2

The first moon colony was built on the silent flatlands of the Sea of Tranquility, near where the Apollo 11 astronauts had landed in a long-ago century. Their flag was still there, in the distance, a fragile little statue on the windless surface.

There was substantial interest in immigration to the colony. Earth was so crowded by then, and such swaths of it had been rendered uninhabitable by flooding or heat. The colony’s architects had set aside space for substantial residential development, which sold out quickly. The developers lobbied successfully for a second colony when they ran out of space in Colony One. But Colony Two was built a little too hastily, and within a century the lighting system on the main dome had failed. The lighting system was meant to mimic the appearance of the sky as viewed from Earth—it was nice to look up and see blue, as opposed to looking up into the void—and when it failed there was no more false atmosphere, no more shifting pixelations to give the impression of clouds, no more carefully calibrated preprogrammed sunrises and sunsets, no more blue. Which is not to suggest that there wasn’t light, but that light was extremely un-Earthlike: on a bright day, the colonists looked up into space. The juxtaposition of utter darkness with bright light made some people dizzy, although whether this was physical or psychological was up for debate. More seriously, the failure of the dome lighting removed the illusion of the twenty-four-hour day. Now the sun rose rapidly and spent two weeks crossing the sky, after which there were two straight weeks of night.

The cost of repair was deemed prohibitive. There was a degree of adaptation—bedroom windows were outfitted with shutters, so people could sleep during the nights when the sun was out, and street lighting was improved for the days without sunlight—but property values declined, and most people who could afford it moved to Colony One or the recently completed Colony Three. “Colony Two” drifted out of common parlance; everyone called it the Night City. It was the place where the sky was always black.

I grew up in the Night City. My walk to school took me past the childhood home of Olive Llewellyn, an author who’d walked those same streets two hundred years ago, not too far out from the moon’s first settlers. It was a little house on a tree-lined street, and I could tell that it had been pretty once, but the neighborhood had gone downhill since Olive Llewellyn had been a child there. The house was a wreck now, half the windows covered up and graffiti everywhere, but the plaque by the front door remained. I paid the house no attention, until my mother told me she’d named me after a peripheral character in Marienbad, Llewellyn’s most famous book. I didn’t read the book—I didn’t like books—but my sister Zoey did and reported back: the Gaspery-Jacques in the book wasn’t anything like me.

I decided not to ask her what she meant. I was eleven when she read it, which would have made her thirteen or fourteen. By then she was already a serious, driven kind of person who was obviously going to excel at everything she attempted, whereas by eleven I already had the first suspicions that I might not be exactly the kind of person I wanted to be, and it would be awful if she were to tell me that the other Gaspery-Jacques were, say, a strikingly handsome and generally impressive person who was extremely focused on his schoolwork and never committed petty theft. But nonetheless I began to secretly regard Olive Llewellyn’s childhood home with a degree of respect. I felt connected to it.

There was a family living there, a boy and a girl and their parents, pale, miserable-looking people who possessed this weird talent for conveying an impression that they were up to no good. They had an air of having gone to seed, the whole family. Their last name was Anderson. The parents spent a lot of time on the porch, arguing quietly or staring into space. The boy was surly and got into fights at school. The girl, who was about my age, liked to play with a hologram in the front yard, an old-fashioned mirror hologram who danced with her sometimes, and that was actually the only time I saw the Anderson girl smile anywhere near her house, when she was spinning and leaping and her holographic double was spinning and leaping too.

When I was twelve, the Anderson girl was in the same class as me, and I learned her name was Talia. Who was Talia Anderson? She loved to draw. She did backflips on the field. She looked much happier at school than she did at home.

“I know you,” she said abruptly one day, when we were in the cafeteria line together. “You’re always walking by my house.”

“It’s on my way,” I said.

“On your way to what?”

“Well, on my way to everywhere. I live at the end of the cul-de-sac.”

“I know,” she said.

“How do you know where I live?”

“I walk by your house too,” she said. “I cut through your neighbor’s lawn to get to the Periphery.”

At the end of our lawn there was a screen of leaves. Push through them and you’d get to the Periphery Road, which circled the interior of the Night City dome. Cross the road and there was a strange, wild area, no more than fifty feet deep, a strip of wilderness between the road and the dome. Scrub brush, dust, stray plants, garbage. It was a forgotten kind of place. Our mother didn’t like us playing there, so Zoey never ventured across the Periphery Road—she always did as she was told, which I found maddening—but I liked the wildness of it, the mild sense of danger inherent in a forgotten kingdom. That day after school I crossed the empty road for the first time in a few weeks, and stood for a while with my hands pressed to the dome, looking out. The composite glass was so thick that everything on the other side looked like a dream, distant in a muffled kind of way, but I saw craters here and there, meteors, gray. The opaque dome of Colony One glowed in the near distance. I found myself wondering what Talia Anderson’s thoughts were when she gazed out at the moonscape.

