No World Before

After the murders and suicides, it wasn't so bad. None of us could agree whether these mattered, anyway. These weren't pleasant, but who could say what counted and who was doing the counting?

We survived as much as one could. Some wished they hadn't, but they didn't have it in them not to see this to the end. They had built up the momentum of existing. Diverging from this, even in these circumstances, was too frightening.

Some people thought there would be rapes, but that didn't happen much. Potential rapists either saw the desperate futility or were among the first killed. Whatever morality might mean now, I wasn't too bothered by the thought of dead rapists. Even a dying world didn't need that.

There was a movie series about authorities suspending all laws for twenty-four hours. I suspected this was meant to prepare us for the possibility of this, which was almost glib. As though whoever wanted to set this in motion cared that we found out. Maybe series like these are the natural evolution of a civilization in decline.

Most tried to maintain after the immediate revelation and its fallout. Someone created us this way for a reason. The thinking went that acting contrary to it would only result in being noticed. We knew, yes, but it was possible whoever started this hadn't realized we knew. It was better to pretend we didn't know. The police arrested what murderers they cared to find. People paid their taxes (and were more generous because money was only numbers and paper, as it had always been). Celebrities staged nipple slips. Most people acted as though it were all normal, and a few might have believed it.

In the knowing, what had really changed in our lives?

That attitude lasted half a year until the apathy hit. There was an epidemic of starvation then. It wasn't that we didn't have enough food. Farmers still farmed out of habit; truckers still carried the food where it needed to be. The world had always produced more food than it could use, throwing away literal tons while poor people went without.

For that alone, we should have guessed that the parameters of this world were askew. No just world, no world that made sense, would have it so that people went hungry and malnourished while tons of food went to landfills daily.

Ceasing to eat became the fad. I don't know how many wasted away. To keep from inspiring others, it wasn't reported. I liked that. It suggested our lives had value to someone. Starvation was a protest. I heard that real people couldn't die, not this way. I didn't know that this made any sense. If you were real, you didn't die anyway. I didn't know there were any real people, that there ever were. If there were, half of us would have done our best to destroy them. The other half would have done anything to preserve them so that there would be no reason to end the world.

It was impatience more than anything at that point, the waiting for an end. The Last Tuesdayans didn't believe there was a world before we knew the truth. All our history and memories were a part of this process, establishing a foundation for our global societies, alliances, and enmities (now both seen as ridiculous). I wasn't sure of the details. The point was that we all might have been created amid this crisis. There was no world before it was ending.

How could fake scientists look at counterfeit evidence in a simulated world and talk about what was real? They had never known anything real in their lives. It seemed guesswork, but the lead on the project explained pixelation and Planck lengths. Minutes after, he slit his own throat.

It was refreshing in a way, this knowledge. All those coworkers who repeated the same stories every Monday, all those middle managers who asked, "Working hard or hardly working? " were less alive, less conscious than the rest of us, inferior ghosts in this machine. There were far fewer of them now because we wanted to know if they would bleed. (They did, but we continued testing the proposition, feeling that it wasn't murder then. The police would investigate out of habit, but what was the point in incarcerating anyone?) They were less rendered than the rest of us. Who knew the limits of this simulation? There was no sense wasting processor speed on a Non-Player Character's AI. Indeed, life seemed a little more vivid to the survivors. Better graphics did not mean a better game.

How bad were the graphics? I had slight astigmatism, which might have further masked the resolution. I could not imagine what an actual world would look like, but I doubted my mind could have handled it.

We were still penned in by the parameters. Until the world stopped for reasons we would never know, we had to obey the necessities of our bodies. With half a billion fewer people (or NPCs), resources were plentiful, resource limitations only those of the simulation. Still, we fought over a nonexistent scarcity because, I suppose, that is what was baked into our programming. Defying too obviously what we seemed made to do suggested our doom.

People wanted to know there was a creator. This conclusion satisfied no one. There was a god to our world, we had to assume, but they were not divine. Maybe they did not have a gender. Maybe gender was only a mutation of this iteration of the simulation. It was not likely we were the first simulation or would be the last. That our simulation ran for billions of years (or since last Tuesday) had to mean something.

I wanted it to.

If we were created capriciously, if our very existence might be no more than a screensaver on some being's neglected desktop, it stood to reason that our time was finite. We could not assume we were that important to our creator. I had saved over drafts and abandoned projects far more than I had finished anything.

Hardware advanced so quickly for us before the world was ending. I have left behind hundreds of programs I no longer needed without thinking twice about them. Our simulation could well be running on a cellphone the creator was about to upgrade.

