When the terror first started—if any one day can be pinpointed and arraigned—it was subtle and suggestive. Sneaky. It set quiet hooks down into rich, fleshy soil and sought nourishment. In Michael Linfield it found sustenance; hearty, bountiful fields of imagination and suggestibility. And it grew strong.

Michael was a plain man on the outside. Not someone who would catch the eye or be worth pointing out in most contexts. He was twenty-seven years old and worked in banking. On Mondays he wore his gray suit: unobtrusive and just a little baggy at the ankles (if you were really looking). He liked to pair that with a green shirt, gold tie, and neat brown wingtips. On Tuesdays he switched to black with a powder blue Tommy Hilfiger shirt and red tie. A reasonably-priced gold Citizen watch sat on his left wrist. A classic look.

Monday through Thursday he forced himself to spend an hour lifting weights in the stuffy basement gym of his apartment building before jogging a painful two-mile circuit through the dark, neighboring streets. His shape didn’t change. That was okay. He just wanted to maintain what he had, or so he said.

On Friday’s he allowed himself to go tieless. Even drank three to four beers from the comfort of his living room to cap off another successful, if not boring and predictable, week.

But inside…inside he was often someone else entirely. Predictable and sensible were not the words that would likely come to mind if one were to see the face he wore when left alone. Inside existed a vibrant and treacherous maze of emotion and longing, a maze that was heavily shadowed and frequented by long-time pals and once-forgotten acquaintances named panic and dread and anxiety.

These friends and their visits were cyclical in nature, and from thirteen to twenty-seven they were largely absent, just as they were for most of the years which preceded their arrival one cold December day at age eleven. Then again, absent might not be the most apt way of putting it. Dormant seems closer to the mark. Yes, dormant and hidden under bountiful fields of soft, fertile soil.

And that’s where they lived. Until the day ground was broken.

It was a Wednesday, a blue suit day. Michael left work at four-thirty and was home by a quarter past five. He changed, fed his cats, laced up his beaten blue running shoes, and was downstairs staring into the streaked, distorted gym mirror by six p.m. The gym was dimly lit, as usual, warm with stale air that reeked of old sweat, rubber dumbbells, and Lysol wipes, as usual, and was mostly empty, as usual. He was alone except for his usual companion, a mid-thirties blond woman walking aggressively on one of the two treadmills. Her arms pistoned forward and back, forward and back, bent stiffly at the elbows as her heavy feet slammed down in a quick but monotonous pattern. She had a sheet of paper positioned at eye level on the treadmill. Michael originally assumed it was a workout plan, but she never did anything but walk for an angry forty-five minutes. Whatever it was, he stopped caring quickly. She began to blend into the background, like everything else.

By seven (or ten after, at the latest) he was outside, running his familiar route, huffing cold February air into his asthmatic lungs and listening to the sound of his own feet smacking the sidewalk in a steady cadence that always managed to penetrate the music coming through his headphones. He smelled the warm, contagious aroma of pizza that he had come to expect as he rounded the second corner and passed Johnny V’s Pizzeria, and felt the same sharp pang in his stomach that he had grown so accustomed to. Twenty minutes later he was slogging up the hill to his apartment, sucking quick, shallow gulps of air into his irritated lungs while pushing wet hair back from his forehead. He felt the familiar combination of exhaust, pride, and relief as he topped the final hill and shuffled slowly through his building’s lobby to the elevator call button. In a flash he was twelve floors up and pushing his key into the door of the apartment he had spent the last four years in.

Jen was home, as he knew she would be. She was sitting on the couch staring at her phone, wet hair hanging down past her shoulders, with a cat on either side of her. He plopped down on the floor in front of her and began stretching as he removed his headphones.

“How was your run?” she asked without looking up from her screen.

“It was all right. My legs hurt like crazy though, I think I’ll have to do the stationary bike tomorrow. I don’t think they have another run in them this week.”

To this there’s no reply, so he opens his phone and scrolls through Instagram while reaching for the toes of his left foot. Five minutes later he finishes his stretching but continues to sit on the floor in his sweaty clothes while he leafs through his phone. Instagram gets boring quickly so he switches to Reddit, something much more capable of wasting his time and gluing him to the floor where he currently sits.

Towards the top of the front page he sees an article from a website with a futuristic sounding name titled Are We Living in a Computer Simulation? Elon Musk Thinks So. He taps this one open. Michael has long been a fan of Elon Musk, as most people of his generation are. He designs sleek, sexy electric cars and talks of putting people on Mars; his companies are successful, his visions are grand but often attained, and he has a cult-like following; he’s the real-life, actual version of every Millennial circle-jerk conversation rolled into a living, breathing person.

Michael has heard of simulation theory in the past. He read about Nicholas Bostrom in college, the British philosopher who posited the idea originally, but seeing Musk’s name attached to it elevates it to a much higher level of credibility, as evidenced by the fact that this article was sitting at the very top of the front page of every 18-30-year-old’s favorite app.

Jen finally closes her phone and looks toward him. She watches as he reads quietly on the ground, legs splayed in a long V in front of him, left hand planted behind for balance, his phone held less than six inches from his face. She notices how he furrows his brow and occasionally lifts his left hand to swipe quickly across his face, the way he always does when he’s deep in concentration, lost in some activity, and she smiles softly, unobserved. She loves him very much, more than she ever thought herself capable. After ten years together—four of which they’ve been married—she believes she understands the strange, complex man that lives inside of her ostensibly average husband. She knows that there’s a violent storm raging beneath the placid face he puts on for the rest of the world and she does her best to navigate accordingly, like a well-traveled captain braving rough, stormy waters in the search of some elusive treasure.

He finishes the article and closes his phone. By the time he’s done, she’s up and off the couch, picking out her outfit for the next day, getting ready for bed.

He takes off his sweaty dri-fit Nike shirt and heads toward the shower. His mind is working. Rolling over a new idea, playing with it, seeing how it feels as he shapes it with his hands, presses it between his fingers and tries to find its true shape. He climbs into the shower with these thoughts deep in his head. The shower is an introspective place for Michael, a place where he does a lot of slow, laborious thinking. Always has been.

A seed has been planted. It needs water to grow. The heavens open and a flood provides life for new thoughts, new ideas, and when that ground breaks, sleeping giants wake and seek higher ground.

At work the next day his mind is mostly occupied by the open spreadsheet he has on his left monitor and the stock chart that’s on the right. On a normal day the spreadsheet would command his attention and the doings of the S&P 500 would be a barely noticed backdrop, something green and pretty to make his setup look more professional. This week has seen the market drop like hell though, officially entering correction territory as of this morning and—despite knowing better than to be concerned with his years of market experience—Michael can’t seem to stop refreshing his chart. Every time he does he sees it’s dropped a bit further. He doesn’t like the thick, zagging red line on his screen, so he turns to the neighboring desk.

“Market can’t seem to stop. Another nosedive today, you seeing this?”

Mark takes off his headphones and turns toward him. There’s no aggravation in this gesture; he’s worked with Michael for almost two years now and they’ve come to know each other well. Not quite friends—they certainly don’t see each other outside of work often—but they still seem to have that unspoken ability to read the other’s temperament with nothing more than a quick glance.

“What’s up?”

“I said the market can’t stop shitting the bed. We’re down almost three percent again today and it’s barely ten a.m.”

“So what? Weren’t you just saying yesterday that you expected a correction sometime this year?”

“Yeah, but still. I hate losing money.”

“Can’t lose money if you never sell.” Mark taps at his head and cracks a smile as he says this.

“Yeah yeah, I see you’ve been listening when I talk.”

“Don’t flatter yourself bro. That’s indexing 101.”

“True. I have at least twenty-five years until I retire so I shouldn’t even care. I don’t even know why I’m looking at it. I’m sure as hell not going to look at my 401(k) anytime soon. I don’t need the stress.” And with that Michael closes out Google Finance and replaces it with another spreadsheet.

