Arley had been in car accidents before. Not many, and nothing serious, but there had been a few heart-stopping moments behind the wheel. The funny thing about all of them was that he could only really remember them as memories. One night, coming home late after a party, the alcohol warm and comforting in his veins, he had drifted over the center line and clipped the rear bumper of an oncoming car. He couldn’t actually remember doing that, but he could remember sitting in the car, heart pounding sobriety into his veins, and trying to replay the scene in his head to figure out what exactly had happened. It had been too fast, though, there was nothing except the nauseating shock of adrenalin and fear, and the -memory- of a hideous metallic crunch, a sickening lurch, spinning and the squeal of tires. He could remember remembering the wreck afterward, not the wreck itself.
This time, everything seemed very immediate and clear. He wondered if he would forget all this, and then find himself trying to remember afterwords. He watched the old ford pickup veer off from the other side of the highway, cross the median, coming towards him like a missile. He saw it disappear into the ditch and then lurch back up like a seal wallowing itself onto a rock. He was aware of his own speed, well over the limit, but there didn’t seem to be time to glance down at the speedometer before the truck was in front of him. He watched his arm begin to pull on the wheel, felt his foot pulling itself with agonizing sluggishness from the gas pedal. Was he experiencing this now, or only remembering something that happened seconds before?
The truck passed in front of the car and for a moment seemed as if it would miss entirely, but then the impact came, the truck’s right headlight hit Arley’s right headlight and momentum piled up behind him like a hydraulic press. He watched the world spin, watched the windshield come up to meet his face, felt the rear end of the car sink off the edge of the road. The car must have flipped over – the world outside the windshield had disappeared in dense spiderweb of cracked glass, but he could feel himself going upside down. The roof, bowing inward, made contact with his head. He heard as much as felt the crack and the long drawn out crunch that followed it, felt texture of the headliner pressing into his forehead. Vision clicked off like a light, and with a final thought, so did his mind. “I’m not going to survive this, am I?”
Then there was white. He blinked, and was startled to realize that he had anything to blink with. Whiteness. He played back the wreck in his mind, marveling at the slow-motion clarity of it. When did it happen? Was he in a hospital, re-living the accident? Surely not, he could remember that crack, the sensation of implacable force bearing down on his head, bending his neck backwards. Oh. He must be dead then.
He sat up, startled again to realize that he had indeed been laying down, and looked around. Whiteness. No, not exactly whiteness. More like over-saturation, like when you take the video camera out into the bright sunlight and everything is washed-out brightness until the camera adjusts. Just like that, the white around him began to melt away, revealing lines and colors, the shape of a room, chairs, a window, people. Two men faded into existence in front of him, one taller, both in white lab coats. The taller one wore glasses and held a metal clipboard.
He stared at them, and at the room that had materialized in what seemed to be empty whiteness moments before. He said the first thing that popped into his mind. “Uh… where am I?”
The taller of the two strangers nodded and made a little note on his clipboard before speaking. “You’re dead.”
Arley considered this. It seemed obvious, really, but like a lot of obvious answers didn’t quite address what he wanted to know.
“Yeah, but where exactly? I mean, what is this place? I never really believed in Heaven or Hell, but this is…” he looked around at the walls, covered with sickly-green and faded yellow flowery wallpaper. “not really what I expected.”
“Ah, no, it’s not heaven or hell or purgatory, though to some extent those are all subjective realities and you may decide to subscribe to the view that this is indeed one of those three.”
Again, it wasn’t really an answer. “So… where am I then?”
The shorter of the two spoke this time, “From our perspective, the real world.”
His tall companion continued, “The universe you grew up in is a simulation, we are engineers, we maintain the systems on which that simulation runs.”
Arley felt like he should be feeling shock right now, or even panic. He felt like he should be feeling -something-, but he simply didn’t. This was confusing and he did feel bewildered, but fear, anxiety and shock were simply absent.
“But… if I’m a simulation, why am I here?”
“Ah yes, it’s somewhat confusing. For the last few thousand years of your universe’s run-time, sentient simulations have had rights as sovereign human beings. So, when your simulation thread expires, we instantiate you here. Bit of a mess, honestly, but that’s the law.”
“Wait, what? Everything I knew was just a computer simulation, but now I’m out of the computer and… where exactly? And everyone who dies wakes up here?”
“Not everyone, but the vast majority. We screen based on the probable damage a person could cause in our society, many psychopathic and otherwise intolerable simulants are held inactive, but no sentient entity is permanently erased.”
“So you judge us and decide whether we get to live here? Sounds an awful lot like the whole final judgment god in heaven deal to me.”
They looked at each other and Arley got the impression that this was something they went through on a regular basis.
“There has been a great deal of confusion about that, in fact. If it makes you more comfortable, you may think of it that way. The religious beliefs prevalent in the simulation are indeed based on our communication of the sentient entity legislation. What your societies have done with that communication is a source of considerable consternation here.”
