Part 3: Final Boss / Chapter 30

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  “It’s crazy, but . . . maybe it’s not,” Darla said. “Maybe it really is a simulation.”

  “Maybe what’s a simulation?”

  “Everything,” she answered cryptically as she retrieved the scattered, blood-soaked pages of the printout from the floor beside the card table. Last time I’d seen it, it was lying on the desk in our hotel room.

  “How did that—”

  But she waved off the question before I could finish it, as she organized the printout into a tidy stack and started flipping through the pages, searchingly.

  “When the Russians were about to stage my death by maritime mishap—”

  “What?”

  “It’s not important. What’s important is what happened in my head.”

  “Something happened in your head?”

  “Something about fear or heightened emotions,” she said as she scanned the pages. “It like . . . unlocked my brain.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can read the printout. Like all of it. But no one else can read any of it.”

  “What?”

  She held up one of the pages and I saw a passage highlighted—a passage of pure gibberish.

  “You can read that?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “So none of it was ever translated?”

  She shook her head.

  “Something’s just been happening to me and now . . . ”

  Based on everything that had gone down, it seemed her guess about her uncle being able to read some or all of the feed was dead on. And I think we both wanted to turn a blind eye to what it might mean that she could now read the crazy gibberish that only a mad man had been able to read. So I skipped to the obvious question about the integrity of her sanity.

  “Okay. So . . . what does it say?”

  “Most of it’s the same kind of stuff we’ve already talked about. It’s like my uncle somehow hacked into a data lake and pulled down a bunch of bits and pieces of news stories. They’re all scrambled and out of order, but some of them . . . ”

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  She paused, as she found the passage she was after. She read it aloud.

  “With Goliath’s ’Project Do-Over’ beta, players see themselves relive life better.”

  She looked at me, with a wide-eyed expression of trepidation. I looked back, clueless.

  “I don’t . . . what’s Project Do-Over?”

  She nodded uncomfortably, then continued reading.

  “Leveraging cutting edge brain scan tech, Goliath’s new AI engine produces digital doppelgangers of users. Those doppelgangers believe themselves to be real people, living in the eighty-some years between 1959 and the present.”

  I was barely following, but the math stuck out.

  “Eighty-some years between 1959 and . . . ” I said. “That would make the present two thousand forty-something.”

  “Maybe it is,” she said. “In the real world.”

  She waited for it to sink in. And then it did.

  “Are you telling me . . . ” I started, but didn’t know how to phrase it. “You think we’re these ‘digital dopplegangers?’ You don’t think this is real? You don’t think we’re real?”

  She shrugged, at a loss.

  “That Nikolai guy said it was B.S.” she said. “At first I thought so too but . . . this printout makes a lot of predictions. A bunch of them haven’t panned out. But . . . ”

  “A bunch of them have.”

  She nodded.

  “I mean it seems ridiculous—like some kind of elaborate prank. But underneath that it feels like . . . ”

  “Like what?”

  “Like it felt when I first saw you. Genuine. True.”

  The subtext warmed my heart. But the main text was a problem.

  “So I’m supposed to believe we’re not real people?”

  “No,” Darla answered. “I . . . I think we are. I mean I think there’s a version of us that is. And they got their brains scanned and . . . ”

  “No,” I said. “No. This is impossible.”

  “More impossible than your RIP stuff happening in a real world?”

  That stopped me cold. She was right. The things that had happened in the last forty-eight hours had broken every law of reality as I knew it. But was the only explanation that I was living in the Matrix or the Oasis or whatever sci-fi trope you want to pick?

  “So you and me, we’re just avatars of the real us, somewhere up there?” I said pointing to the sky. “And what about everybody else?”

  I looked around at the bodies all over the warehouse. “These guys? Merrick? My sister?” I couldn’t bring myself to add Robbie to the list, as if saying his name out loud would make him more likely to be a figment of some MMO server’s imagination.

  “I don’t know,” she answered, looking down at the printout. “This is a jumbled mess and I haven’t even read the whole thing.”

  But I wasn’t listening.

  “And how is RIP supposed to fit into the equation?” I railed. “Why is it happening to me? And why are you some kind of prophet?”

  She just shrugged timidly but I pressed on, starting to shout now.

  “You want me to believe that we’re not even here? That nothing really exists? Nothing really matters? There’s another explanation. There’s a hundred other explanations!”

  “You’re right,” she said. But while her words agreed with me, her face didn’t. And I wanted her face to agree with me.

  “It’s all a dream!” I posited. “Or I’m hallucinating all of this and you’re having a concurrent paranoid schizophrenic episode. That makes sense—you’re suggestable because you’ve lost it—gone bonkers—like your uncle did.”

  She recoiled at that, anguish surfacing in her eyes. I was beating up on the only person I had to hang on to in a world gone mad. But I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t accept what she was saying. I could comprehend her losing her mind—even me losing my mind. I could even half-way believe some magical being was intruding on reality, manipulating it. But the notion that our whole world didn’t even exist? I couldn’t abide it. Still, as Darla took a step back from me, I wished I hadn’t said what I’d said.

  “Darla, I didn’t mean to . . . ”

  “I know,” she said.

  “I just . . . ”

  I didn’t know what else to say. But a moment later my phone rang and this time the panic it elicited was more than justified.

  Robbie was in a coma.