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 na?ve 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?”