He takes a quick look around to make sure no one important is nearby. His boss is away from his desk in a meeting, as usual, and now that he’s opened the door to conversation, he doesn’t feel like working. He turns back to Mark, thoughts of the market pushed aside, and conversation naturally steers toward their normal topics: basketball, rap, and their favorite conspiracy theories. Lately they’ve been talking a lot about flat-Earthers. Both Mark and Michael get a kick out of Robert who works in Corporate Actions—he claims to be well versed in the flat Earth conspiracy because he finds it funny, but they both have a feeling that part of him might believe what he says.

“How about them Lakers? Think you guys might crack the ten seed in the west?” He smirks as he says this. Mark knows better than to feed into his taunts, but he can rarely control himself when his team is brought into it.

“We’re on a four-game win streak bro. Better than your trash Blazers.” This he says without looking away from his screen.

“Sure, try beating us one of these years before you talk about who’s trash and who isn’t.”

“Sixteen ‘chips bro. That’s all I need to know.”

They both work silently for a few minutes after this back and forth. Michael puts his headphones in and tries to concentrate on the mortgage trend analysis that he’s supposed to finish by end of day tomorrow, but he finds he can’t stop his mind from wandering. He pauses his music and turns back to Mark.

“Yo, have you heard of simulation theory?”

“You been talking to Robert again? You need to stop encouraging that guy.”

Michael laughs. “No, not this time actually. I was reading about it last night. Elon Musk is a big believer. I thought it was kind of interesting.”

Mark finally looks away from his screen and turns toward him. Must’ve been the mention of Musk, Michael thinks. Mark likes to keep tabs on SpaceX and their developments and he dreams of one day owning a Tesla.

“That’s the one that says we’re all living in a simulation, right? Elon really thinks that?”

“I know, I had the exact same thought at first. I thought it was all conspiracy bullshit like lizard people and ‘jet fuel can’t melt steel beams.’ I was surprised to see his name attached to it. But it’s not that simple. A lot of the people who talk about it are educated; Neil deGrasse Tyson was mentioned in the article too.”

“Damn, that’s crazy. You gonna tell me about it or just sit there and look stupid?”

“I don’t know, you might be too dumb to understand. Asshole.”

“Well if you get it I’m sure I won’t have any trouble.”

If anyone at First Trust Bank, especially—God forbid—HR were to walk by and overhear the daily conversation between these two, they’d be appalled. They’d probably assume they hated each other. But this was just the nature of their relationship; two people, on the same page, with an unspoken but mutually agreed upon trust.

“Sure buddy. Anyway, the crux of it is this: looking back at technology and gaming and how far we’ve come from the first days of pong or whatever, and assuming any rate of improvement at all, it stands to reason that sometime in the future we’ll have simulations that are indistinguishable from reality. You follow?”

“Yeah, that makes sense.”

“Ok, so what Musk said was that assuming we continue to progress as we’ve been, there will come a day when simulations and augmented reality will be so real that no one would be able to tell them apart from our daily lives. That day might be in fifty years from now or five-hundred, but it’s going to come. And—just like video games are so pervasive now—he thinks that everyone in the future will have access to simulations of that level of sophistication. Just for entertainment purposes alone. Like the Sims on crack.”

Michael could tell by the absent look in Mark’s eye that he was getting it, he was really listening.  

“So in this hypothetical future everyone has access to these simulations. They’re essentially playthings, like video games to us. Assuming a world where billions of people could have these ultra-life-like simulations running on desktops, it also stands to reason that there’s a one in billions chance that we’re not in a simulation right now.”

“You kinda lost me on that last part, man.”

“Think about it this way. One of the following two things is true: one day we will reach a point where technology can create virtual realities that are indistinguishable from our reality, or that will never happen. It’s impossible. Life-like augmented reality cannot happen. I personally believe the former.”

“Right.” He appeared to think it over for a moment. “I’m with you on that one. Just compare a modern video game to some Atari shit. I don’t think we’ve seen the limit yet. I think we’ll get there one day.”

“Exactly. So if that day is going to come, assuming that is true, one of the following situations also must be true: the world has reached that point and there are currently billions of those life-like simulations running right now, or, we’re the first, the original timeline, and we just haven’t made it there yet. But the chances that we’re the original, that we haven’t made it there yet…mathematically speaking, is one in billions. It’s far more likely—statistically speaking—that we’re in a simulation right now. One that is indiscernible from ‘real life.’ We might just be in a desktop in some kid’s garage.”

Mark sat and thought this over for a minute. Michael relished the genuinely thoughtful look on his face.

“Damn, that’s trippy man. Thanks for the mindfuck.”

“Right?”

“So I guess I really shouldn’t be worried about the market. It’s all just simulated bullshit anyway. Maybe whoever is running the show can bump up my paycheck a little.”

Michael laughed in agreement. “For real man, but seriously, I kinda can’t stop thinking about it. I mean, it really does—”

And then Derek, their boss, came around the corner like a hurricane, papers stacked helter-skelter in his hand, his face flushed and irritated, and all conversation was stopped.

“Mike, how’s that analysis coming along?” he said in his business-as-usual voice. The voice that was meant to sound jovial and relaxed but never came out sounding halfway close to sincere.

“Getting there, Derek. I’ll have it to you before tomorrow ends.”

“That’s what I like to hear, my man.” He sat down at his desk—directly behind the two cohorts. And with that, conversations of simulations and the Western Conference Standings halted for the day. Michael returned to his analysis, Mark went back to the database he was working on, and the day returned to its normal state.

Right on cue, Michael thought. He showed up just as the conversation was getting good. How convenient. Couldn’t have scripted it better.

And with that thought the ground shook; a chasm opened and revealed a pit of blackness. In that blackness titanic monsters stirred and began the ascent.

She walked home on light feet that seemed to move on their own. If asked, she would have said that three-thirty in the afternoon is the sweetest hour of the day; too early to be thinking about tomorrow, but late enough to be done with today.

She loved her kids, yes, but even the brightest-eyed, most hopeful teacher lost some of her wind within the first semester. By the end of the first year you were lucky to catch the occasional breeze. Five years in and you more than understood the question that all parents ask when their child mentions the prospect of going into teaching: “And why would you do something like that?”

But despite the occasional difficult child, the god-awful parents, the incompetent administration, the long hours and abysmal paychecks, she would have it no other way. If asked, Do you regret it?, she would be stunned. Not because the question was out of line or inappropriate, but simply because the idea had never crossed her mind. It was a choice she made without conscious thought. She had always wanted to be a teacher, was always going to become a teacher. She was simply following the script.

These thoughts were far from her mind as she walked, because it was the blessed hour, the sweet spot of her day. It was three-thirty and she was free. The day was unexpectedly beautiful for early March. What had started as a dark, wet morning had become a glorious golden afternoon that promised spring blessings were just around the corner. The breeze was still crisp with winter air, but today it carried soft floral notes for the first time of the new year. She could smell fresh grass and the somehow alluring scent of dirt; a scent that conjured old memories of childhood summers and endless June twilights.

And she wasn’t the only one enjoying the stark change in weather. Her short walk home—normally quick and lonely this time of year—was full of life. Squirrels that seemed to disappear for six months of the year resurfaced as if they had crawled up from beneath the ground; crows roosted on trees and power lines, screaming in their shrill language, as if offended by their grey sky turning blue. She saw butterflies in the bushes and circular, painfully complex spider webs stranded between branches of bare trees that were beginning to sprout short nubs that would soon become vibrant leaves. And the people.

A day ago she could have rode her skateboard down the empty sidewalk like she used to as a kid, and she would have made it the nine blocks to their apartment without slowing once. Today she had to jostle and sidestep every few feet just to hold her ground on the crowded pavement. The city center—a one block-wide square of asphalt that held a few small shops, a semicircle of big cement steps, and of course a few bronze statues no one quite understood—that she regularly cut through to save herself a few steps was a sea of faces. She wondered idly where all these people go during the winter. Surely they must live in some of the buildings that stand tall above the city, guarding the skyline like sleepy sentinels, or the few small houses nestled comfortably in the hills off in the distance. But still, the swarm of eager, smiling families was jarring compared to the sad, abandoned courtyard she had walked through just yesterday. She found it hard to comprehend how they all came out of hiding so quickly, so uniformly. It was like they materialized out of thin air.

