see if I understand,” I said slowly. “We’ll just go on living, not needing to eat, with no more kids being born, until we all . . . die of old age?”

  “Yes. Or accidents. Or . . . well . . . we suspect some may decide they prefer not to live, given their new understanding of reality.”

  “What about disease?” my girlfriend said.

  He made a seesawing gesture with his hand. “Not global pandemics—

  also surprisingly hard to accurately simulate—but most diseases will remain, yes.”

  “Why don’t you get rid of disease!” She looked pissed. Her father had died of emphysema before we met.

  “Ah, well, the basic forms of your bodies and the frailties therein are already established, built into the simulation as it were, and changing them all . . .” He shrugged. “Not for a study that’s over. If there are no further questions . . . Then that’s all.”

  “What do you mean that’s all?”

  “I have nothing else to tell you. The study is over. You’re free to live your lives however you see fit.”

  “What lives?”

  “That’s a question you’ll have to settle for yourselves.” He blinked his eyes. Then he blinked out of existence.

  My girlfriend and I reached out and held each other on the couch, silently. Outside, in the streets of Oakland, dogs barked and sirens wailed.

  The next thing I remember seeing on the TV was the image of falling bodies as the passengers and crew of Flight 11 opened the cockpit door and tossed the struggling hijackers to their deaths. Some of the reporters gasped. Others cheered.

  The survivors of the flights said that when he arrived the Ambassador disarmed the hijackers with a wave of his hand, rounded them up, and asked them a series of questions. None of the survivors understood the language being spoken during that conversation. When I asked Dawson what he thought Future Man and the hijackers had talked about, he just shrugged and said, “Exit interview. Not uncommon in a psychological experiment.” Then he went back to digging.

  I don’t know about you, but I was most impatient with the disbelievers. A bunch of Flat-Earth, the-moon-landing-was-faked, Holocaust-denier types, sure, but ordinary people too. (Then again, it’s hard not to have sympathy for the wacky conspiracy theorists, especially since some small subset of them were proved right—the world is fake, and everything we know really is a lie.) Humans are driven by engines of denial, obstinance, and short-sightedness, whether we’re simulated or not. Government officials telling us to disbelieve the evidence of our eyes. Experts talking about mass hysteria, even as other experts—experts at piloting helicopters—hovered over New York rescuing the passengers who were stuck on those frozen planes in New York, and the other plane stopped a handsbreadth from the Pentagon. Flight 93 was close enough to the ground in Pennsylvania when it froze that the local fire department just rescued the passengers with hook-and-ladder trucks and big inflatable pads to cushion the ones too scared or old or frail to climb. And still people argued, shouted on TV, blamed terrorists or Western imperialists, called it a hoax. The scientists tried to be rational, to tell us how deep space had gone suddenly static, no more pulsars pulsing, no more stars exploding—more non-essential services taken offline—but nobody listens to scientists in America. After a few weeks with no babies born, though, with people realizing they didn’t get hungry anymore, with the weather never changing, it began to sink in. The first wave of suicides was pretty brutal. Maybe as much as ten percent of the population, dead by their own hands. Nihilism is tough to live with. Me, I was always an atheist. Finding out there was no point to our existence, besides whatever point we create, wasn’t too tough for me. Though I did wonder if I’d been robbed of a destiny. I never believed in destiny before, but now I knew there was literally a different life I was meant to lead, that I would never have now.

  Not as many religious nuts killed themselves as I expected. Those people are adaptable. They came up with whole new weird explanations, most involving the UN and the Antichrist. Just as boring and incomprehensible as the old weird explanations, really.

  It was the end of the world, sort of, so I decided to take a road trip. My relationship with Heather didn’t even last until the end of September—

  she was worried about her mom, living all alone in the middle of the country, in the middle of increasing unrest and craziness, and she made arrangements to catch a ride back home with some old friends. There was no discussion of my going with her. In those last days it was like she couldn’t see me at all, she just looked beyond me, moved around me without noticing my presence. To be fair, I was probably the same to her. Our world of possibilities had been beheaded. There was nothing else keeping me in Oakland. I’d lived there for about a month, having relocated from Santa Cruz when my old contract job ran out and Heather agreed to let me live with her, so I’d hardly put down roots. I’d only been working at my new job as an editorial assistant for a trade publishing magazine for a few weeks, and the few friends I had weren’t close enough to stay for, or else they’d scattered.