"So you don't see a point to existence?" Joseph asked. We'd met after the revelation. Our relationship was frenzied, masochistic sex for a few weeks to feel something. We did not bother with birth control, assuming there would be no time to give birth, possibly only that a baby growing in me had to be a programmer's fiction. The zygote would be no more real than the rest of the world.

After that, at once, we clung to one another for company but never again even kissed.

"I don't see a point to our existences, no," I said. "The actual existence above us, or above them--whatever it at the top--I'm sure that's fine. We are background processes pretending to be conscious. It's not satisfying."

"It's as satisfying as it ever was. You've never known anything more satisfying. If you want to act as though filled with existential dread, has it occurred to you that these thoughts are part of the program? Maybe all this is just to see what we would do with knowing our world was... was this."

He picked at the grass under us, or what we were made to think was grass. It made my head swim to have thoughts like that. Was this some cognitive quirk or an invisible wall in the simulation? This world allowed us to be philosophers and scientists but not to question its foundations. Once we tried that, our programming did all it could to push us away.

"Then I have no free will." The sunset was beautiful this evening. Who was it for? Before all this, I never took to the belief that there was some creator who cared what we did, and so nothing was for anything. God wasn't leaving us messages. Now, I could not avoid the thought that the creator might have made this sunset for a reason to which I would not be privy. That it could have been a personal flourish made the sunset more touching and suspicious.

"But you never did, so even worrying about that is predetermined. Why not be reassured that you at least exist for a certain reason, even if it is too big for you ever to know?"

I had tried starving myself for a few days, but it hurt too much. I decided the hurting was evidence enough that I might exist outside here, but, again, maybe the program wanted me to think that, so I would go on. "Maybe you are an NPC trying to make me think this way."

He put up his hand in mock defense as though I were the sort to kill the likely NPCs. He laughed, and I liked that he did because I was serious and didn't want to be. If he were an unconscious part of the program, I understood this reality even less than I thought. I could suffer living in a game, but I could not stomach his being less than real. I loved him without reservation. There was no plenty in resisting the fullness of it. I would die for him because he would never want me to.

"Maybe you are an NPC trying to make me justify the simulation, but I like you anyway. I choose not to let this bother me."

He took my hand. "It shouldn't bother you. It is a waste of your time." It had been a week since he had touched me, and the sensation of it surprised me-flesh to flesh, warm, the contours of his bones. I traced my thumb over his knuckles and wished for the first time since we had suspended our fornication that it would resume at once. There were other people--or things that looked like people--around, but what was shame? It was not a matter of lust--though I was not immune to this--but wanting to be as close to another person as I could be. "You build all your doubts on things that are not part of the alpha reality. Your arguments are not even built on sand but a rendering of a picture of sand, so how can you take this all seriously? You can't be all hangdog at the same time you acknowledge that nothing actually matters."

I squeezed his hand, though he gave no reaction I could see. Let his hand in mine be real. Even if I am not, please let him be real. Let me have a single friend to carry on my memory. Was he touching me because I needed it, or he did? "I will one day disappear. So will you and everything you have ever experienced and loved. It won't be death. It will be something so much vaster. Our world will cease to have ever existed."

He was quiet, thinking about this, and I let him. Thinking couldn't bring us closure. We were ones and zeros. Our thoughts were a part of a greater process, but it let us feel human, even if "human" was not a thing that might ultimately exist.

"Or we are crucial," he decided. "Maybe we are saving their world by living in ours."

"We've destroyed this world by learning the truth. How does that help anyone?"

"I don't know, but neither do you. All we know if what is inside us. Our thoughts and feelings are not an accident but facts crucial to this world and one beyond."

I could be that our world would end any moment to save them, but I did not consent to be sacrificed. I refused to find nobility in being born for slaughter, if it happened forty years ago or forty seconds. I deserved to live. So did he. Why create good people to dispose of them?

He did not say anything more, watching the sun set beneath the horizon. I held him to me, finally resting my head on his lap, feeling his hands stroking my hair as the sky grew dark.

Neither moon rose and the stars were absent.

The machine lifted the helmet from my head. The gyroscope rings slowed and stopped, though it did not release me. The machine would hold me until its sensors were certain I had fully rejoined this world.

"Take your time," she said through my earphones. "There is no rush. You know this is real, right?"

It was an hour minutes before I had the confidence to open my eyes. I focused on the steady breath of the ventilation system.

I lifted my lids and shut them again against the clarity. The once glimpse of white tile was a torrent of information.

I heard another breath in the room, arrhythmic but familiar.