Despite the crowd, she ventured through Pioneer Square and cut a sharp diagonal path in the direction of her apartment. She veered hard to the left to go around a congregation of long-haired teenage boys standing around stupidly with their skateboards held tight to their sides. Now she stared forward to avoid the gaze of a balding man with a clipboard, presumably looking for signatures for this week’s hot petition, but she couldn’t help but turn her attention to the man with the megaphone and the sign that read ALL NONBELIEVERS WILL BURN. It was written in bright red letters that smeared at the ends like dripping blood.

People like him were far from rare in the summer months. She assumed it was the same way in the downtown part of just about any city, although she had never spent time travelling the country. Still she found herself watching as he paced and shouted his apoplectic declarations.

“IT WAS WRITTEN,” his voice was amplified through the speaker, and despite the nasally tone that wanted to come through, the volume was enough to make it intimidating and somehow final.

“YOU WILL FOLLOW HIS SCRIPT! WE ARE ALL BUT PAWNS IN THIS WORLD! GIVE IN, AND LET HIS WORD GUIDE YOU! FREE WILL IS AN ILLUSION!” This last part was paired with an emphatic stomp. “YOU. WILL. ALL. PLAY YOUR PART. AND ALL NONBELIEVERS WILL BURN!”

Jen hurried past him and weaved her way to the far side of the square. Once out of the claustrophobic mass his message seemed silly and almost flamboyant. It hadn’t felt that way at the bottom of the steps with a crowd of empty faces surrounding her on every side, looking down from above. Down there it felt apocalyptic. It felt like doom.

But now she was walking again, and her path was relatively clear. The breeze cooled the sweat that had appeared on her forehead, and made her feel light again. She allowed her thoughts to drift once more and before long she was stepping into her quiet apartment. She changed quickly, ignoring the cats brushing against her long legs, and went back out the door she had just come through. Fifteen minutes later she was running through the quickly-cooling evening air as she climbed deeper into the hills that stood above their apartment.

When she got back home the apartment was empty, but she saw Michael’s shoes by the door, and the sleepy cats on the couch told her all she needed to know about how recently their bowls had been filled.

While showering she thought about her husband. He’d been acting strange lately, not that acting strange was so strange for him, when it came right down to it. But still, she couldn’t shake the feeling that something big was on his mind. It was in the vacant stares and empty expressions that seemed plastered to his face, the disinterested grunts that had become his way of communicating. She loved him a great deal and just wanted to see him happy again.

Maybe it’s me, she thought, pausing under the hot water with her eyes closed. Maybe I’m doing something wrong. Does he need more from me?

She thought about the brooding face that slept next to her every night. She wondered what that face looked like when she wasn’t there.

I can help him. I will help him. I will play my part.

The black car turns hard to the left, cutting across a desultory lane of traffic and settles with its headlights a few inches from the steel sliding garage door built into the wall in front of it. It’s a newer model Civic with dark window tint to match the exterior paint and black rims.

The young man that gets out of it is wearing light gray joggers and a purple hoodie. His sunglasses are mirror lenses that reflect back like a still pool of water. Today is Sunday and the first day of Spring, but the sky is slate gray and wet with a mist finer than the eye can detect. The world is very still. People are inside, waiting for their sunlight.

He’s annoyed to find the coffee shop full. He’s getting his to-go—like every Sunday—but he has little desire to interact with anyone. As he stands in line toward the back of the store, he observes the scene around him. The café is dimly lit with a faux fireplace nestled comfortably in one corner. The walls are brick, except for the one in the far back which is lined with shelves holding books; the floor is wood, and all around the perimeter sit small groups of people, leaning closely in to whisper secrets.

Someone at the front of the line has question after question for the barista, so Michael turns around and gazes at the bookshelf. He comes here every Sunday, has for two years, but he’s never looked closely at the books. They sit in long rows, books of all colors, all of them very old and used looking. It looks like they haven’t been so much as moved in years. He wonders if they’re even real.

I bet if I opened one up, it would be nothing but blank white pages. It might not open at all. Maybe they’re painted cardboard husks and nothing more. And why not? No one here has any interest in books. Look at them. They all sit around with their laptops or their phones, smiling vacantly. I wonder if any of them are real, either.

“Sir?”

He turns around and notices the line has disappeared behind him. The man at the register is smiling. It’s an empty smile, mechanical, but his eyes are full of knowledge.

“Sorry, I’ll have a medium coffee to go. Room for cream, please.”

What does he know? Why is he looking at me like that?

“Okay, that’ll be two dollars.”

He finishes the transaction and heads to the other side of the bar to wait for his drink.

Get ahold of yourself man, you’re losing it. He probably thinks you’re high or something, with the way you zoned out back there.

Suddenly he feels it’s very important to take a book from the shelf and see what’s inside. A compulsion he can’t control pulls him toward the back of the store. He feels claustrophobic, like the air in this place is too thin to breathe. He needs to see words inside the book, needs to know it’s real, because lately nothing seems real—not the people around him, not his job nor his life. He pulls a reddish-pink book that’s sitting at eye level from the shelf and turns it over. The words on the cover are obscured and blurry and he can’t tell what it’s supposed to say. He opens it.

Blank inside. Every page. The book is nothing more than a prop. The room he is in starts to feel smaller and he has the absurd idea that when he turns around, everyone in the shop will be staring at him. He can feel dozens of eyes digging into his back, turning his skin tight. He replaces the book and walks back to where he was waiting.

So what? I bet plenty of coffee shops have fake books on their walls. It’s called aesthetic. That doesn’t prove anything.

But if it means nothing, then why is his chest tight? Why is his heart pounding at the base of his throat?

None of them are real. This is all fake. Look at it, it’s too perfect. Like that couple there, in the corner. Don’t they look just like the people you’d see in an ad for a coffee shop? I bet they’re not even talking, just smiling and moving their mouths. I bet if I got right up next to them they wouldn’t even notice me, they’d just keep moving their mouths and smiling like extras in a movie.

He looks all around the room, trying to find something that seems out of place, anything at all, something to convince him that the room isn’t filled with lifeless props designed to maintain the illusion around him.

Someone do something unexpected, please, for fuck’s sake just get up and move.

Suddenly a woman gets up from her table and walks to the back of the shop. She walks to the bookcase in the wall and, to Michael’s astonishment, grabs the same book he had just examined. She opens it and stares, leafing through the pages.

And now she’s going to put it back, she was probably just curious like me.

She walks back to where she was sitting and puts the book down on the table. She’s reading the book with blank pages. He stares incredulously as she turns it to the man sitting across from her and points to something on one of the pages. She smiles and turns the book back and continues reading.

She doesn’t even know that there’s nothing on the pages. Because she’s not real. None of them are. They’re all just lines of code in some big computer, doing what they’re programmed to do. How come I can see? How am I the only one that can see through it?

“Medium coffee, room for cream.”

His thoughts are broken and he turns to see the man who took his order holding out a cup underneath his wide, uncanny smile.

“Thanks.”

“No problem, Michael. You have a great day.”

He takes his black coffee and leaves in a hurry.

The next day Michael Linfield decided that he needed to mix things up, try something different for a change. He left his gray suit hanging in his closet and wore the dark blue checkered slacks that rarely worked their way into the rotation.

Gonna throw them off their game, that’s right. See how they react to a little unpredictability. Hope the programmers planned for this—would hate to see things go haywire. He barked a brief laugh at his own wit, the type of laugh that sometimes precedes the long-winded grumblings of a madman or a hysterical bout of tears.

For the first time in his five and a half years at First Trust Bank he elected to go tieless on a day that didn’t start with the letter F. There was short, dark stubble growing on his face. His hair was unkempt. A pair of old glasses rested on his face; his contacts sat disregarded in his medicine cabinet.

He grinned at the strange man looking back at him from the mirror before grabbing his lunch box and walking out the door.

