This Is Not Really Happening

The truth was I didn’t immediately get my act together after Barbara ran away. My grandparents ever-so-reluctantly picked me up from CPS, and dragged me away from the only home I ever knew to live with them in some gated community way out in Plano, Texas. They enrolled me in a stuffy Christian school and I returned to a soulless house every afternoon to people I met once who showed no affection. No wonder why Barbara ran away from them. I did the same thing. One day, I took their Buick Lasaber and eventually I drove it all the way out west to wind up shacking up with the worst sorts. I probably would have wound up dead if it hadn’t been for my older brother Henry who picked me up from a police station in Albuquerque.

I was on the road making my biweekly trek to Baton Rouge to visit Henry and my nephew Daniel. I didn’t get to see them as often as I wished since taking the position at Rice three years ago. Back when I was teaching at LSU, Henry and I lived just a few blocks from each other. Madeline and her cousins Daniel and Phoebe spent their entire childhood together as Henry, his wife Joyce, and I spent most of our free time hanging at each other’s houses. My then-husband Dmitry was off on some business trip or another, so Henry, Joyce, and I were the only family we really had along with our kids who became more like siblings than cousins.

I really didn’t care for the four-hour drive from Houston, but Henry wasn’t in a position to share the burden. Along the I-10 were the usual things, a Buc-ee’s on the edges of Houston and Beaumont, several oil refineries, cows, and megachurches of course––still plenty of those throughout Texas and Louisiana, though they were now getting some stiff competition from the ERMs. Along the desolate stretch of interstate between Lake Charles and Lafayette billboards waged war with each other.

I had grown up used to seeing signs proclaiming that Jesus saves. But those billboards now contended with “Stop worrying. Nothing matters” brought to you by the Fellows Of Nietzsche, “Consciousness Is Everything” placed by a Cartesian church, “This Simulation Began Last Thursday,” which was followed by a billboard countering, “Actually, It Began Last Tuesday.”

When I arrived at Henry’s house, he was feeding Daniel. Daniel was sitting in the electric wheelchair.

“Hi, Daniel,” I said, giving him a kiss on the forehead. Daniel moaned, his mouth twitching slightly. The young man was Madeline’s age. He should have been in college right now.

“Here take a seat,” Henry said as he pulled up a dining chair next to him as he fed Daniel. We talked about mundane things like gas price increases due to the spiraling situation in the Middle East and Russia when during a lull he added, “I heard about the Fermilab scientist.”

“Doctor Sanchez,” I replied solemnly. “Yeah, it was terrible.” In one of the double mass shootings last week, the shooter at the Target had a, well, target in mind. One of the victims was Dr. Ricardo Sanchez, the head scientist at Fermilab, who provided crucial data to Dr. Malik’s research. Henry gave me a concerned look.

“Are you packing?”

“Um, no, Henry, I’m not. I think we have enough guns in the world, don’t you,” I said, glancing over to Daniel. Henry put down the shredded brisket and grimaced.

He was only four years older than I, but he looked worn out.

“Look, I’m not a gun nut, sis. But those Ecstatics are. And it looks like they’re out to kill any scientist involved with the study of the Grand Unified Algorithm.”

“Well, as tragic as that is, it doesn’t involve me. I’m not a scientist, I’m a religious studies professor. My knowledge in math extends to what I learned in grade school.”

I wasn’t exaggerating. The other day in seminar, Twan was explaining the elegant connection between mathematics and known physical laws. The liberal arts students and I nodded, but we had to trust all those squiggly formulas he wrote down meant something.

“You’re a famous religious studies professor, Rhiannon,” he emphasized. “Weren’t you on CNN a couple of weeks ago?”

Daniel moaned excitedly to support what his dad was saying. “It was just a small bit. Anderson wanted someone to discuss the rise of cross studies as a result of the Glitch,” I said trying to brush it off as no big deal.

“Well, you looked great by the way, a little skinny, but great.”

I gave Henry a kiss on the cheek for that. “You’re the best.” I had starved myself for days hoping to lose some pounds that the camera added on. A part of me thought it pointless to diet and exercise a body that didn’t really exist. Many agreed. The diet industry and gyms across the world were particularly devastated by the revelation.

