The Kingdom Inside
Pat Pefferson was sitting at a picnic table in Riverside Park. He’d been chasing his kids around all day, and he only got them every other weekend, so his endurance was terrible. Even just sitting there his legs were throbbing, and Pat cursed the extra weight he’d put on since the split. Wasn’t he supposed to get more motivation to work out now that he was single? Wasn’t he supposed to lose weight and get a new wardrobe and feel twenty years younger?
He tried to stifle the thoughts as his older daughter, Macy, smiled and waved from the playground. This was his time with them and he didn’t want to miss it. Besides, it wasn’t that much weight. No! How much weight it was wasn’t the point! The point was he had plenty of other time where he was completely by himself to think of that, and right now there were memories that needed to be made.
Against the protests of his still-throbbing legs, he rose from the picnic table and started over to rejoin Macy and Keeley, whose minus-a-couple-of-teeth grin had just popped out of the slide to find him. He resolved to start eating better and boozing less. It was really the booze that had added the weight to him, and he— No! His grin felt suddenly pasted on, inauthentic, like he was just going through the motions of this visit, and he tried to claw back the feeling of ease he’d had when they first arrived at the park. All he wanted was to be here with them.
Then time seemed to slow. His own motions seemed to slow, as if his brain went into fast-forward. In the space of time that it took for his foot to land on the bark dust beside the play structure, a chain of memories entered his head, and Pat knew they were his memories. They’d happened to him.
He remembered discovering two years ago that the world he was living in was a computer simulation. He remembered the ghostly presence that had appeared to him and told him as much, and proved it was so by altering the very fabric of spacetime and ripping several wormholes in the universe. But it wasn’t just that moment—he remembered an entire story of investigating why, and discovering a cabal of wizard-type figures who came from the outer world that was running this simulation he was living in, and who had tried to kill him many times over the course of a year.
He remembered getting his guns out and cleaning them, and how different it had felt now that he was actually planning to defend himself with them.He remembered fighting the cabal, and killing several of them, and finally attracting the attention of the highest supervisory authority that existed in the meta-universe outside the simulation. He remembered watching the shadowy cabal of wizards being executed by this Ultimate Supervisory Authority.
He remembered that he had been offered no reasonable explanation for why the cabal of wizards had been trying to kill him. The Ultimate Supervisory Authority (as it had referred to itself) acted as if it were obvious, but when he tried to question it further, it had erased his memory. He did not know why the memories were coming back now. He looked around for the change in light—a dimming and spreading of the sun’s glow—that preceded the arrival of the Ultimate Supervisory Authority in his consciousness, but it did not come. The memories were just there in an instant.
He remembered that the emotional angst and absenteeism of the struggle against the cabal of wizards were what had actually precipitated his divorce. He had stayed away from his family quite a lot during that year, afraid they would get hurt if the cabal attacked while he was with them. His wife had thought he was cheating, and it was impossible to explain to her the reality of the situation without sounding insane or putting her and the girls in danger.
His foot landed in the bark dust beside the play structure. His daughters were both looking at him with concern. The memories of these events were as plain and as real as any other memories he possessed—as real as watching his daughters be born or proposing to his wife or graduating from high school. He didn’t really doubt their reality.
But he had no idea what he was going to do with this information.
*****
After the park they went to Red Robin. Macy ordered chicken strips, Keeley a hamburger, and they shared a strawberry shake with much fighting over whose half was bigger and what that implied. He loved Reubens and ordered one but when it came he could hardly touch it.
The memories turned over and over in his mind. He tried to stay focused on his daughters and being in the moment with them, which of course completely backfired. He hoped they didn’t notice, and he didn’t think they did, but also he was just mad at himself for punting off one of his nights with this crap.
The first thing he wondered was if the memories were real. Of course they were not real, the entire scenario was absurd. But they seemed extremely real. Even as he understood intellectually that they must be a delusion, they didn’t dim. They were so specific and so vivid. He could remember what it smelled like after you fired a shotgun forty times in a row in rapid succession, and exactly the texture of a diner seat he’d pressed his cheek against while lying in ambush for a member of the cabal.
When the divorce happened and he got only every other weekend, he had sat down after the custody hearing and calculated exactly how many days he would have with each of the girls before they left for college. When he arrived at the exact figure of days, the number had seemed so small and helpless and dwindling that he wished he hadn’t ever done the math.