As he walked up the wide cement steps of First Trust Bank he considered all his options. Mind moving faster than a lightning bolt, he weighed all the potential outcomes of the various scenarios he had been envisioning since yesterday’s episode at the coffee shop. He found that he could see them all with astounding clarity, like he was watching his life play out in a series of short films.

What does it really matter? he thought to himself, and—stepping through the slowly revolving door into the warm embrace of the lobby—decided to scrap them all.

Why don’t we just see where this goes? Let the old script play out? And at that, he decided to see where the day would take him. He realized he was curious now. For the first time in what felt like ages he wanted to see what would happen, and, more importantly, he no longer cared. Something about seeing the hollow woman at the coffee shop studying the blank pages of a fake book had stripped away his ability to worry about anything in this world.

When he reaches his desk he’s not surprised to see Mark occupying his usual chair, comfortably settled in and working with his headphones in his ears. He takes a moment to wonder if he’s ever beaten Mark into the office.

Can’t get here first, never will. He doesn’t leave. At five in the morning he probably just boots up in that chair, headphones already in. There’s no apartment on 192nd, no dog—have you ever seen them? Or just heard about them and accepted them at face value, like so many other things in your life?

Michael logs in to his computer and begins loading his usual tabs. He opens his email, Google Finance, the project management system they use to track their progress with ongoing tasks, and the analysis he’s supposed to be working on. He notices that Derek is away from his desk, in a meeting in some out-of-sight conference room (or materializing in a dark corner, pixel by pixel with that stupid fucking grin on his face), but decides not to strike up conversation with Mark as he usually would. Today is to be a day of firsts. He puts his headphones in and attempts to look busy.

How long until he talks to me? And what about? I can’t wait to see!

Twenty minutes later, Mark leans in and takes off his headphones.

“I know you saw that LeBron dunk last night. Straight murdered that man.”

“Huh?” Michael removes from his ears headphones that aren’t plugged into anything and pretends he didn’t hear the question.

“That dunk last night. The Cavs? Tell me you saw that.”

“Oh, nah man. I don’t really like basketball. Didn’t watch.”

Mark stares at him with a stone-faced look of non-amusement.

“So you’re just gonna act like a weirdo today? That’s what we’re doing?”

Michael turns toward him with a straight face, but underneath that face, inside of it, with the face that he wears when he’s all alone, he smiles a predator’s grin.

“And what do you mean by that, Mark?”

“You’re buggin’ bro,” he says as he laughs and shakes his head. “Had a little too much to drink last night? Hit your head getting out of bed this morning?”

“Nope. I feel great.” His lips turn upward as the grin of his hidden face works its way outside.

“Whatever you say, buddy.”

Mark turns back to his computer and replaces the headphones in his ears.

Didn’t expect that, did you? Inside his head, Michael laughs with pride.

For the next few hours the two men work silently, side by side, the way they had spent the past three years, but with an unseen barrier between them. A barrier better known as doubt. This barrier had been part of Michael’s life for years—placed between him and countless people he knew unwillingly, inadvertently; a side effect of his oldest friends, the ones that wandered the dark maze of his mind, angrily looking for their way out, their way back to the warm light that once welcomed them.

His angry resolve was momentarily disrupted during this time and he had a brief moment to think, a moment where he was almost his old self, the person he was before ground was broken and old ways reinserted themselves into his life. He sat with soundless headphones in his ears and considered himself, considered his life, and for the first time, considered the invisible barrier he was building between himself and one of the few friends he kept. His mind was a jumbled, miserable pit of longing and pain and bitter understanding.

Why do I have to feel like this? Do I not deserve to be happy? Why must I constantly feel like I’m an illusion, a fake, living in a world where I don’t belong? Do other people feel this way? Do other people feel anything at all? Are there other people? Why am I like this?

The more he tried to control his increasingly frantic thoughts, the more he found he was no longer in control. All he could do was sink his fingers in and hold on for dear life.

Am I the illusion or is happiness the illusion? Can anyone truly say they feel happy? How could that be possible in a world with so many questions, so many dark spots and dead zones of confusion and mystery? Maybe no one ever feels happy. Maybe we all just pretend, because we think that’s what we’re supposed to do. Maybe no one is ever happy at all. How could we be when we keep so much to ourselves, when we keep so much from each other? Who can truly say they know another, whether their mother or father or brother or sister or wife or best friend—how can we know each other when we keep so much hidden, even from ourselves?

He asks questions with ease, but unfortunately, they are greeted only by silence. Either the answers aren’t within him, or they refuse to come out, but in the end, the difference is negligible. We all do what we can with what we have, and for Michael Linfield, the game was always to be played against a stacked deck, in enemy territory, moving steadily uphill. We don’t get to choose where we start, we don’t choose what weapons we are armed with—we simply play the game we’re given, with the pieces we have, and everything else is a dark glass. The harder we look, the more we see our own faces reflected back.

“You saw that Black Mirror episode everyone is talking about?”

“What?” This time he wasn’t feigning ignorance.

“C’mon, don’t tell me you don’t watch Black Mirror.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s a show on Netflix. I’m surprised you’ve never seen it, everyone is talking about it lately. You’d probably like it, actually.”

“Never heard of it. What’s it about?”

Mark laughed, “That’s actually kind of hard to say. Every episode is a different story, related to any of the others in only the loosest sense, and they all focus on technology and the future. Usually pretty dark stuff. Like I said, you’d probably like it.”

Michael sat staring with the same oddly vacant look that had been on his face all day. It was a new look for him—strange, Mark thought, and decided to continue.

“The reason I brought up that episode is because it reminded me of the conversation we had a week or two back, the one about simulation theory.”

The glazed look disappeared from Michael’s eyes and his head perked up, as if listening to a far away sound he could only barely hear. So he is alive in there, thought Mark.

“Ah, that got your attention, huh? I guess you haven’t forgotten. Your memory isn’t as bad as you’d have me believe when I come to cash in on those basketball bets you try to claim you never made.” 

“Oh, I remember Mark. I remember.”

On second thought I liked the glazed-over look better than this. Mark was trying to figure out what seemed so off about his coworker. His eyes still seem dead but now they also seem like they’re drilling into my brain, trying to see through me.

“You gonna tell me about it, or just sit there and look stupid?” Michael said. His lips imitated a smile as dead as his eyes.

“Yeah, I’ll try to dumb it down for you, bud.” Mark was trying to remain lighthearted, but nothing felt right about this conversation or the empty shell staring back at him from the next desk.

“The episode was about this dating service. It was like Tinder and Match combined almost; you enter a bunch of stuff about yourself and it matches you with people. Thing is, you get a time limit with the person you match with. And you can only see how much time you have with them if both people agree to check it. The story follows one guy and one girl who are on a date in the beginning, but their time together is super short, like a day or something. Then you see them match with all these other people and stay with them for like, eight months at a time or whatever, and all of these other people seem like poor matches whereas those two seemed to really like each other in the beginning. Make sense?”

“Why do people follow the time limits if they match with someone they like?”

“That’s kind of the whole point. You’re supposed to give yourself up to the system and trust it. By the end, it guarantees that you’ll match with the perfect person. It claims to learn about you through every relationship it puts you in, like an automated assistant that helps you with everything in your life. It totes some really high success rate, like 99.8% or something, so people just trust it and follow its guidance, even when they don’t want to. It’s a pretty good watch man, I think you’d like it.”

“What does that have to do with simulation theory?”

“Well you find out at the end that the two people you’ve been watching the whole time aren’t actually real. I mean, they’re real in a sense, I guess. They’re like an uploaded consciousness of the real person. The two people we’ve been following decide they really like each other and they don’t care about the system—kind of a ‘fuck the rules’ type of thing—and they find each other and try to run away from this weird, organized, fake society that they’re in.

