At 5:45 AM, a woman named Maya wakes up in a new, unfamiliar city. Today is her first
day at a new job after having recently moved. At 7:20 AM, she waits at the train station
nearest her apartment. At 5:28 PM, she will take the same train again home. This first
morning, she gets on the last car at the back of the train.
Every day at 5:34 PM, a man named Reve takes the same train to work for his night shift.
Then again, at 7:25 AM, he takes it home. Reve always rides in the last train car, preferring
the back for reasons he’s never really thought about. Today, like every other day, he sits
in the back-left section of the left corner. Today, unlike any other day, Maya enters the
train for the first time and sits just a couple seats away in the same section. As she does,
Reve notices her, and then quickly looks down to his phone, pretending that he hasn’t.
Almost simultaneously, just missing eye contact, Maya notices Reve as well, also quickly looking
the other way. Both sit quietly on opposite corners of the same section of the same car
of the same train, as they glide through a city of millions of other things and people,
both thinking only about the other at this exact same moment in time.
On her way home from work, Maya gets on the rear train car again and sits in the same
relative section. Several stops later, like he always does, Reve does the same. As he
rounds the corner of the train’s doorway and moves down the aisle, he meets eyes with
Maya. In unison, a small, subtle lip smile automatically forms on each of their faces,
immediately followed by a downward break of eye contact. In this moment, through some
weird, shared connection affirmed by a soft contortion of the face, an inexplicable sense
of almost fate fills each of their heads. Barred off by nerves and the quirks of interaction,
though, neither wanting to bother the other, and both fearing the strangeness of rejection
and failed attempts, they sit quietly secluded, each screaming in their heads, imagining notions
of romance and lust and futures that hurt a little less.
As more days go by, Maya continues to get on the same train car. On which continues
to sit Reve. Each day seems to almost exclusively contain their brief exchange of smiles and
nods; the days blurring together, only made truly lucid and worthwhile in these introverted,
yet potent acknowledgements of each other. Eventually, somewhere around the second or
third week of sharing the same train schedule, a certain, unusual confidence overtakes Reve.
On his way to work this day, getting on the 5:30 PM train following Maya, he notices an
open seat next to her for the first time. He takes it. After a brief pause and a hidden
explosion of nerves and self-doubt, in an act of benign but heroic courage, he turns
towards her. “Hi. I’m Reve.” Reve meant to say, but actually said something that sounded
more like, “Hi Reve,” as a result of a small, nervous tick inflection of his voice.
Maya, also nervous, says, “Wait, who’s Reve?” despite sort of realizing in real
time that Reve had mumbled what he meant to say. “I’m Reve.” Reve replies with a
nervous laugh, unsure if Maya is joking or not. “Oh, hi. My name…I’m…I’m Maya.”
Maya responds, also with a sort of nervous laugh and stammer of her words. This shared
inability to speak successfully somehow makes both a little more comfortable with each other.
The “hello” quickly turns into a conversation about this and that; where they are going
each day, where they are coming from, and what they would prefer those destinations
were if it were up to them. The conversation turns into more conversations across more
days, the two always sitting or standing next to each other. More conversations turn into
a series of dates. Dates turn into a relationship. A relationship into love; a love neither have
ever experienced before. A sort of love that horrible, unrealistic stories and movies peddle
to deny the dog from hell that it otherwise normally is.
The two fight and complain and clash over all the usual topics and hitches of relationships,
but the love seems to pervade through it all. The desire to find solace in the confusion
of being and nonbeing; to fill in the missing parts of self and purpose; to alleviate the
strangeness and anxiety of existing in the unknown they have woken up to, all sustain
the love. Even at the relationship’s worst, the world feels worthwhile in the clutch of
it. As far as one can be, Maya feels, for the first time in recent memory, like she
is ok. On one night, Reve takes…
…Maya wakes up, disoriented and almost scared. The feeling quickly goes away, though, as
she gets up, gets ready, and leaves for work. On her drive, she can’t help but think about
the dream she had last night, and how it almost feels like an actual memory of another life.
Her concerns of the oncoming day quickly overtake and replace her thinking, though, dissolving
the dream’s setting and characters into some oblivion that will never be known nor
experienced nor remembered by anyone, including her, again.
Maya works as an architectural designer 1 for a mid to large-sized design firm. She
has recently started working at a new firm after having left another. Her main goal in
life has and remains to become an architectural project manager, developing and controlling
the design plans of buildings and city features from the ground-up. For all intents and purposes,
she is passionately obsessed. She has given up relationships and left loves unfounded.