  So I loaded up my silver Nissan with my worldly possessions—that only just filled the back seat and the trunk, and it was mostly books—and set out East, reversing the course I’d taken thirteen months before, when I left the mountains of North Carolina to seek my fortune.

  There were a lot of cars out on the road, a lot of people trying to get to one place from another for whatever reasons of their own. I passed a few crashes, maybe two or three a day, and there were places in the mountains or over rivers where people had clearly just lost their shit, decided there was no point anymore and crashed through guardrails, dropping their simulated cars into simulated rivers and gulches. The radio, especially in the dead stretches at night, were full of preachers, and I listened, because it was that or country-and-western music, and I’ve got my limits.

  I won’t lie to you, it was a depressing goddamn journey. I looked into that empty sky and what I missed most were the clouds. The way they used to slide across the sky, like they had someplace to go, but weren’t in any particular hurry to get there. That was me, I guess—moving cloudwise, knowing I’d get where I was going eventually. I didn’t have a cell phone, which was okay, since they didn’t work reliably anymore anyway—neither did pay phones, so I couldn’t let Dawson know I was coming, though I tried a few times. I couldn’t even be sure he was still there, living in the house we’d shared with a few friends in Boone—he had family farther east, maybe he’d gone to join them in these times of tribulation. But he was one of my dearest friends, the guy who always seemed to know how to deal with anything, from flat tires to financial catastrophe to muggers to bad trips, without even blinking. We’d met at a writing workshop freshman year, when he decided he wasn’t really a writer and I decided I really was, and we’d been tight ever since, and were roommates for years. He was a Chinese-Hawaiian military brat who’d trained in more martial arts than I could remember, owned about five swords, smoked incessantly, liked to stay up all night talking about movies, and was no better at playing chess than I was, though he loved it just as much. Who better to spend the end of the world with? Of course, Dawson wasn’t perfect. He was shit at romance and creative writing. We used to joke that I was a lover and he was a fighter. Fighting didn’t sound bad to me, but what could we possibly fight for? Or with?
Or against?

  It was a pretty mellow apocalypse, all in all. I mean, nothing was broken. Nothing exploded. Driving through Texas I was a little weirded out to see that somebody had attacked the second largest cross in the Western hemisphere, something of a landmark in the area, and one of its arms was hanging broken. Sometimes cars went past me the other way fast, and military vehicles, and cops, but I figured they were dealing with little local disasters. I wondered how long people would last in that part of Texas. It was always pretty dry, but there was a difference between “always pretty dry” and “absolutely never getting any rain at all, ever again, never.” Even cacti die of thirst eventually, right?

  But I didn’t. I’d gotten used to not eating—I was never hungry, so it just didn’t occur to me—but I was filling up the overheated radiator at a filling station in the desert when I realized I hadn’t had a drop of anything to drink in a couple of days, not even a caffeinated soda. Didn’t much miss drinking, either. I did miss pissing and taking craps, though. I’d done some good thinking while pissing and taking craps. I still could eat but it seemed like a lot of hassle, and it’s not like many of the highway fast food joints were open. When the world’s falling apart, you don’t keep your gig as a drive-through attendant.

  I’d been sleeping in my car on the side of the road, but I wasn’t exactly tired, either. Was sleep just a habit, too? That night I drove straight through, and wasn’t tired a bit, and didn’t notice any bleariness or weariness or psychotic breaks. Maybe there were perks to this apocalypse after all. No sleep meant more time to do . . . Oh, right. There was no point in doing anything. So much for silver linings.

  I got to Boone in late afternoon and pulled into the old familiar driveway, the same one I’d pulled away from a bit over a year before. Back then, right after college, I’d shared the little brick house and split the rent with four other guys, and after graduation we’d all gone our separate ways . . . except for Dawson, who’d kept the whole place for himself. He’d studied clinical psych in college, even co-authored a couple of papers (one controversial one about whether violent videogames primed people for real-life violent behavior), but pretty soon after graduating he got into traditional Chinese medicine and started training in acupuncture.