“They run away and escape by climbing over the giant wall that houses them in this fake world. You find out that what you’ve been watching is actually the dating service, and it uploads the consciousness of the user and matches them with other people to see what happens. If you and another user decide to forget the system and run away together enough times—they run a thousand simulations, I think—then the system matches you with that person in real life. We see real versions of the two people we’ve been following all episode meeting each other for the first time at the end. Everything we saw was just a simulation, but they obviously thought they were real. Funny enough, they actually have a conversation during the episode about how they might be simulations, how they might not be real. Kind of like the conversation we had. And it turns out to be true. I thought that was a cool little misdirection.”

“I see.”

“I see? That’s all you got? Did you smoke before work today or something?”

Michael ignores the question. He’s thinking. Inside his head a dangerous new flower is sprouting and reaching up toward the sunlight.

“So the point was that they had to suspend belief, right? They had to go against everything they thought was real all this time and run away from it all to finally be free? Leap of faith.”

“Yeah, pretty much.”

Quietly, under his breath, “They had to believe.”

“What was that?”

“Nothing. Thank you, Mark.” Again his empty smile sits underneath lifeless eyes.

Mark shakes his head and laughs, “You need help, bro.”

Oh, but I think I just got all the help I need my fake friend.

Three-thirty. The blessed hour. Freedom. Her feet barely skim the ground as she exits the red-brick façade of Markham Elementary School. She is here. She is present. Life is within a moment.

Twenty miles away, a conversation carries on; she can’t hear it, but it affects her all the same. Does she feel it? Somewhere, inside? Does it carry? Not the words, no, but the meaning of what is spoken. Do the implications ride invisible waves, crossing miles of open air and empty space to receive their carrier? Do those tremors settle into her bones as bad vibrations? All long-held pain and mistrust and doubt and confusion and fate, maybe? Is there fate? Who writes it, then? Who charts it?

Perhaps she is too far to receive the signal, because her face is easy; a warm smile that seems at home where it is and eyes that are far too full of light and life and all things good to be leading her to a dark cave where stinking beasts consort with black nothingness.

The day is another beautiful arrangement; the sun rests close to the top of the sky, where it seems to spend more of its time at this point in the year; the wind wants to be cold but can’t quite commit, like an impotent last stand in memoriam of winter. There’s a crossing over happening, so she thinks, and there’s such beauty in it.

In the wind she smells lavender, coming from far away. It’s traveled a great distance to reach her. On top of that she smells wild flowers, just beginning to return to life now that another cycle has taken place, underneath it the smell of cold, still trying to be there, to be present. Above all and more immediately, she smells the freshly mowed grass of the baseball field she now strolls past. And dirt.

She’s once again assaulted by memories. Pulled into the undertow, the rip currents that always flow just beneath the surface, but sometimes swell to a raging tide that cannot be overcome.

No longer is she walking down the sidewalk, living another regularly scheduled weekday. Her feet continue to carry the lower half of her body, but her head has floated to 1998. It’s June. School is out for the summer and all the hours are blessed; these are the days that stretch endlessly toward an unseen horizon, and routine is nothing more than an empty word—letters arranged in a specific order that carry no meaning, no weight.

Their backyard is long. It might as well stretch to the Idaho state line as it exists in that foggy place of nostalgia. The sun hangs in the sky, refusing to set, the way it does as the days trickle slowly toward solstice in the pacific northwest.

Time doesn’t exist.

Her feet continue to move her, but here, where part of her always exists, unseen, they move much faster, in short, awkward strides. Tristan runs from her, screaming about the machine, the machine, chasing them in dumb hunger.

She looks behind her. At first she sees nothing, but then it’s there, rolling slowly but so impartially after them. The machine is coming and nothing can stop it. It chews and spits dirt to its side as it rolls after them, following its programming, doing the only thing it knows to do. Hunting.

She chases her small brother, urging him on, telling him to hurry before it catches up, laughing and living but also scared of the inevitable, invisible monster that follows her always. She knows she can’t escape it. She doesn’t care. This is now; that will be then. Life is within a moment.

He stops dead when he reaches the tall boards of their fence and turns back to her, his face a sheet of pure panic. Dead end. She grabs him—without missing a beat, so graceful, always—and pulls him down on top of her as they roll into the hedges that line the border of their yard.

“Shh!” She puts one finger over her pursed lips as they lie in the cool darkness of the bushes, their small bodies stacked on one another.

“He can’t see us in here. Be quiet!”

They lie on the ground, holding each other, holding their breath, and they wait as the machine rolls back and forth outside of the bushes, seeking them, trying to find them, out of sight, hidden, lost, gone now. She smells her own sweat—not the stinking body odor that will come later for both of them, in adolescence, eons away—but the smell of ozone, of air, of outside and playing. And she smells the dirt beneath them, all around them, on their skin and in their pores. The dirt that is caked and impacted; the dirt that never truly washes off all summer, only removed temporarily at the end of the night, before supper, just to be reapplied the next day at the start of some new adventure, the pursuit of some new goal or the fearful fleeing of a new machine, a new foe, a hideous monster that feeds on eager children; the dirt that never truly washes off in that deep, mostly quiet recess of the brain where happy times find their home and decide to live forever.

They stifle giggles as the machine gives up and rolls away, leaving them to enjoy each other for one more day.

“See! I told you! His eyesight is no good, there’s no way he could find us in here.”

“I think you’re the smartest person I know Jenny,” he says as he squeezes her tighter for a moment.

She looks into his stupid, happy six-year-old face, sees the mismatched teeth that make up an asymmetrical, gap-filled smile, and the pure joy of relief in his brown eyes, and realizes she will always love her little brother. A thought that she didn’t realize was new, one that always seemed to be there in her mind but was never fully formed or realized until just this moment. Tears fill her eyes and she fights—hard—to keep them inside; she does this in 1998 and realizes she is doing the same thing nearly twenty years later as she returns to her body, leaving the memory where it belongs, safe, inside her mind, behind a translucent film for safe keeping.

When was the last time I called Tristan? She feels misery as she realizes she can’t answer the question. He’s living eighty-five miles south in Corvallis and we hardly talk, let alone see each other face to face. Whatever happened to that little boy in the bush? Where is he now? Where is she?

Routine, time, growing old—the real machine. Chased into another corner, this one with no bushes to hide in.

Thoughts of the first boy she loved bring her to thoughts of the only man she’s ever loved. The strange, stoic man she shares a life with. She thinks back to the day they met, freshmen in college, kids thrust into a new place where you’re slowly conditioned to face the adult world.

Michael was so different then. She remembers the first day she saw him, walking silently into the wide lecture hall where they were to learn of the history of the United States from Reconstruction to Present Day. He was alone, as he so often seemed to be. His face was younger but already distrusting of his surroundings; the man she would marry was sitting just beneath that face. She wonders what else was lurking beneath his face that day. She wonders what might be lurking there now.

But despite the familiar lines she could see taking hold in his face, despite the same nervous, tight walk—head down, shoulders slumped, eyes everywhere but her own—he had been different then, so very different. His smile, when she could work it out of him, was truer. More real. He had been happier then. It was as if whatever black cloud had been following him since his birth had taken some time off, decided to cast someone else in the shade and allow him a brief reprieve in the sunlight.

And his eyes. How much bigger and bluer they had looked behind those glasses, before he had taken to contact lenses their senior year. She had forgotten about those glasses. How funny it is, the way such noteworthy things fade as we put years between ourselves and them.

She’s thinking of her husband, young and unburdened as he was so many years ago, trying to figure out what happened and how she can help, when she approaches Pioneer Square and sees the same familiar gaggle of onlookers observing the apocalyptic preacher.

Her hazy and pleasant recollection of college is expelled from her brain when she sees the same group of long-haired skateboarders standing at the bottom of the square.

Strange. How like clockwork they all are; gone in the rain and here again in the sun. Where do they come from?

She decides to take the long way and walks around the perimeter of the square, avoiding the red-faced angry man that appears to be taking center stage, parading back and forth, back and forth with his bullhorn, shouting urgent declarations of prophecy. She notices his sign has changed and now reads PLAY YOUR PART in the same vibrant, dripping red letters. His voice is smaller at a distance, but she can hear him screaming about free will and how it is all an illusion, all a farce.