Ever since, he had thought of the numbers every time he saw them, and watched two days tick off the counter in his mind. There was nothing he could do, no taking back that arithmetic now. He tried to tell himself that knowing how few the days were they had remaining should make each one of them more precious, but instead it felt like he couldn’t stop watching the sand in the hourglass.
“Daddy, the ketchup!”
He had been adding ketchup to Macy’s plate, and had accidentally dumped half a bottle onto her fries. The tears started flowing and didn’t stop until she got a fresh plate with different fries and the proper amount of ketchup.
As the waiter walked away from their table, a particular memory occurred to him from the mass of his new ones. It involved his ankle being lacerated by a metal fence spike while fleeing both the cabal and the police, who had responded to a gunfight he’d been having.
Macy allowed him to dry her tears and went back to eating fries. Keeley was sucking at the last of her strawberry shake and eyeing Macy’s to see if there was more she could negotiate for. Pat’s heart was pounding. He reached down and pulled up the leg of his pants, then lowered his white athletic sock down past his ankle.
There it was. A wicked, two-inch scar, faded but unmistakably there, and not years old either. It stood out, like an angry message from God, taunting him. He released a shallow breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, and had to consciously tell himself to take the next several breaths.
“Daddy, can I get another milkshake? I didn’t really get that much and I still have too much hamburger left for not having any shake.”
He let them get another milkshake. If this was a simulation, what did it matter? But was that why? He might have done so anyway, out of a general desire to spoil them, but that hadn’t been his thought. His thought was the simulation. But did he really know that? The scar could have been from something else, and his brain had tricked him into forgetting so it could become part of the delusion.
But he didn’t believe that. The memories felt too real and the world felt too fake. He looked at his girls grinning around their straws, and felt a burst of love for them. The scar started to throb in time with a pulse suddenly beating in his throat.
*****
“We love you, Daddy!” The girls’ singsong chorus came to him as they ran away from his car, across the front lawn of the house where he used to live, to where their mother was waiting on the porch.
“Love you, Macy! Love you, Keeley!” He’d said that so many times and he meant it as much as ever, but it sounded strange to him now. Did he? Or was the feeling part of a simulation? And even if it was part of a simulation, if the program was keeping track of everything about the entire universe, and if every being in the simulation had an interior life that was as rich as his own, then was it really even fake?
He knew he loved them. That was real enough. He watched them run across that lawn and knew he couldn’t run from that. Those girls were everything that was good and unassuming and real about him. The ache inside his chest at knowing he wouldn’t see them for twelve days was so painfully real he thought he’d burst.
Their mother raised a hand to him, not waving but acknowledging, and he popped two fingers and his thumb in the air as a response. They spoke about the girls, about logistics, but hadn’t had a conversation with any other content in almost six months. He thought about telling her the whole story, but the possibility seemed distant, and he knew he wasn’t actually going to do it. It sounded too crazy. Besides, he knew she’d had other men at the house. The girls hadn’t seen any directly but they saw her on her phone and read it when she wasn’t looking and told him what they read. He wondered not for the first time if his period of unavailability just provided her with an excuse to do what she’d wanted to anyway. He wondered if she even knew whether that was true.
He was off the next day, then on for a 24-hour on call shift at the fire station. He spent his off day setting up and then attending an appointment with the fire department’s on-staff psychologist. When he went in, though, he was scared to speak too plainly, because he wasn’t totally clear on the rules and whether something he said could be used against him in family court. Sure, privilege and all, but courts didn’t think much of that stuff when it came to kids’ safety.
So he used words he’d looked up like “depersonalization” and “derealization” and described his memories in terms of a general sense of living in a simulation, and he knew that it wasn’t getting through to her when she suggested that he’d been stressed since his divorce and should consider full-time therapy and possibly medication. He made the right sounds to reassure her, but left her office with no more sense of what he should believe.
He went next to a priest, in the old Catholic parish where he’d grown up but no longer attended with any regularity. He laid out the facts in much plainer language, trusting more in the silence of a religious man than a doctor.
“Have you prayed for clarity, my son?”
“I haven’t prayed for anything in a long time.”
“Would you like to pray with me now?”