The questions began piling up in his mind, but the two engineers seemed to be growing impatient. They clearly had things to be getting on with. Before Arley could formulate his next query, the tall one said, “In any case, you will have access to all the information you need, we are just here to ensure that you have instantiated without incident. We have tuned down your emotional response to avoid trauma, you will feel your emotions slowly come back to you over the next day or two. We find this helps eliminate the worst effects of the transition. A job has been assigned to you, as well as an apartment and basic necessities.”
As he spoke, the other one took Arley’s arm gently and led him towards the door.
“You have been instantiated into a copy of your body that matches your peak of health. Should you have any issues with your body, let us know and adjustments can be made.” The engineer pressed a small bundle into Arley’s hand. “Here are your keys, directions to your apartment, and an instructional booklet that answers the most common questions.”
Arley found himself on a sidewalk outside of a modest brick building. A hand full of pedestrians walked by, ignoring him. He looked at the little bundle, then back up at the street. It looked like a perfectly normal street in any perfectly normal city. The people looked like anyone he would have seen in his native Chicago. The city around him was unfamiliar in specifics, but had the perfectly familiar feel of every large city he had ever been in.
His apartment, which he found by following the simple map included in the packet, was so like the first tiny apartment he had rented on his own that he felt and almost physical nostalgia looking at the beige walls, beige carpet, beige formica counters and tiny white refrigerator. Everything was a little unusual, the shapes and designs of the apartment and indeed everything he had seen in the city were all a little off, a little different in the small details, but deeply familiar all the same – as if the consumer goods here were all the same, but made by different companies with different corporate branding.
The car’s seemed to all be smaller, quieter, possibly even electric, and the clothing seemed longer and more flowing. The appliances were more curved – but for all that he could simply be in a European city rather than an American one, there were no fundamental differences that had made it incontrovertibly an entirely different universe than the one he had grown up, lived, and died in.
The packet explained that he had a job here, clerk at a local retail store, which was essentially the same job he had left behind. It contained a card which resembled a debit card, an ID much like a drivers license, and a cellphone. It also contained a page of frequently asked questions.
Q: Can I return to my old life in the simulation?
A: No, the instantiation process works only in one direction.
Q: Can I view the simulation and see my old friends and family?
A: No, viewing the simulation is restricted to certified Simulation Engineers only.
He scanned down the list of questions until something caught his eye:
Q: How fast does time pass in the simulation?
A: Time in the simulation passes at a rate of approximately twenty years for every one year here.
Q: Why did I instantiate in a place very like where I lived in the simulation?
A: Due to the large number of instantiations, cities and provinces here have been founded by people from near your own time. You have been placed in a locale populated largely by people from your own era in the simulation.
Further down the page:
Q: Can I find people I knew from the simulation, such as my parents and friends who have died?
A: No, in order to maintain social order, the memories of every instantiation have been altered, you will not recognize anyone you knew in the simulation, though you will remember your time with them clearly.
Q: What other aspects of my mind have been modified?
A: Any psychoses or other diagnosable mental disorders have been removed.
Arley stared at the page, it was slightly glossy and each question and answer were grouped together in a cheerful orange box. He touched his head, as if he would be able to feel the changes that had been made inside it.
Over the next few days, he felt his emotions return, but the familiarity and matter-of-fact normalcy of this place had it’s own dampening effect on the fear, frustration, and shock of death and reincarnation. And then of course he had to consider that the Engineers may have simply “fixed” any parts of him that would have panicked. In any case, he fell into the new situation with amazing ease.
He went to work at a men’s wear store, made a few friends, and settled into a life so like his old that he often forgot that this was a new life. There were differences, of course. Here, people apparently lived on three different planets, though it was never clear to him how they moved in between. There were two civilizations, really, that of the simulation builders who were technologically advanced far beyond the simulated earthlings, and the civilization of the reincarnated simulations themselves. They lived mostly in enclaves that reflected the era in which they had lived in the simulation. There was a large semi-primitive country, he learned, in which hundreds of people who had lived two thousand years before Arley’s birth still subsisted, having resisted the temptation to move on to more advanced areas. In this world, they had been there a mere hundred years.
He watched the customers, the people on the streets, and his friends for hints that they might be people he knew in his old life, but as the little guide had promised, no one seemed even slightly familiar. He had vivid memories of his friends, he could still hear and see and feel them in his memory, but every stranger he met set off a little part of his brain searching in vain for clues.
It was all so very easy. The old life faded into the new, his death was reduced in his mind to a simple move from one apartment to another. He moved up in his job, met a girl, moved in with her. Years slipped by, he married. Inside the simulation, some hideous disaster occurred, and apparently everyone inside it died – but the influx of new souls was little more than an aside on the local news – the new citizens mostly instantiated on a newly terraformed fourth planet where they had little contact with Arley’s compatriots. They turned the simulation off after that, apparently there was no one left there. A handful of his friends threw a little party for the event, but Arley missed it.
He grew old, much older than he would have in the simulation, but there was no immortality here any more than there had been there. When he died, body failing in a peaceful and orderly sort of way, after the whiteness faded away into shapes and colors, he sat up and saw the woman in a lab coat standing before him with a clipboard. The situation seemed vaguely familiar but he couldn’t quite say why.
Dead by Kenneth Lett is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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