Why do they listen to him? Do they have nothing better to do than stand around and listen to the ravings of a madman? Is this entertaining for them? And where, just where do they all go in the winter? One day they’re gone, at the first arrival of a dark cloud, at the first sound of screeching wind, but then when the sun reappears so do they—so very much like scripted characters in a cosmic play, but for whom? Who watches? Who writes?

As she climbs the final hill to their building she tries to shake these thoughts from her mind. But they hold tight.

She changes quickly and before the sun can drop a few more feet behind the West Hills she is out the door, off and running through the hills, breathing in and out, in and out, hearing the steady cadence as her feet meet concrete, thinking nothing at all.

Upon returning home her mind is all dopamine and endorphins. The preacher is long ago, far from her mind. Her brother and the sickeningly sweet, painfully familiar smell of dirt are back where they belong—behind the curtains of a play that has just completed its final run. There is no curtain call for this performance; it simply happens, one last time, with no fanfare, no announcement that this is the last show. Like so many things in life, she’s none the wiser. Often when things happen, or certain people are brought together for the last time, no one has any idea of the significance. Only later, when it is too late to fully embrace the moment, does the sinking realization come home. And when Jennifer Linfield realizes that this particular memory has given its final performance, things have progressed far, far too much for her to take any joy in it.

She jumps in the shower and thinks only of one thing: her husband. He will be home soon, this she knows, and she is determined to help him however she can. Whatever he is facing, they will face together. Doped up on nature’s very own high she feels strong and capable of helping him. She will play her part.

Not long after she gets out of the shower, Michael returns from his run, sweaty and semi-limping, as usual. Her stomach drops when she sees he is wearing his old college glasses.

How many years has it been since you saw him wear those? Five? Six? What are the chances he decides to break them out the same day you think about them for the first time in God knows how many years?

It was written.

She watches silently from the bedroom as he takes off his shirt and tosses it into the laundry before beginning his stretches.

“How was your run?” she asks as she takes a seat on the couch.

“It was all right. My fuckin legs hurt though. I think I need new shoes.” He curls his right leg at a ninety-degree angle so the bottom of his right foot rests on his left thigh and reaches down with the opposite hand to grab his toes.

As she watches she thinks about how routine their lives have become. She thinks about how much has changed since they got married four years ago.

He lets go of his stretch and sits staring for a moment, his face tightening—she can see him working through something in his head and almost asks what’s on his mind. Before she can open her mouth he asks, “Do you ever feel like we’ve done this all before?”

“What?” She says this before she can stop herself; the sheer surprise of Michael inviting her in to his thoughts catches her completely off guard. Great going, this is your chance to help and you make him feel dumb.

But he carries on as if she hadn’t even responded. “Does any of this ever feel fake to you? The way we do the same things day after day, like robots. Doesn’t it ever feel…I don’t know, scripted? Like you’re not in control?”

The man with the bullhorn flashes into her mind and she feels a chill so wicked and so cold shoot up her spine that stifling it is impossible. She shivers visibly on the couch. She’s frozen in it for a moment. 

Come on, say something! Say something you idiot! He’s opening up to you and you’re sitting here with your mouth shut like you don’t care!

His stare is cold and alien. It’s like he’s measuring her up. She doesn’t like being under this gaze, she’s never seen him look like this.

She feels her mouth open and hears the words come out before she knows what she’s saying. “We all play our part. Free will is an illusion.”

He recoils. It’s as if her words flew out of her mouth and struck him in the chest. His face changes and is drawn down in a portrait of disgust and anguish.

“Why would you say that?” His voice wavers and all she can think is that she’s hurt him. She doesn’t know how, doesn’t even know why she said what she said, but the pain on his face is unmistakable. He stands up quickly.

“Why would you…” He stops and looks down at his feet. She can see him thinking, working; he frantically swipes across his face.

“I-I don’t know, Michael.” She gets up to walk toward him but he steps backward. “I don’t know why I said it. It’s just something I heard earlier, when I was walking home. Some crazy guy was shouting it. I was trying to be funny.”

But was I?

He brings his hand up and covers his mouth as he stares at her. “Why would you…no. No.” And then he turns and walks quickly to the bathroom, closing the door hard behind him.

Jen listens outside as the shower turns on. Why did I have to say that? She stands listening for a few minutes as tears fill her eyes for the second time today. She hears the sound of the shower curtain being drawn as he steps in, the sound of water falling on ceramic as her husband, the man who seems so much like a stranger right now, cleans and rinses his body.

What she doesn’t hear—what neither of them hear—is the slow, steady rumble as the ground shakes. They don’t hear the arrival of old friends, clawing their way up from the depths. They come unannounced. And hungry.

Eyes closed against the hot water.

Why would she—

Doesn’t make any sense

(free will) (play our part)

No she can’t be not her she can’t

(illusion) (play our part)

But why now why can I see through (happy) (fake)

(pretend) (other people) too much it’s too loud

(one in billions) (illusion it’s all an illusion augmented-reality it’s all)

(we all) no not again (play) it can’t be (our)

Everyone else not her

(part)

(free will) how can I see then (other people real)

(the system is) but when did they get her (leap of faith)           how long has she  

(blank pages have a good day where’s my sunshine)

but I don’t want to I don’t (an illusion) (we all play) (a part apart)

anything else not that I can’t do that (deserve happiness) but not that way

(they had to believe) (they had to believe)

(play our part)

(believe) (leap of faith had to believe)

(escape) (the system)

(believe)

Drifting off to sleep in a cold bed made colder by the barrier. Walls in every direction, a stranger sleeps beside her, somewhere far from here; a hundred turns and twists through a dark maze away.

I will be whatever he needs me to be. I can change, too.

That night she dreams she is back home. Chasing her brother through the back yard, a yard far too big to be familiar. He’s a great deal ahead, she can barely see him.

It’s dark this time. The trees hang above like giants with long, twisted fingers. They’re looking down in disapproval. Every black corner of the yard seems to watch back.

Jen realizes she can no longer see who she’s chasing, she’s following the sound of little feet moving in the dark and she’s not sure she wants to catch them.

But she keeps moving, leg out, down, out, down, one foot before the other, because she’s being chased as well. The machine. It hunts.

She looks back over her shoulder and at first she sees nothing. She can hear it rolling toward her, faster now, chewing up dirt and grass and minutes and hours, seeking her with its implacable, hard-wired logic.

When she turns back around she is five feet from the fence. Her feet dig into the ground and she puts her hands out to avoid colliding with the wood, face-first.

Cornered. Dead end. She turns around, her face a beautiful rendition of terror. She’s scanning the blackness, waiting for the machine to materialize with all its buttons and steel appendages jutting outward, waiting to see the reflection of the crescent moon in its chrome skin.

“Psst!! He can’t see us in here!”

She looks down and to her right, and she can see his small body underneath the brush, the white oval of a face through the branches and green shrubbery.

“Tristan?”

She pulls the bush apart with both hands and begins to climb in. She wants to be underneath, covered, hidden, smelling the dirt with her brother’s small face pressed close to hers.

He has no face. She pulls back in horror and screams as she stumbles out of the bushes. The small boy with long hair sitting over the empty oval of skin where a face should be climbs out from the bush toward her.

All she can do is scream.

“Jenny,” even his voice sounds muffled, as if his mouth is stuck behind the wall of flesh that has enveloped his entire face. “Where’s my sunshine, Jenny?”

She turns around to run as her faceless brother reaches an arm out for her. She’s forgotten all about the machine and even if she remembered she’d willingly run towards its cold, mechanical chaos before facing the abomination from the bushes.

Michael rolls out of the darkness. His legs have been replaced by a large spinning steel wheel, whirring in the night. From the waist up he is mostly himself; beneath he is the machine. One hand is all mechanical bone, like a futuristic prosthetic. The other holds a knife. His eyes are glass marbles and when his mouth opens to speak she hears a robotic voice come out of it.

“Play your part.”

She wakes up as he starts rolling forward.

