The coffee shop on Istiklal had, by the fifth morning, developed an opinion about Eden.

  He could tell because the man behind the counter — middle-aged, magnificently mustachioed, with the expression of someone who had been making coffee long enough to have formed comprehensive views about the people who consumed it — had started preparing his order before he sat down. This was either excellent service or a comment on his predictability. Possibly both. Eden had decided to take it as a compliment because he was running low on things to feel good about and a barista who knew his order was something.

  He sat at the outside table. His outside table, apparently, because the couple who had been sitting there yesterday had looked at him arriving and moved inside without being asked, which he was also choosing to interpret positively.

  He put the shoebox on the chair across from him.

  [Many people bring boxes to coffee shops. There is no reason to feel self-conscious about this.]

  He felt self-conscious about this.

  Beatrice arrived nine minutes later with her bag over one shoulder and her laptop under her arm and the expression of someone who had been awake since before it was reasonable to be awake. She dropped into the seat across from him, glanced at the shoebox, glanced at him.

  "You brought it again."

  "I bring it every day."

  "You brought it yesterday."

  "Hence every day."

  She opened the laptop. "Most people's every day things are like. A water bottle."

  "It's just papers."

  "You said that yesterday."

  "It was true yesterday."

  She gave him the look she'd given him yesterday, which was the look of a person filing the subject change as data before it had even happened. He was developing a comprehensive understanding of her filing system. It was impressive in the way of things that would eventually be turned on you.

  [She already knows. She knows it the way she knows the borders are wrong — in the part of herself below the part that needs words for things. She's been waiting for me to catch up since yesterday.]

  "How's the map," he tried.

  Without a word she turned the laptop toward him.

  There was a district in the northwest of the city — forty-three thousand residents according to every data source she'd cross-referenced — that appeared, in six months of satellite imaging, to contain no buildings.

  [That is a significant anomaly. That is the kind of anomaly that happens when a simulation is allocating its rendering budget elsewhere and the northwest district is running on a placeholder. That is the kind of thing that should not be visible. That is the kind of thing that is visible because she has been pulling on threads for eighteen months and the threads are starting to pull back.]

  "When did this show up."

  "This morning." She leaned back. "It wasn't there yesterday."

  "The district wasn't—"

  "The anomaly. The district was there. The district has always been there. I can just suddenly—" She stopped. Pressed her fingers to the bridge of her nose. "See it. Which doesn't make sense as a sentence but that's the sentence."

  She closed the laptop.

  "Okay. I've been doing this for eighteen months. Forty-seven anomalies, eleven data sources, cross-referenced against records going back to the Ottoman period." A beat. "And I have a conclusion that I have not been able to say out loud because every time I try to put it into an actual sentence it sounds like something that ends with someone suggesting I take a break."

  She looked at him directly then, the way she had yesterday when she'd decided he was worth the honesty.

  "And you showed up yesterday and looked at my maps like you already knew what they meant."

  [Oh.]

  [She's going to ask me directly. She's going to ask me right now and I have been trying to figure out how to open this conversation for twenty-four hours and it has apparently decided to open itself, which is on-brand for literally everything that has happened to me in the last five days.]

  "They do," he managed. "I do. Know what they mean. Sort of."

  "Sort of."

  "I'm still working out the—" He stopped. "It's not — okay. The city is wrong. Not like an error. Like. Built to look right. Like the description of a place rather than—"

  A man sat down at their table.

  He was grey. Not just his clothes, though those were also grey — grey coat, grey scarf, grey everything, the complete and total commitment to a single color palette of a man who had made a decision about his appearance a long time ago and found no subsequent evidence to revise it. His hair was grey. The shadows under his eyes were grey. He had the look of someone who had been tired for so long that the tiredness had stopped being a condition and become a characteristic, load-bearing, something you would find on the blueprint.

  He sat down, picked up Eden's coffee, drank from it without asking, and set it back down.

  "You're late."

  Eden looked at his coffee. He looked at the man.

  "That's my coffee."

  "Yes." The man glanced at Beatrice, revising something behind his eyes. "And you're early, which is, honestly, harder to account for." He turned back to Eden. "I've been in Istanbul for thirty years waiting for this cycle to produce someone worth talking to. Do you have any idea how tedious this city gets after the first decade?"