“My point is you are involved with the study of simiverse and you’re not anonymous. I just want you to be safe.”

We went on to discuss other things. Henry told me about his insurance business struggling in the post-Glitch market as people’s interest in safeguarding their future took a massive hit right alongside the health and fitness industries. I told him about how I started listening to old school music in an effort to reincorporate memories after eschewing it for decades. Fortunately, there were no further acid-laden flashbacks. After lunch while Daniel was watching TV, Henry sidled up to me in the kitchen as I washed a ton of dishes that had been piling up since my last visit.

The water was on as he spoke in a hushed voice. “Have you heard anything from Madeline?”

I shook my head. I understood why he didn’t want Daniel to hear about her. They had been best friends their whole lives. Her running off had to have hurt him badly. It certainly wrecked my world.

“Well, she’s probably okay,” he cajoled. “After all, she’s with one of those happy nihilist communes, right? They don’t do anything stupid or dangerous, just farm.”

“I wasn’t aware Fuckin’ Steves called their cousins ‘happy nihilists.’”

Henry smirked. “For the record we don’t believe the end user of this piece of shit simulation is actually named Steve. It’s just a stand in for whatever asshole decided to play such a cruel game.”

My smile faded. I couldn’t blame Henry for becoming a Fuckin’ Steve. He had been happily married to Joyce and had two wonderful children, Daniel and Phoebe. Joyce had been driving Phoebe to a soccer game when The Glitch hit. During the pixelation, things blinked in and out of existence. A section of bridge they were driving on ceased to be momentarily, sending the two plunging several hundred feet into the Mississippi River. That in itself would send anyone into the depths, yet Henry did not allow himself to despair. But then a year later, there was a mass shooting at a farmer’s market where Daniel was meeting with a girl he was seeing. A fragment from one of the bullets pierced Daniel’s cerebellum, leaving him severely brain damaged. He was supposed to graduate that Spring next to Madeline. Now, Henry was taking care of him the way he did when Daniel was a baby, but there would be nothing to look forward to, no growing into a man for Daniel.

Henry grimaced. “Sometimes I wish Daniel had been a part of this simulation.”

I nodded. “I understand, Henry. But then he wouldn’t be real.”

“Real? What says we’re really real? Because we didn’t pixelate? Or because we get to suffer with this abortion of a subroutine called ‘self-awareness?’ You think that makes us real?”

Our place in the simulation has been one of the central arguments since The Glitch. The Cartesians pointed to the fact that on a quantum level, nothing in this simulation is determined until we observe it. They believe this proves that we exist outside of the simulation, because it has to respond to us. We’re stuck in the sim as opposed to being just a part of it. The Ecstatics go one further and say we’re supposed to protect the simulation by not interfering with it with all of our scientific probing and observing. The nihilists however, contend that all those conclusions are a conceit to deny our ephemeral and meaningless existence.

Henry’s eyes welled up. “The only thing that is real, Rhiannon, is suffering.”

I put the dish I was washing down and gave Henry a hug. After a moment he pulled away and wiped his eyes.

“I might not believe any of this matters in the end, but I still have a vested interest in you, sis.”

“I know, Henry. And I love you, too. You’ve always been there for me.”

I returned to washing the Fiestaware dishes Henry liberated from Barbara’s house decades ago while he dried. I remember eating countless takeout pizza on these dishes when we were kids in that little house on Hummingbird Lane. That house…I had that same dream last night about that place. As I washed, I tried to conjure the memory of the dream. I was in the hallway. I came across a door that I must have always overlooked….I opened it…

“Shit!”

I dropped a plate into the sink as the hot water from the faucet singed my hands.

“Oh my God! You okay?” Henry asked, concerned as he checked my hands for cuts.

“Um, yeah. Just clumsy.” I picked up the broken pieces of the plate that had survived decades of reckless overuse until now.

“Sorry, Henry.” He shrugged.

“Good thing they aren’t real, right?”