All too often we try to find meaning. People are apt to say things like everything happens for a reason when faced with trials that seem too big, too much. This assumes that all is written, that one’s life is no different than a well-crafted drama playing out on center stage. But so rarely do we consider just who is scripting our fate then, and why they feel the need to select certain people to torment, like a child slowly pulling off the wings of a captured fly.

Do some have to suffer so that others can prosper? Or is it just that sometimes bad things happen to perfectly good people—for no reason more grandiose than “Because they can”? Or, perhaps, is it that when billions of lives run their course in a contained environment, given enough time everything and anything will eventually happen, leaving some people to reap the rewards of thousands of fortunate circumstances, while others are predestined to find themselves drowning in a sea blacker than the darkest night?

Once, long ago—before the terror started (returned)—Michael Linfield was the type of person who would occasionally combat such existential questions in that shadowy, confusing labyrinth where part of him dwelled at all times. But in moments of extreme stress—when people find themselves walking toward the end of a short plank, gazing into the bottomless abyss that waits to swallow them—questions of the philosophical breed tend to shrivel and disappear. In those moments our minds are commandeered by the lizard brain. Thoughts beyond survival become unimportant. We simply act. And when the dust clears, when the time comes to begin digging ourselves out of the hole we’re left in, we sometimes find that we are far too deep within the dirt to ever find the light of day again.

Such depths can be hard to reach alone, but on that cloudy morning in early April, Michael found a little help from his friends.

He woke up to an empty bed and his stomach sunk further into the pit that seemed to be growing there. Jen was never up before him. The ugly conclusion he had been trying to avoid inched closer.

Now, getting up out of bed, he had a decision to make.

What’ll it be Mike? Do we keep playing the game? Do we really act like nothing’s wrong, just close our eyes to this madness, this blatant and obvious last-ditch attempt to wake us up?

Or do we take a leap of faith?

He left the bedroom and crossed the small hallway to his walk-in closet. On the right, suspended on the add-on hang-rail Jen had purchased and he had screwed into the walls himself, were his suits and shirts and ties. Sitting beneath were his dress shoes, brown and black, wingtip and loafer with little silver buckles. He looked at these items with disgust.

My uniform. How all of them look. Did I even pick any of this stuff?

Michael bypassed the suits, making a mental note to try and remember when or where he had bought the double-breasted charcoal that hung on the end, looking new, looking like it may have popped into existence this very morning. Stepping around the disassembled bike that sat leaning against the left wall—where it had stayed since the day he put it there last fall, relegated at this point to another rack for him to throw his dirty undershirts on—he reached the hanging shelves in the back and threw on sweatpants and a baggy long-sleeved t-shirt instead.

No work today! And if you don’t like it, just come and get me you hollow assholes. I’m getting out of here.

He sat at the kitchen bar and ate his usual breakfast, a bowl of multi-grain cheerios. He chewed every flavorless pixel with no pleasure, trying to find a way, any way at all to avoid going to the place his mind kept taking him to.

He wanted to be free, needed to be free. He knew that he was close to the end, that the real world was sitting just behind a very thin veil, one he could almost see through if he looked the right way. It was only a matter of believing now.

His old friends spoke to him in secret voices, whispering between his ears madly. Well past the point of trying to shut them out now, he strained and fought and hoped to find a flaw in their logic. All paths were dead ends; he kept coming up blank.

But part of him, that small, shrinking part of him that had stood in the sunshine for a fleeting moment, long long ago now, feeling the warmth that so much of him had never known and never would, inserted itself. That part of him that loved dug into the ground and fought against the encroaching darkness, the old, familiar void that came from within.

As these opposite forces battled for control of his exhausted mind, he heard the sound of keys sliding into the door, and his decision was made in that moment.

Before realizing where she was or who she was, in that fleeting moment of slipping from the imagined world in her head—or in this case, being violently ripped from it—back to the waking world, the world of real (real?) people and places and things, there was nothing but the feeling of relief. She had escaped the monster again. The machine turned over and over in perpetuity, but it was far from here, stuck behind a thin wall mercifully erected by the opening of her eyes.

But the coldness crept closer as her thoughts returned to her life, currently in a state of disarray. In the darkness of early morning she considered their situation and just how exactly they had found themselves here. The man sleeping beside her was never an open book; she had known this the day they met and had accepted it almost immediately. It had been rough at times, yes, but ten years later she thought herself to be a well-versed traveler, adept at finding her way in the dark. Oh, how she had worked to help drag him from the deep pits of melancholy, to shine the light on those hidden parts that wanted only to cower in the shade.

This was different, though. She found herself lost in the labyrinth she thought she knew so well. Her flashlight had gone out, and the walls were moving, closing familiar passages and opening new ones, paths that lead her to old places she had never been. And she was no longer alone here.

Realizing now that sleep would not return to her—and if it did, she was certain it would take her somewhere she had no desire to go—her course of action became clear. She left the bed, and twenty minutes later she was running through the dense fog and early morning quiet that enveloped the sprawling West Hills standing tall in the darkness above their home.

Today she would be home when he arrived, and her schedule would be clear. She would spend time with him, however much time was needed, and together they would face whatever stood in their way; the wall would be broken and destroyed. Its cold, hateful bricks would be pulled free one by one if that’s what it took. And when it fell, they would be together again. And together they would be ok.

She gets to Markham an hour and a half early and eagerly attacks the disheveled stack of papers she planned to grade during her free period at the end of the day. The empty classroom is quiet and the hallway outside of her open door is deserted. She welcomes the unaccustomed silence. As she makes hasty marks with her red pen, circling misspelled words and crossing out unnecessary punctuation, scribbling short notes of encouragement in the margins, and adorning each crudely stapled collection of words on pages with a bright red letter indicating its quality, she wonders why she has never tried showing up early to grade or lesson plan before.

Part of her sheepishly tries to suggest that perhaps she was a little afraid of being alone at the school in the dark hours before dawn. The long, empty hallways sitting under unforgiving fluorescent lights, the rows upon rows of lockers closed against her, the unnatural silence that always seems to hang especially heavy over places that are not used to the absence of sound; how easy it would be to wonder what might be inside those lockers, peeking out through the small metal vents, trying to steal a look at whomever is imposing on their brief moment of lonely quiet.

She tries to dismiss the idea before she hears a distant squeaking approaching from the far end of the hall. The open classroom door leaves her a narrow window to view the hallway, and through it she can hear the sound clearly; it’s the sound of a turning wheel, an old wheel in need of some grease, and it’s getting closer. Last night’s dream, barely gone long enough to be considered a memory, comes flooding back. Suddenly, she realizes where she is, and the absurdity of being alone in her classroom with the deep purple of night’s last moments pressing upon the wide windows on the west wall causes her to frantically wonder if she might still be dreaming.

The thought offers no comfort considering whom she locked behind the thin wall of sleep. A locker slowly creaks open somewhere closer in the hall, and she hears footsteps join the sound of the slowly turning wheel. Small footsteps. She stares at her open door and listens to the slowly approaching sounds of moving wheels and quiet footsteps, her red pen jittering madly in her shaking hand, and anticipates the moment that they’ll step through the door together, mechanical and faceless, the grotesque imitations of her favorite people.

Squeeeeak, step, squeeeeak, step, squeak—she can see shadows on the far wall now, a small body walking behind something wide and cylindrical, with all sorts of sticks and blunt ends sticking out of it—squeak, step, squeak, step, squeak.

And she feels more than a little embarrassed when Gabe, the school janitor she has known for over two years, appears in her open door, wheeling what he refers to as his Mobile Clean-up Station—the wide trash can, the attached mop and broom—and offers his usual quick but friendly wave.

Gotta stop jumping at shadows. You can’t see bad in everything, that won’t help anyone. Positive, remember, he needs positivity.

When she turns back to her papers she sees that the purple sky has been replaced by the permeating cool blue of dawn, and the sullen mood hanging over her room seems to leave with it.

Today will be a good day. I can feel it. And if the day doesn’t want to cooperate, I will make it.