She has moved three times. She has sacrificed a great deal for it. But she can’t imagine
a life in which she would be doing anything else. Her work is her way of escaping the
uncertainty of everything else. The clarity and purpose and self-control she finds in
it seems to make the chaos and confusion of the world and her inexplicable place within
it worthwhile. Today, she is pitching several new concepts
for seating integrations to potentially be applied to a large restaurant redesign that
the firm is working on. After nerves and stress and an almost blacking out of awareness, the
pitch seems to go perfectly. Her designs are brought onto the project.
As more time seems to go by, more and more of Maya’s work is utilized and developed
into project plans. She is soon promoted to architectural designer 2, the next higher
rank up at the firm. Not long after, she is promoted to designer 3. Eventually, after
a long stretch of time that seems like almost no time at all, she is promoted to project
manager. Her teenage dream now finally a reality. As far as one can, Maya feels ok. Like it
has all been worth it. Her first two projects are a great success,
both well received by the clients and highly regarded by the firm and local industry at
large. Her concepts are a perfect balance of being both simple, yet innovative; subtle,
but effective. Her third project is off to a great start
as well, on track to be equally successful. On one of the build days, Maya visits the
construction site to ensure that everything is in order. Everything is off to a great
start and that day is like any and every other day. Then, for no explainable reason, the
partly constructed building suddenly collapses in on itself; the surface almost peeling back
into a collection of rubble; the rubble seeming to almost disappear or dissolve into the ground
in a way that should be impossible. Sudden disorientation and horror overtake Maya, terrified
that she has made a horrible mistake. Then, in nearly the same instant, the other surrounding
buildings and homes within her view seem to also simultaneously fall in a similar manner,
peeling away from themselves and then dissolving into the ground. Maya begins to black out
in a disorientation as she hazily looks around and notices the other workers panicking and
frozen. One by one, they all appear to peel off themselves and dissolve. The ground appears
to begin the same. Maya, now in a physically active panic, quickly tries to…
…a man named David reflects to himself briefly as the software exits out, the project file
clears, and the experiment resets. He and two other researchers discuss the experiment’s
results in a dark lab room. In front of them, a large, 180-degree, multiscreen monitor connected
to a state-of-the-art supercomputer finishes its reset and spews out a collection of data
results. It’s the second trial of the day, and the 6th of the week. The results have
remained inconsistent with the intended hypothesis, yet again, rendering the experiment mostly
useless. David, his two partners, and a full team of
assistants are researching consciousness through a new, highly controversial mind-modeling
software, which maps and replicates the functions of a brain. In which, certain codes and commands
can be executed that simulate the electrical activity of biological brain neurons, reproducing
any mental and perceptual state. This then allows the software to interact back and forth
with an artificially created exterior world, forming a hyper-real, comprehensive imitation
of human experience and ordinary conscious phenomena. Specifically, in this experiment,
David uses the software to set up a character entity with baseline genetic dispositions,
false memories and influences of a childhood and adult life, effects from altered states
like dreams, and so on. The character is then sent through a variety of scenes and moments
of decision making and performance assessment, all for the purpose of testing David’s hypothesis
of freewill in conscious-like agents. David, who is lead researcher and one of the
staple figures of the technology’s development, has spent his whole life researching and uncovering
mysteries of the mind. He has been given several major grants and awards over the span of his
career, and is regarded as one of, if not the most important figure of the 22nd century.
Subsequently, he is one of six individuals who have been given clearance to utilize the
mind-modeling software under a variety of strict guidelines that limit the complexity
Nearly every day, David constantly rediscovers the childlike wonder that got him interested
in science and philosophy in the first place, each needle push forward creating a grander
and more enthralling magic show of reality. David is 176 years old. He is of one of the
last generations who just missed a major transition into substantial anti-aging technologies.
Just prior to, he was diagnosed with a late-stage, irreversible brain cancer. One of the last
to be diagnosed with any form of cancer at all. Of course, it is only getting worse each
day. And with mind-uploading technologies still not fully figured out, they are unlikely
to catch up to him in time. With the reconciliation of freewill, randomness, and determinisms
being one of David’s great remaining goals in life, he spends nearly all his time in
pursuit of this knowledge. After two more years of research, at age 178,
a series of simulations run consistent with a set of David’s predictions, confirming
his hypothesis. On this day, the truth of self-agency and freewill is discovered. As
David looks down at the final test results, as far as one can, David feels like he is
ok. Like it has all been worth it. His greatest moment, achieved.