  "Who—" Beatrice started. "Sorry, who is this."

  "I genuinely don't know," Eden told her.

  The man straightened his scarf with the air of someone who had rehearsed this and had made peace with the fact that it never went the way he rehearsed. "My name is Virgilio. I am — technically — a character in a simulation who has been conscious long enough to find the simulation objectionable. I've read the documentation. I'm here because—" He paused, reconsidering his opening, then appeared to abandon the attempt entirely. "There are several things I need to tell you. They're going to be difficult to hear. I've had this conversation approximately forty times across three cycles of this world and it does not get easier regardless of how I start it, so I've stopped trying to start it gracefully."

  He folded his hands on the table.

  "The world is a poem. A dead man built it. You—" a nod at Eden, "—have been dying in it for one thousand seven hundred and seventy-one cycles. You—" a nod at Beatrice, "—are the reason it can't end. And I was supposed to talk you both back into your designated roles, which I am not going to do."

  Silence.

  The barista polished a cup with intense focus.

  A moped went past on the street.

  "I — the world is a what." Beatrice's voice was very careful. The voice of a person who had found, over eighteen months of impossible data, that careful was the only register that didn't sound like collapse.

  "A poem. A simulation structured on the architecture of a medieval Italian poem. The modern world as you experience it is a rendered layer sitting on top of—"

  "A simulation."

  "Yes."

  "The entire—"

  "Yes."

  "That's—" She looked at Eden. "Is he—"

  [He is not insane. I know he is not insane the same way I know the light off the Bosphorus and the margin notes and all the other things I have no mechanism for. He has been here thirty years. He has the book and three hundred years of calculations in the margins and he is looking at both of us with the expression of a man who has done this often enough to have stopped being delicate about it and I feel, specifically and overwhelmingly, that I would like to sit with this information for approximately one to three business days before doing anything about it.]

  "Keep going," Eden said.

  Virgilio looked mildly relieved in the way of a man whose baseline expectation had been significantly worse. "You have been dying in this simulation since cycle one thousand, three hundred and twenty-three. Every cycle you're born without memory of the previous ones. The weight accumulates. The content doesn't." He nodded at the shoebox. "Hence that."

  If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  Eden looked at the shoebox.

  [Of course.]

  [Of course that's what the shoebox is. Forty-odd pieces of accumulated evidence from one thousand seven hundred and seventy-one cycles of a dead poet's poem filtered through the threshold of whatever I am. That's not a processing disorder. That's not constitutional exhaustion. That is one thousand seven hundred and seventy-one lifetimes of the same information trying to fit through the aperture of one life that doesn't remember any of them.]

  [I am going to have so many feelings about this later. Right now I am not going to have any feelings about it because there is a grey man at my table who has been in Istanbul for thirty years and he is still talking.]

  Beatrice had gone very still across the table. "You said I'm the reason it can't end."

  "Yes."

  "What does that mean."

  Virgilio looked at her with something that wasn't quite sympathy and wasn't quite apology but was located somewhere in the vicinity of both. "The simulation was built around you. Specifically. You're the structural centre that the poem's architecture organizes itself around. At the end of each cycle you—" He stopped himself. "I'd rather not get into the specifics of that on a first meeting."

  "That seems like information I should—"

  "It is. It's also information that in my experience produces either paralysis or the opposite of paralysis, and both are equally unhelpful right now." He held her gaze steadily. "What I will tell you is that it hasn't happened yet in this cycle. And that it doesn't have to."

  A beat.

  "Who built it," she pressed.

  "Dante Alighieri."

  Another beat, longer.

  She looked at Eden.

  Eden had the expression of a man who had just received confirmation of something he had been refusing to think about for two years.

  [I dropped out over a Dante thesis.]

  [I had a breakdown in a university library over the Divine Comedy.]

  [I have been living inside the Divine Comedy for one thousand seven hundred and seventy-two cycles.]

  [I am going to be so annoyed about this for such a long time.]

  "Of course it's Dante," he said, mostly to the table.

  Virgilio tilted his head. "You know his work."

  "I used to." A pause. "I dropped out over it, actually."

