5

In the weeks that followed, I tried to reacclimatize to the rhythms of my life. I rose at five in the afternoon in my tiny apartment, listened to music while I cooked, fed my cat, walked or took the trolley to work. I was at the hotel by seven p.m., gazing out at the lobby from behind dark glasses—most staffers didn’t wear dark glasses, but as a light-sensitive native of the Night City who couldn’t tolerate the diffuse glare of the dome, I had special dispensation from HR—and I stood there thinking of all of the things around me that might not be real. The stone of the lobby floor. The fabric of my clothes. My hands. My glasses. The footsteps of a woman crossing the lobby.

“Evening, Gaspery,” the woman said.

“Talia. Hi.”

“You were taking a very concentrated interest in the lobby floor.”

“Can I ask you an extremely random question?”

“Please do,” she said. “I’ve had a boring day.”

“Do you ever catch yourself thinking about the simulation hypothesis?” It seemed worth asking. It was all I could think about.

She raised her eyebrows. “That’s the idea that we’re possibly living in a simulation, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

“Actually, yes. I have thought about it. I don’t believe we’re living in a simulation.” Talia was gazing past me, past the lobby, to the street. “I don’t know, maybe this is naïve of me, but I feel like a simulation should be better, you know? I mean, if you were going to the trouble to simulate that street, for example, couldn’t all of the streetlights work?”

The streetlight across the street had been flickering for a number of weeks.

“I see your point.”

“Well, anyway,” Talia said, “good night.”

“Good night.” I returned to the exercise of noticing everything and telling myself that none of the things I noticed were real, but now I was distracted by her point. Something no one ever talked about in those days was the shabbiness of the moon colonies. I think we were all a little embarrassed by it.

“Yeah, I think it’s fair to say the glamour’s worn off,” Zoey said, when I saw her later that night. My shift ended at two a.m., so I’d called to ask if I could come over and see her. I’d known she’d be up—she’d never fully transitioned out of the Night City either, and, like me, she preferred to stay up all night—and she was taking a couple of days off work, so I took the trolley to her apartment. I’d been to this apartment only a handful of times, and had forgotten how dark it was. She’d painted the walls in a deep shade of gray. She had a collection of old-fashioned paper books—mostly history—and a framed painting on the wall that we’d made together when we were children. I was moved by it. We’d been about four and six, something like that, and we’d painted ourselves: a boy and a girl holding hands under a tree in exuberant colors.

“Where did the glamour go?” I asked. She’d poured me a generous glass of whiskey, which I was sipping very slowly because I’ve never had much of an alcohol tolerance. She was already on her second drink.

“To the newer colonies, I suppose. Titan, I guess. Europa. The Far Colonies.” We were at her kitchen table. She lived across the street from the Time Institute, which I’d known intellectually without fully absorbing. What did Zoey have? She’d been very close with our mother, and now that Mom was gone, what Zoey had was her work. Her work and almost nothing else, to all appearances, but who was I to judge. I leaned back in my chair, gazing over the Time Institute rooftops at the luminescent spires of beyond. Could I immigrate to the Far Colonies? Fantastical thought. But of course the thought that followed was If we’re living in a simulation, it’s not like the Far Colonies are real either.

“What happened to them?” I asked. “The letter writer back in the twentieth century, Edwin whatever his name was, and Olive Llewellyn?”

Zoey had somehow finished her second glass—I was still only halfway through my first—and poured herself a third.

“The letter writer went to war, returned home to England a broken man, and died in an insane asylum. Olive Llewellyn died on Earth. A pandemic broke out while she was on a book tour.”

“Zoey,” I said, “has your investigation started yet?”

“Sort of. Preliminary discussions are under way. The bureaucracy around travel is intense.”

“Will you get to…Will you be the one to travel?”

“I almost left the Time Institute a few years ago,” she said. “I agreed to stay on condition that I never have to travel again.”

“You’ve traveled through time,” I said, and my awe at my sister was boundless in that moment. “Where did you go?”

“I can’t talk about it.” Her expression was grim.

“Can you at least tell me why you don’t want to do it anymore? I’d think it’d be…”

“You’d think it’d be interesting,” she said. “It is. At first it’s fascinating. It’s a portal to a different world.”

“Right, that’s how I imagined it.”

“But before you go, Gaspery, you might spend two years engaged in research. When you’re going to a given point in time, you’re there to investigate some specific thing, and you read up on everyone you expect to encounter. There are people at the Time Institute, hundreds of staff, whose entire job is researching long-dead people to compile dossiers for travelers, and your job is to study those dossiers until you know everything in them.” She stopped to drink. “So, Gaspery, picture this scene. You step into a party, at some long-ago point in time, and you know exactly how and when each and every person in that room is going to die.”

“That’s pretty creepy,” I admitted.

“And some of them are going to die in the most preventable ways, Gaspery. You might be talking to a woman, let’s say she has young children, and you know she’s going to drown at a picnic next Tuesday, and because you can’t mess with the time line, the one thing you absolutely cannot say to her is ‘Don’t go swimming next week.’ You have to let her die.”

“You can’t pull her from the water.”

“Right.”

For a while I wasn’t sure what to say, so I gazed out the window at the rooftops and spires and wondered if letting someone die for the sake of the time line was something I could do. Zoey drank quietly.

“The job requires an almost inhuman level of detachment,” she said finally. “Did I say almost? Not almost inhuman, actually inhuman.”

“So someone will have to travel through time to investigate this,” I said, “but it won’t be you.”

“It will be several people, but I don’t know who. It’s not exactly a popular job.”

“Send me,” I said. Because what I was thinking in that moment was that the theoretical woman who was going to drown next Tuesday was going to drown anyway.

She looked at me, surprised. Two spots of pink had appeared on her cheeks, but otherwise she seemed perfectly sober.

“Absolutely not.”

“Why not?”

“One, it’s a horrifically dangerous job. Two, you’re not qualified.”

“What kind of background would you have to have, to travel back in time and talk to people? That’s what it is, isn’t it? I mean, what are the qualifications?”

“There’s a barrage of psychological testing, followed by years of training.”

“I could do that,” I said. “I could go back to school, I could do whatever training was required. You know I almost finished my criminology degree. I know how to conduct an interview.”

She was quiet.

“You want to keep the circle small here,” I said, “don’t you? Imagine the panic if word got out that we’re living in a simulation.”

“We don’t know that we’re living in a simulation, and I don’t know that panic is quite the word. More like terminal ennui.”

I decided to look up ennui later. There are words you encounter all your life without knowing what they mean.

“Zoey,” I said, “I’m not doing anything with my life.”

“Don’t say that,” she said, too quickly.

“This is just…this situation,” I said, “this thing, whatever it is, this possibility I guess, it’s the most interested I’ve been about anything in maybe my entire life.”

“Then get a hobby, Gaspery. Take up calligraphy or archery or something.”

“Can you just think about it, Zoey? Talk to whoever you have to talk to? Can I be considered? If we’re talking about traveling through time here, then there’s no real rush, is there? I’d have time to prepare, I could do whatever you want, go back to school, psychological training, whatever—” I realized I was babbling, so I stopped.

“No,” she said. “Absolutely not.” She drained her glass. “When I say it’s a dangerous job, Gaspery, I mean I wouldn’t want anyone I love to do it.”