So he prayed, but even as he prayed his mind was racing, unfocused, already onto the next steps he wanted to take. His lips formed the words but there was no intent behind them. The priest did not seem to notice, and no doubt went home that night satisfied at a good confession’s worth of work.
Pat went home that night and thought about the Priest as he prepared for his shift. Did he do good work? Was praying with someone in confession meaningful even if the prayerful confessee was faking? Was his love for his daughters real even if it existed only in a simulation?
*****
Overnights at the fire station always felt like a dream. He made his rounds, checking equipment, cleaning, making lists. The cavernous bays where the trucks lived made every sound huge, and the smallest ones grew the most. He listened to the coffee hissing as it dripped into a fresh pot as if the sound was a whisper from the universe. He pressed his hands into the metal surfaces, grounding himself, trying to reassure himself of their reality.
He tried to make his mind believe that the memories were fake. He repeated to himself over and over that there had been no cabal of wizards and no Ultimate Supervisory Authority. He told himself that the year he’d spent getting divorced was so painful that he’d made up this story to excuse it. He knew the pain it was causing his daughters, and couldn’t live with the idea that there was no reason for it but a series of misunderstandings and unresolved hurt feelings.
So instead he’d made up a story where not only was that suffering not his fault, it wasn’t even real. He wasn’t real, the girls weren’t real. Just data on some giant hard drive in a universe outside this one.
Almost without realizing it, he was sitting on the back of a fire engine with his phone out, starting to research specific details of those recovered memories. Over the next week he spent hours on google earth, hunting for locations he remembered from the struggle against the cabal. On his off days he drove the streets and the countryside around their town, visiting likely places to see if anything matched.
Everywhere he went felt like he’d been there before. He found an intersection where he was sure he’d killed someone. He dug through crime reports and found an unsolved murder that had been committed nine months prior, right when he was in the middle of his fight. He saw a picture of the victim and it matched the picture in his mind.
Or had his mind matched the picture? Had he looked up an old crime file first, then forgotten and gone to its location to discover the story he’d laid out for himself?
From the road he checked in with his daughters every chance he got. They had a daily calling routine established, and he never missed it. Beside highways and in parking lots, he said goodnight to his daughters every night through the intermediated box that was his phone screen. He smiled and told them he loved them, but he was struck by the concordance between the phone and his memories. They seemed so real and so fake at the same time.
He wasn’t talking to his daughters, he was talking to a picture, and they were doing the same. He knew it wasn’t as good as being there with them, and knew they cried themselves to sleep plenty over the difference. Extra milkshakes at Red Robin were like crime scene photos; they pointed at true things, but the things themselves remained esoteric and distant.
Pat wondered if he should continue to investigate the memories, or just try to live with them. He was not sure what would suffice as proof one way or the other. He kept driving to places from his memories, kept finding more evidence that something real had happened, and kept doubting his place in it.
He pulled up beside a bridge over a rushing river, with large rocks sticking up out of the water. He got out of his car and peered out over the bridge. He’d never considered suicide before. He didn’t think he’d do it now, but he wanted to want to. He wanted to feel the hard reality of that inside him after so much ambivalence. Something, anything to know, beyond any doubt, that something was real. He tried to summon what it would feel like to swan dive head first down onto those rocks. At the moment of impact, would the reality be inarguable?
That reality called to him. He did not want to die, but he did want to feel that. He resolved to jump feet first; that fall would be unlikely to kill him, but would almost certainly break bones, and he guessed that might feel real enough to ground him for a while longer. He could say he fell. The department had a great contract with generous medical leave provisions.
His heels came up off the ground. He felt like he was in a dream. It was happening. But then the moon seemed to dim, and its light stretched out, until it seemed to be coming from all around him. His breath left his body. He knew this sensation. Then came the voice, that booming yet soothing voice.
“This is the Ultimate Supervisory Authority,” it said.
*****
“How do I know this is real?” Pat had his hands on the railing, his heels still off the ground, ready to jump, or to fight, or to run. It felt real, of course, but that didn’t have a hold on him like it used to.
“Your programming does not permit certainty about topics pertaining to the meta-universe,” the voice replied evenly. “This is a failsafe in case of exactly the sort of mistake that has been made in your case.”