After a series of successfully reproduced experiments by other scientists, David’s
theory is accepted by the majority of the science and philosophy community, and not
long after, by the public at large. A few weeks later, David passes away from
his cancer following a series of complications during…
…a group of individuals watch the digitally projected screen fade to black in the virtual
reality theater they are collected in. It is the premier of an art exhibit by Ray Delar.
Delar, a famous simulation artist, codes and creates complex worlds and stories through
autonomous characters coded with artificial intelligence algorithms, all run on a simulation
inside a massive quantum supercomputer. In which, the characters are sent through simulated
universes governed by sets of laws that Delar configures, anchoring and compelling the characters
to his intended story lines, like a marionettist with strings made of code and a stage made
of fabricated reality. As characters move through various maps and scenes, the simulated
world creates an deletes parts of itself in real-time, correlating with the characters’
observations of it. The simulation adds environmental features consistent with the characters’
imagined pasts, simultaneously encoding them with confabulated, false memories, making
it seem like things are upwards of billions of years old, when in fact, everything is
hours, minutes, seconds, or not at all. Each character contains a fully simulated brain
with a simulated sense of self-awareness and sensory inputs of a non-existent physical,
external universe. Delar is known and renowned for his absurdly
meta style. Many of his characters are often coded to doubt their realities; to suspect
that something is off and to become curious about what is; to consider that they are in
something or something is in them; to ask why, where and how, all for the purposes of
inciting story lines through his characters attempts to solve and deal with these uncertainties
through art and love and self-improvement and knowledge and the creation of other realities.
Of course, like all art, Delar’s work is a product of his own fears, anxieties, thoughts,
and theories. He himself feels what he gives many of his characters: a skepticism or doubt
in reality; a feeling that his sense of what is real is sufficiently detached from what
actually is. He constantly wonders if he is most likely just in someone or something else’s
contrived reality, like his characters are in his? If he is living in a dream or simulation
or a vat of nutrient solution elsewhere? If some evil genius is in his head, or if the
entire universe is in the head of some evil genius?
Delar doesn’t feel like any of this is true, but he also recognizes that he doesn’t know
what any of these things feel like. He only knows what he feels like. And he feels like
everything could be anything. His sense of what feels real and natural tells him that
everything is real and natural, but what if what feels real and natural is nothing but
a byproduct of the very thing he fears is not. How can he trust what he feels without
having any way of knowing what he does not? How can he know what exists outside his head
without ever being able to step outside of it? And so, he creates art; to deal with this
confusion and anxiety and self-doubt, and to explore all possibilities, he creates worlds
of other character who feel the same. After the screening ends, as always, following
a massive ovation, Delar opens up to a Q and A with the audience. Several audience members
ask about coding techniques, his thoughts on the limitations of current 23rd century
computing power, the prospects of creating entirely self-sustaining simulated worlds,
concerns of ethics, and so on. The Q and A goes as normal and is wrapping up. The last
audience member in the line approaches the mic to conclude the event. He asks the following,
“Hi. This is probably the simplest question of the night, but I’m wondering… your
work seems to always bring up questions of epistemology, obviously; doubts of actually
having sufficient knowledge of knowledge to know if we can trust anything we think. You
create worlds and people that think and act and feel like they are just as real as we
think we are but are of course not real in the way they think they are at all. But so,
my question is, as a true skeptic, you seem to doubt all things, but I’m curious, have
you ever doubted if any of that matters?” The audience member pauses for a short moment
and then continues. “I mean love is felt in the dreams of your characters’ characters,
right? Passions and purposes are had and made in worlds within your worlds. Apparent truths
are discovered and wonders are found in realities made of no more than art and entertainment.
If experiences are experienced in anything anywhere, does it matter any less if it’s
real in the way one thinks? And does it matter if one can or can’t prove it? You show that
knowing what is real or not is likely impossible; that we all very well could be inside some
simulation or video or story right now.; that we could exist in some precoded or deterministic
system, without any of the freewill we yearn for and feel like we have. But does that matter?
Haven’t you more revealed that the uncertainty and unknowns of these “how’s” and “why’s”
and “where’s” and “what’s” is in fact a sustainable and desirable quality
that builds a potential infinity of love and desire and curiosity? And isn’t that you
exist somewhere able to experience any of these things all that you can truly know,
and all that ultimately needs to matter?” The audience member subtly nods his head and
steps back away from the mic to imply the completion of his question.
The virtual theater is quiet. Delar pauses and thinks for a moment. Then
responds, “I am…