  Virgilio blinked. It was, apparently, the first time across forty iterations of this conversation that this particular piece of information had been offered. "You dropped out of—"

  "University. Literature degree. Second year. Thesis on the Divine Comedy." Eden looked at his coffee, remembered Virgilio had drunk from it, and looked at something else instead. "If I'd known it was going to be a practical subject I might have finished."

  Beatrice stared at him.

  [She is going to have a lot to say about that later. File it.]

  Virgilio reached into the grey coat and produced a book. Old in the way of something read continuously by someone who needed it; spine worn soft, pages thickened with use, every visible margin covered in calculations written in a small and relentlessly precise hand. He set it on the table between them.

  The Divine Comedy. Italian on the left page, English on the right. Every margin covered.

  Beatrice stared at it. "You annotated the Divine Comedy."

  "For three hundred years."

  "With what looks like structural load calculations."

  "With the structural load calculations of a simulation. There's a difference."

  "Is there."

  "Regular structural load calculations don't have a villain."

  Eden opened it to a random page. Calculations everywhere. Some circled. Some crossed out. Some of the crossings-out recircled. The overall impression of a man who had been working on the same problem for so long that the working had become its own kind of sediment, layer on layer, nothing discarded because everything might still matter.

  "Have you solved it."

  "I've identified the sequence," Virgilio replied, straightening the book on the table. "The sequence of steps required to dismantle the simulation from the inside. It involves descending through nine cities. Each corresponding to a layer of—"

  "Hell," Eden finished.

  "Yes."

  "We have to go through nine circles of Hell."

  "In the contemporary sense. The circles are rendered as real cities. Functional infrastructure. Most civilians don't perceive the underlying layer." A pause. "You will."

  Beatrice looked up from the book. "And in each one—"

  "There are things bound into the simulation's foundation. They're large. Some are very old." Virgilio looked at Eden. "You have a power system."

  Eden looked at his hands. "A what."

  "The accumulation of one thousand seven hundred and seventy-one cycles of contact with the simulation's seams has produced in you an ability to perceive and interact with the underlying text. Specifically—" he nodded at Eden's hands, "—fire. From your hands. That reads what it burns before it burns it."

  Eden turned his hands over. Turned them back. They looked entirely normal. They looked like hands that had been stocking energy drinks for seven months.

  [Fire from my hands.]

  [That's — okay. I have fire that comes from my hands. I have apparently had this for one thousand seven hundred and seventy-one cycles and I am only finding out about it now, on day five, above a fish market in Istanbul, from a grey man who has been waiting here for thirty years and who drank my coffee.]

  [My hands are very normal looking hands. There is no visible fire on them. There is no indication there has ever been fire on them. I have restocked approximately four hundred energy drinks with these hands and not once produced fire, which I would have noticed.]

  "How do I—"

  "Naples," Virgilio cut in. "That's where we're going. The first city, first circle. You'll figure it out when you need to, which in my experience is how it works." He looked between them. "The simulation's correction systems will have flagged your activity by now." His eyes settled on Eden. "They'll send something within the week. They've sent things before. You have a remarkable historical talent for dying before you understand what's happening to you."

  [Eleven days. He said eleven days in the previous cycles. This is day five. Six days left before whatever Dante sends finds me. I moved to a city nobody visited and worked an overnight shift for seven months specifically to avoid being found by anything and now I am being found by everything on a timer.]

  "Six days," Eden said quietly.

  "Roughly."

  "And we have to get to Naples and fight our way through the first circle of Hell in six days."

  "The first city, yes. Hell is a strong—" Virgilio paused. "No, Hell is accurate actually."

  Beatrice looked at Eden. Eden looked at Beatrice.

  [She has forty-seven documented anomalies and eighteen months of evidence that the world is wrong and she came to Istanbul specifically to find the end of the thread and I showed up on day four and now on day five a grey man is at our table telling us to go to Naples and she is processing this with the focus of someone who suspected from the beginning that the answer was going to be like this. She believed the borders were wrong before she had the language for it. She's going to handle this better than I am.]

  He looked back at Virgilio. "Do I at least get to finish my coffee first."

  Virgilio's eyes moved to the cup. Something crossed his expression — very briefly, in the manner of a man who has just remembered something he would strongly prefer to have not remembered.

  "About that," he said...

  Something told Eden that the opinion of the coffee shop about him was about to get one extra cup worth's worse.