4
If we were living in a simulation, how would we know it was a simulation? I took the trolley home from the university at three in the morning. In the warm light of the moving car, I closed my eyes and marveled at the detail. The gentle vibration of the trolley on its cushion of air. The sounds—the barely perceptible whisper of movement, the soft conversations here and there in the car, the tinny notes of a game escaping from a device somewhere. We are living in a simulation, I told myself, testing the idea, but it still seemed improbable to me, because I could smell the bouquet of yellow roses that the woman sitting beside me held carefully in both hands. We are living in a simulation, but I’m hungry and am I supposed to believe that that’s a simulation too?
“I’m not saying these things add up to any kind of definite proof that we’re living in a simulation,” Zoey had said, an hour ago in her office. “I’m saying I think there’s enough here to justify an investigation.”
How do you investigate reality? My hunger is a simulation, I told myself, but I wanted a cheeseburger. Cheeseburgers are a simulation. Beef is a simulation. (Actually, that was literally true. Killing an animal for food would get you arrested both on Earth and in the colonies.) I opened my eyes and thought, The roses are a simulation. The scent of roses is a simulation.
“What would an investigation look like?” I’d asked her.
“I think you’d want to visit all those points in time,” Zoey said. “You’d want to speak with the letter writer in 1912, the video artist in 2019 or 2020, and the novelist in 2203.”
I remembered the news stories when time travel was invented and then immediately made illegal outside of government facilities. I remembered a chapter from a criminology textbook dedicated to the near-annihilating nightmare of the so-called Rose Loop, when history had changed twenty-seven times before the rogue traveler was taken out of commission and his damage undone. I knew that one hundred forty-one of the two hundred and five people serving life sentences on the moon were there because they’d attempted time travel. It didn’t matter if they’d been successful or not; the attempt was enough to send you away for life.
“Gaspery,” Zoey had said, “I’m not sure why you look so shocked. What does the sign on the building say?”
“Time Institute,” I admitted.
She looked at me.
“I thought you were a physicist,” I said.
“Well…yes,” she said. There was a knowledge-and-achievement gap the size of the solar system in that pause between words. I heard that old kindness, that familiar sense that she was extending generosity toward me. We can’t all be geniuses, I wanted to tell her, but we’d had that conversation when we were teenagers and it had gone poorly, so I didn’t.
We are living in a simulation, I told myself, as the trolley stopped a block from my apartment, but this fell so far short of, well, of the reality, for lack of a better word. I couldn’t convince myself. I didn’t believe it. There was a scheduled rainfall in—I glanced at my watch—two minutes. I stepped out of the trolley and walked very slowly, on purpose. I’ve always loved rain, and knowing that it isn’t coming from clouds doesn’t make me love it less.