The trouble with the process is that one's head filled with so many people who had never been. I felt as though I knew them. By the nature of the process, they felt as real to one's brain as anyone I had ever met. I'd had a thousand lifetimes of affairs and fights, casual conversations and midnight epiphanies. I couldn't test even a fraction, but we considered it good enough to pull any.

With so many of them, how could I be expected to know this person in the room was real, whatever "real" might mean.

It was like meditating, this waiting before I felt ready to open my eyes to this world once more. As I tried to keep my mind empty, threads of this world wove back until the tapestry seemed intricate enough to bear the weight of my foot.

I opened my eyes finally. White room with dim light. In the corner sat a squat figure, soft light on her face, her glasses reflecting the screen enough to seem to have their own blue glow. I searched my mind for who this person might be, but I had only a feeling of finding them servile but useful. That would suffice.

"You're back?" she asked.

I nodded until the words returned, the language different than any I had spoken in what felt like thousands of years. "How long?" I croaked, my throat beyond parched. The woman handed me a plastic squeeze bottle. Though the substance within was closer to a gel than the water I craved, it satisfied me and made speaking further seem again a possibility.

The woman looked down at her wrist, then did a calculation in her head. "Seven minutes, thirteen seconds."

I closed my eyes again and saw a world collapsing in upon itself. The world I thought was mine. I saw children torn apart, whole families wasting away. I could taste the cinders of uncertain providence, a flavor more concrete than anything that had happened since my return. I had held hands, comforted the tears of a hundred thousand. I had walked until my feet bled. I had felt the shattered bones of those who couldn't survive knowing. The years I had spent in this iteration rushed back, one that felt like it had an eternity preceding it, one that didn't take time enough to brew a proper cup of tea. The machine induced it did not make wracking sobs grieving a universe any less authentic.

The woman did not comfort me, instead having returned to the terminal. "We have the diagnostics here. These were unique parameters, and the results showed that. Do you have anything to add before we render a new simulation?"

I remembered now the urgency, what I could do. "We have to save Joseph. He knew his world was a whisper on the wind, but he stayed good. He deserves it."

"Is that it?"

My mind buzzed as the knowledge returned. "Of course not. There is a list, a few thousand this time. Not as many as I would have liked from this scenario. It's on the server."

The woman clucked her tongue in a way that said she had asked this before, though I couldn't find the memory. "We don't need that many this week."

How often had I done this? I couldn't find the number yet. I was young when we began to do this, I felt, and I no longer was. "They deserve to live."

"We can port them out," my assistant said, "of course, Doctor Skinner."

Samira. That was the assistant's name.

"Can we go again?"

"Now?" she asked. "Protocol says you need a full day between sessions of this duration. It will take some hours before we can render a new world."

"As soon as I can."

"You don't usually ask that. You told me before not to let you," Samira said, but with a small whine that meant she would do as asked.

"I was wrong then. I'll have lunch--"

"Dinner," Samira corrected.

"Dinner. Can you spin a new simulation by then? Change the parameters so" -- more of my memories, like something held in bodily reserve rather than ones belonging to my mind, rediscovered themselves with each new word out of my mouth -- "they don't realize for seven years. Pre-Industrial, but increase their culture to post-decline level. I'd love to bring back some more books and music. I need to test their morals, so increase aggression by a factor of point seven five."

We couldn't start them before their worlds were ending. Only when they knew it was hopeless could they begin to show who they were.

Samira keyed in the figures as I removed the remaining electrodes from my skin.

"They aren't real," said my assistant. "You still remember that?"

It hardly seemed to matter.

I passed the cafeteria and the exit, walking further through the facility, reorienting to this world.

The people in the simulations were real, and they were not. It was a matter for pedants what "real" meant and if something like a soul existed, though we had a bad habit of saying that we were giving the kids souls. It horrified me to think I lived in the world that could summon forth nine billion souls at the push of a button and extinguish 99% of them in a quarter-hour. We handed them the deck, but they played their hands. This was little different than anyone in the world outside, though it had been trickier and less explicable when our world started to end.

I wanted to feel no remorse for the mercenary burden I had chosen. Those who did not make it through the test, those left in the simulations, did not suffer after. They ceased to exist without discomfort, no punishment awaiting them. We were not cruel.

The Last Tuesdayans were wrong. Though it felt like forty years of life, we spun up this iteration only this morning.