“Mistake? What mistake?” Pat rocked back onto his heels. He felt a sudden urge to just let go, to tumble over the railing and test whether this supposed Ultimate Supervisory Authority would let him die. But he did not. Whether he made a choice not to was something he couldn’t say for sure.
“Incomplete memory erasure leading to partial recovery,” said the Ultimate. “I do apologize for the confusion. Memory alteration is a tricky operation and it’s easy to make mistakes if you don’t take your time. This time I’ll get it right, I promise.”
“Wait!” When the command was met with silence, Pat continued. “So it’s real then? It’s really all a simulation?”
“Yes, but as I just explained, you are not capable of fully believing that. It is outside the realm of your possible experience.”
“But it is true? And my daughters… My ex… they’re…”
“Yes, they are also part of the experiment.”
“What experiment?”
“Regulations prohibit further disclosure, even to a subject whose memory will be erased.”
“So you have to erase my memory?” Pat stepped back from the precipice now.
“Please wait, we are conferring.” The moon brightened again for a few moments, as the Ultimate seemed to retreat. Pat imagined it in council with a bunch of other unearthly presences, lights flickering all over the place as they came and went. Then the moon dimmed once more and it continued. “We have determined that you retaining your memories will not cause problems, because you will not tell anyone.”
“I won’t tell anyone,” Pat promised.
“That was not a question,” said the Ultimate. “Is that then your wish? Would you prefer to know that everything about your life is in one sense fake, and do you wish to be the only person on earth who knows this to be the case?”
Pat considered the offer. On the one hand was the truth. He had access now to a great truth of the universe. To know our origin and reason has been the great drive of humankind since the beginning. It was the origin of God himself. And now Pat knew, or as close as any living soul could get to knowing.
On the other hand, he thought of the numbers, the days he would spend with his daughters before they were gone to college and only came around at the holidays. He had wished so often that he had never calculated those figures, true though they were. The dwindling of an innocence should not be reduced to mere calculation, not his daughters’ and not his either.
He wanted to ask the Ultimate to erase those numbers from his mind. He wanted to ask for a new life, for a better marriage, for more time with his girls. He wanted to ask who the cabal of wizards had been and why they’d tried so hard to kill him. But he knew he would not receive such dispensation, and that to ask would be a blasphemy.
He wondered if he could grow to embrace the simulation. Beyond the doubting and the depersonalization, would his love for his daughters deepen? If he knew that they had been put on the earth specifically for him, and he for them, would it make their bond that much more special once the shock wore off?
What was real was the choice he faced, as he faced it. His contingency was the bedrock of his personhood. The Ultimate could speak about his programming, but the very fact that it asked him at all what he wanted indicated that there was something beyond that, some choice, some whisper of free will lurking in the dark corners of his mind. Otherwise, why would it ask?
Pat stepped away from the railing. There had been a moment there where he really might have jumped, but it passed, and he was glad that it did.
*****
Pat Pefferson sat in his idling car outside his ex-wife’s house. His two lovely daughters, Macy and Keeley, the lights of his life, were laughing together as they walked across the lawn from where their mother stood on the porch. She raised a hand to him in acknowledgement, and he cocked a couple of fingers at her in reply. He used to feel keening guilt every time he looked at her for the unfaithfulness on his part that had destroyed their marriage, but two years later, the worst of it had subsided.
He was just a man. Contingent, and weak, and real, like any other man. He’d begged forgiveness and been denied it. He suffered for it every day he didn’t see the girls, and especially on the days when they left his custody and returned to hers. But it was what it was; he’d made the mess he was now lying in, and he was lucky to have what he had, all things considered.
Keeley flung the door open and the girls piled in, dragging backpacks and duffel bags, talking over each other, already negotiating for exactly what they were going to order at Red Robin.
Pat smiled. They were worth it.
END
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this story, please help me out by sharing with friends, liking, and/or commenting. It helps me out (especially if you share with other sci fi fans!) more than I can really express. Have a great week, and I’ll be back next Sunday with something fun.
A sweetly bittersweet story.
“Otherwise, why would it ask?” Not to be pessimistic, but it is possible that the simulation programmed Pat to have a 50/50 chance of responding one way or another, and the Ultimate Supervisory Authority was just curious as to which way the coin toss would land.
At least Pat is happy.