After she finishes with her papers she spends the remaining time before the students arrive thinking about what she will do to help Michael. In a brief but crucial flash of insight she remembers the bike she bought him for his birthday last year, still sitting in pieces in his closet, propped up against the wall like an extra clothing rack. They never took it to the shop down the street to have it fitted because fall was just arriving and with it came the wet, gloomy conditions that typify what people believe to be the climate of the Pacific Northwest. Together they had decided they would get the bike fitted in the spring, when the sunshine returned and the health-conscious people of the city descended upon the streets with all the energy of pent-up animals finally free of their cages.

What a wonderful idea! He’s been complaining about his achy legs all winter, this will give him a break from running. I wish I could have it built and ready for him when he gets home tonight.

She looks around the empty room—the hallways have already begun to buzz with activity; teachers arriving, opening doors, greeting each other with hollow niceties—and asks herself what is important to her. In this life, the one and only that she has, what matters the most? Before she can fully think it through, she is talking with the principal and arranging for a substitute teacher for the day. She tells her that she is feeling unwell, but the truth is that she is feeling the best she’s felt in days. The sun is coming out, and she intends to drag Michael into it, kicking and screaming if she has to.

Although it is many hours from three-thirty, she finds herself gliding home once again on feet that are lighter than the spring morning’s air. There’s no preacher in Pioneer Square—too early for him, not a big enough crowd at this hour—and she finds herself riding the elevator to the twelfth floor less than ten minutes later.

She rounds the corner and strides confidently to her apartment door, her dress flapping easily behind her with nothing more than the force of her own momentum. She smiles brightly at the thought of surprising her husband tonight as she reaches into her purse to find her keys.

What a wonderful idea.

Her key is swallowed by the slot, and, moments later, she is swallowed by the machine.

There is a moment of mutual surprise, completely unexpected and somehow equally horrible for both of them; he turns around, his spoon hanging halfway between his bowl and his mouth as his wife walks through the door. She’s stunned to see that he is home, shocked in that gut-twisting way people always are when they open the door to a room they expect to be empty, only to catch someone wearing their secret face behind it.

For a moment, brief but consequential, they can only stare at each other’s surprised face. And in that instance the end is written.

Jen breaks the silence as she closes the door behind her.

“Didn’t expect to see you here! 

(I’m sure you didn’t)

Are you going into work late today?”

Michael slowly lowers his spoon and turns away from her.

“Nope. No work today. I don’t think I’ll be going to work anymore.”

Thick, icy fear wraps around her chest. Something is wrong. She considers opening the door behind her and leaving, running as fast as she can and never coming back. Where she will go doesn’t matter, as long as it is away from here, far, far away. But she loves him. And it is her love for him that causes her to ignore all the ancient neurons firing panicky signals in her brain, the synapses and electrical impulses trying to commandeer her mind and therefore her body, trying to elicit fight-or-flight, trying to survive.

“Are you ok? What’s wrong?”

“What are you doing here? A little early to be getting off of work, no? Did they cancel school today?”

“I wanted to surprise you.”

“How’d you know I’d be here?”

“No, not like that. I mean… I wanted to surprise you later. I thought I could take that bike I got you down to the shop and have them fit it.”

“Right. What a coincidence. Life is full of coincidences, huh?”

Michael stands up from the counter and faces her.

“Do you really expect me to believe that? You just happened to come home, today of all days?”

“What do you mean?”

“I think you know what I mean. I think you know a lot more than you let on, actually.”

“Michael, you’re scaring me. Why are you acting like this? I want to help you. Whatever it is, I can help.”

“Ha! Me? Acting like what? You’re one to talk. ‘Free will is an illusion.’ Right? Are you just ‘Playing your part’? Is that it?”

“I didn’t mean…”

She pauses, thinking of the right words to say. She knows that this moment is critical, that their entire relationship might hang in the balance of her next few words. His eyes are hostile and foreign and she can hardly stand in his gaze without shuddering.

“I don’t know what’s going on, Michael, but whatever it is, we’ll be ok. As long as we’re together. And we’re together now. Why don’t we both take the bike down? For whatever reason we’re both here today. I think it’s a sign. We were meant to be here together. Let’s walk together, please? Like we used to?”

She can see his face working, contorting in that old familiar way she has seen so many times. He casts his eyes to the right, the long row of windows set into their western wall, and a moment later he turns back to her. His eyes are softer and she lets out a long exhale, one she didn’t realize she was holding in.

“Ok.”

“Ok?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me just change into sneakers and then we’ll go.” Jen walks through their short hallway and into their bedroom. She sits down, removes her heels, and starts sifting through the long row of shoes in her closet. Far in the back corner she sees the scuffed pair of blue Converse she’s had since college. The shoes she was wearing the day they met.

Haven’t worn these in a while. Why not? They were good luck on one September day so many years ago, maybe they still have some juice left.

She hears him rattling around in the kitchen as she slips the sneakers on and begins to tie them.

(Just remember that’s not your wife that’s not your wife that’s not your wife that’s not)

As she finishes knotting the second shoe she hears him approaching from the hall.

“Just one more second!”

Thank God—I don’t know what I said, but I’m glad I found the right words. For a second there I thought he might ki—

He’s standing in the doorway holding a kitchen knife. His eyes are expressionless and dead. Like marbles.

“What are you…” But she knows. She knows.

“I know what you are.” He steps into the bedroom.

“Michael…” But she can’t find the words.

“I’ve never been happy. Never. And you know that, don’t you?” The way his voice sounds—so hollow and void of emotion—tells her everything she needs to know about how this will end.

“It’s just been one thing after the other for me. All my life. From one trial to the next. You’ve been probing and poking and trying to set me off, trying to see what would finally break me. And I fought. Yes, I did. I fought for years. But you’ve finally found it. You finally found out how to break me.”

She takes a step back on feet that are completely numb. She’s cornered. Behind her is the wall (fence).

“She was the only thing I ever loved, the only thing that ever made me happy in this miserable fucking existence. Was she ever real? Was any of this ever real? Or did you just give her to me so that you could take her away? Was that all this ever was? Just some big fucking game to you?”

The closet (bush) to her right. It’s the only place left. She jumps inside, closes the door, and crouches down behind the rows of hanging clothes. Her eyes are wet and she wishes she was a kid again, hiding in a bush with her brother’s face close by.

From outside the closet: “I get it now. If I want to be happy, if I want to escape, then I have to believe. I believe now. And I’ll prove it.”

Under her breathless sobs, “The machine. He can’t see us in here.”

He rips open the closet door and pulls her to her feet. As he looks into her face, he tells himself, Just remember, this isn’t real, she isn’t real, none of this is real, you’re almost free.

As she stares into the empty, vacant eyes of the machine she tells herself, This can’t be real, none of this is real, you’ll wake up soon.

But when she feels the cold, silver ripping in her stomach, she knows it’s real. She doesn’t have to look down to see the black handle sticking out of her abdomen, or see the bright red blood staining their beige bedroom carpet as the handle slides left to right, tearing skin and muscle. When he pulls the blade out she feels a horrible vacating feeling as long, tangled cords of gray intestines plop onto her sneakers, turning them red and slimy.

He lets her go and she falls to the ground in a heap. As the light starts to fade from her vision, she sees the shadow of someone she thought she knew standing above her. She struggles to speak, but produces no sound; only a slow, thick stream of deep crimson flows from her mouth. The last thing in her mind, before she ceases thinking forever, is the dripping red lettering of the preacher’s sign.

Michael stares down at the bloody body before him. This cheap imitation of his wife, the woman he loved so much, replaced by a replica. Like he wouldn’t notice.

Sure, her screams had sounded real enough; the blood that came out of her was red enough and warm enough; excellent attention to detail was paid, no corners were cut in this simulation. The heavy weight of the butcher’s knife felt real in his hand, as did the heavy, sick feeling in his throat.

Any minute now I’ll wake up. They’ll see that I know their secret and they’ll lift the veil. I had to believe. I can be happy now.

Any minute I’ll wake up.

Please, please, wake me up. I want to wake up now.