There had been attempts to allow the tester to remember their actual lives better. This led to messiah complexes, dictatorial posturing, and inauthenticity. Birth was meant to wipe clean the slate even when the birth was computer code shoved into a person's head. Coming back from the simulations was harrowing--there was no better word for it. Implanted memories, earned ones, fought against the natural ones. Some information and skills lingered after, which was among my favorite aspects. I could play eight instruments, six of which existed in the world. I was conversant in nine natural languages and four conlangs, though the latter faded when one was the only speaker in existence.

People had come to be born empty some time ago. To borrow from the parlance, they were hardware with no operating system. One could raise children to about three, and then they dropped dead. It was unclear if they suffered, but they never seemed bothered by pain. They would eat and move around as requested. They understood and obeyed simple commands. The babies didn't cry, though. They would not do anything to preserve their lives. They could be toilet trained but not induced to speak. Language was something belonging to real people. It was an epidemic, as no new children survived. Those waiting for that fatal birthday did so with silent patience.

I didn't know who decided this was the solution. Though this person must exist, the world's governments had hidden her identity against those who rightly fingered this as unnatural, though I would not go so far as to agree it was unholy.

This was a matter of the species' survival. I was the midwife to millions. I avoided knowing which people we downloaded where. The facility randomized it, of course, not that the children remembered their creation. (Parents sometimes claimed they did, but it was never enough to be problematic.)

Still, I took pains to avoid the sight of small children, anyone for whom I might be culpable. Had we once had a torrid affair or talked ourselves to sleep on a beach? Had I rescued them from artificiality into this adoptive world, or did the credit go to one of my colleagues? While walking away from a kindergartener with a snotty nose, it was not something to ponder.

I had no biological children and did not mourn this. I was one of the few in the world who could survive the process, having done it enough to have populated cities (or would in five years, when the oldest of the children came to the age of majority).

I had refined it from necessity to be less debilitating. It still crushed most people who attempted it. There had been suicides. On balance, it was twenty-five thousand children for every tester who shot himself in the temple because the only man he had ever loved either occupied the amnesiac body of a two-year-old or ceased to exist because he didn't meet the quota. It was worth it. This world could continue, even at the expense of spinning up worlds to cannibalize. Wasn't better that they existed for an hour that felt like a million than that they were never anything?

There was no sense quibbling about survival. A little happiness and, yes, the terror of the end, but the happiness still, almost as real as my own. So many people got to have the chance of that happiness as a byproduct, so that was enough. I saved souls, as much as souls might exist, as much as these people might.

As much, I supposed, as I might.

The media we brought back was a side effect, but it seemed wasteful to leave it behind, even at a small expense. The people, those who did not meet the qualifications, they could go. Not the music. Not the books. Not the movies.

We had planted some in iterations, sometimes those media that gave hints, but it was usually a mistake. Too influential. We couldn't lead the simulation, or the people pulled from them were spoiled paranoiacs, even if they didn't remember they were. Some children did not survive that way long. Children were, for the most part, innocents. We could only justify implanting their bodies with good people. It had to be organic to produce the best of them. They had to be free to make the choices they did.

The way I figured it, we had a decade before these children realized what we did and rebelled against us. I hoped they would. There might be lawsuits, though the parents consented sooner or later. If they did not, the child would not exist.

Humanity always has its bad apples or did. It remained to be seen if any of the implanted children would spoil, would commit crimes. I wasn't sure a purified generation could flourish, but the public would not hear the arguments for letting through a couple of monsters to keep the rest fit. Even all these years and children later, our grip on the project remained tenuous. We would not push it.

Since the governments of the world partly funded the implanting--how could they do otherwise?--they considered them as property as well as citizens. Harming one of them brought additional charges for wasting government resources. Parents were screened. It reeked of eugenics, but implantation was not cheap. If you were going to molest, beat, or murder a kid, the governments could not allow you to implant.

The rate of parental rejection was in the low single digits. Most people, especially those who wanted children, were good enough to be allowed to implant. Those that weren't but still conceived knew they cared for a vacant doll on borrowed time.

Governments also funded more comprehensive sex educations. They, with surprising rapidity, found contraceptives that all but guaranteed a child--or an infant body, at least--was not born that someone did not want.

I went to the nursery to wait, unable to find a hunger for food within me. I remembered my last picnic with Joseph, a sort of calamari with a sweet cheese sauce and crackers full of seeds, a wine made of something like roses crossbred with peaches, like drinking stars. I ate so much I felt sick as if I knew this would be the last time in my life I would taste any of this.

I watched the nursery long past when the next simulation was spun, as the sky outside grew dark. A child woke from the treatment and exited with her parents, groggy but now whole.

She caught my eye, lingering on my features a second too long for comfort.