Talia Anderson transferred out of my class and left the neighborhood halfway through the year. I didn’t see her again until my mid-thirties, when we were both employed by the Grand Luna Hotel in Colony One.

I started work at the hotel about a month after my mother died. She’d been sick for a long time, years, and at the end Zoey and I all but lived at the hospital. That last week we were there every day and every night, exhausted comrades keeping watch, while our mother murmured and slept. Death was imminent and remained imminent, for much longer than the doctors predicted. Our mother had worked at the post office since we were very young, but in her last hours she thought she was doing postdoctoral work in a physics lab again, murmuring in a confused way about equations and the simulation hypothesis.

“Do you understand what she’s talking about?” I asked Zoey at one point.

“Most of it,” Zoey said. In those hours Zoey sat by the bed with her eyes closed, listening to our mother’s words as if listening to music.

“Can you explain it to me?” It was like being on the outside of a secret club, nose pressed to the glass.

“The simulation hypothesis? Yeah.” She didn’t open her eyes. “Think of how holograms and virtual reality have evolved, even just in the past few years. If we can run fairly convincing simulations of reality now, think of what those simulations will be like in a century or two. The idea with the simulation hypothesis is, we can’t rule out the possibility that all of reality is a simulation.”

I’d been awake for two days and felt like I was dreaming. “Okay, but if we’re living in a computer,” I said, “whose computer is it?”

“Who knows? Humans, a few hundred years into the future? An alien intelligence? It’s not a mainstream theory, but it comes up every so often at the Time Institute.” She opened her eyes. “Oh god, pretend I didn’t say that. I’m tired. I shouldn’t have.”

“Pretend you didn’t say what?”

“The Time Institute part.”

“Okay,” I said, and her eyes closed again. I closed my eyes too. Our mother had stopped murmuring, and now there were just her ragged breaths, with too much time between each one.

When at last the end came, Zoey and I were sleeping. She woke me in the exhausted gray light of early morning, and we sat together for a long time in silence, in reverence, before the stilled figure of our mother on the bed. We dealt with the formalities, hugged goodbye, went our separate ways. I returned home to my cramped apartment, and several days passed where I spoke only with my cat. There was the funeral, then more stillness. I needed a new job—I’d been without one for some time, and was burning through my savings—and so a month after the funeral I found myself in the basement office of a hotel Human Resources officer, a vaguely familiar-looking woman with blond hair, accepting a position that had been advertised as “hotel detective” but whose exact parameters were unclear.

“To be absolutely honest,” I told her, “I’m not entirely clear on what a hotel detective position might entail.”

“It’s just hotel security,” she said. I realized I’d forgotten her name. Natalie? Natasha? “The job title wasn’t my idea. You won’t actually be a detective. Just a security presence, as it were.”

“I want to be sure I’m not misrepresenting myself,” I said. “I left school a few months shy of my criminal justice degree.”

“Can we be honest here, Gaspery?” There was definitely something familiar about her.

“Please.”

“Your entire job is to pay attention to what goes on around you and call the police if you see anything suspicious.”

“I can do that.”

“You sound doubtful,” she said.

“I’m not doubtful for myself. I mean, I don’t doubt I could do it. It’s just, I’m—couldn’t anyone do this job?”

“You’d be surprised. It’s the attention part that’s hard to hire for,” she said. “Distraction is a problem, generally speaking. You remember that test you had to take on your first interview?”

“Sure.”

“That was to measure attentiveness. Your score was high. Tell me, do you agree with your test results? Can you pay attention?”

“Yes,” I said. I was pleased as I said this, because I’d never really thought of myself in this way before, but it seemed to me that I’d been paying close attention my entire life. I hadn’t been successful at very many things, but I’d always been good at watching. That was how I knew my ex-wife had fallen in love with someone else, just by being attentive. There were no obvious clues, just a subtle shift in— but the HR person was talking again, so I reeled myself in from the past.

“Wait,” I said. “I know you.”

“From before this meeting, you mean?”

“Talia,” I said.

Something changed in her face. A mask dropped. Her voice was different when she spoke again, less amused by the world. “I go by Natalia now, but yes.” She was quiet for a moment, looking at me. “We went to school together, didn’t we?”

“End of the cul-de-sac,” I said, and for the first time in the interview, she gave me a genuine smile.

“I used to stand at the Periphery for hours,” she said, “looking out through the glass.”

“You ever go back there? To the Night City?”

“Never,” she said.