The ladies were gone. Leona, Olimpia, and Romana were on a trip together in
the Pacific Northwest, predominantly the Portland area. Mateo could have
taken time off of work to go with them, but he wasn’t invited. Instead, he
was staying home. Ramses was spending a lot of time here too, hanging out to
keep him company. They had planned on playing cards with a couple of driver
friends, but both of them fell through, so now it was just the two of them.
“You can play cards with just two people,” Mateo reasoned. “You can play
with just yourself, if it’s the right game.”
“That’s depressing,” Ramses pointed out. “Let’s just find someone else.”
“This last minute?”
“It’s not a big party; they’ll be able to leave whenever they want to. What
about those twins next door?”
“Angela and Marie.” Mateo leaned over in his chair, but couldn’t quite see
through the window, so he stood up. It still wasn’t enough, so he just
stepped over. “Yeah, they’re out there in their garden. Seems as though
that’s all they do.”
“Maybe they would like a break,” Ramses suggested. Maybe they’re always out
there hoping a couple of cool guys will invite them to something better.”
“I’ll see.” Mateo walked out of the house, expecting to do this alone, but
Ramses was trailing behind him. “Hello, Waltons. Are you free this evening?
We got a poker game going, and there are some extra seats at the table.”
Marie and Angela exchanged a look. “Do you have RPS-101?” asked the former.
“Is...that a drink?” Mateo asked.
They laughed. “No,” Angela said. “It’s a game. We have a board, if you think
you might like to learn.”
Mateo exchanged a look with Rames, and then shrugged. “Yeah, we’re up for
something new. It’ll just be the four of us.”
“Great.” Marie stood up, and started to remove her gardening gloves. “Marie
Walton, computer programmer.” She shook Ramses’ hand.
“Computer engineer,” Ramses replied.
“I know.” She smiled.
“I’m an addiction counselor.” Angela shook his hand too.
“There won’t be any drinking,” Mateo explained, worried that maybe
she was worried about it.
“It would have been fine if there were,” Angela promised.
The twins wanted to shower first, which was fine, because the gaming table
wasn’t set up yet. A half hour later, they showed up with their game board.
It was a giant wheel with 101 objects written in the wedges. The entire game
was pure chance, with absolutely no strategy involved. One player spun the
wheel, and randomly landed on one of the objects. The other player spun
next, and if it was better than the first one, they won. It was the
most boring thing that Mateo had ever experienced, and he couldn’t
understand why they liked it so much. They couldn’t explain it either. They
just had this peculiar fascination with it, like there was a secret
dimension to the game that they simply hadn’t reached yet. Mateo wasn’t so
sure, but he did find himself mysteriously landing on Sponge a lot. Maybe
there really was magic to it. Despite this inexplicable intrigue, everyone
agreed after a while that it was literally played out. They switched to
regular old poker. They had to explain the game to the Waltons first. Well,
Ramses did. Mateo knew the hands, but he didn’t understand it on the
level that Ramses did. That was why he served as the region’s engineer.
Mateo certainly couldn’t do it without him.
After hours of this, they took a break to get up, use the restroom, and
scavenge for food. Ramses and Marie ended up in a discussion about their
jobs, and it was kind of looking like they were never going to start playing
again.
“There’s something I’d like to show you,” Angela said to Mateo. She tilted
her head towards the east. “Back at our place.”
“Okay,” he said. Hopefully she wasn’t coming onto him. Managing a
three-person relationship was complicated enough. They didn’t need to add a
fourth. He followed her back to her house, and into what she called their
study.
“Did you know that there are more than two kinds of twins?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, you can have identical or fraternal—or in the case of two girls,
sororal. You’ve probably heard of this distinction, but there are
other variations. Precisely when the egg splits, or whether it was
fertilized before the split, or after, makes a difference. There are
other factors. You can even have two twins with two separate fathers!”
“Is that what you are?” Mateo asked, not sure where she was going with this.
Angela giggled as she took a file folder out of the top drawer of a desk.
“No.” She opened the folder, and folded it under itself before handing it to
him. “We’re not sure what we are.”
Mateo looked down at the top piece of paper. “I don’t understand what any of
this means. DNA methylation, telomeres...”
“Down at the bottom.” Angela just pointed at the sheet in general.
Mateo read it out loud, “biological markers inconclusively suggest an aging abnormality that
places Subject B roughly four years ahead of Subject A.
Yeah, I still don’t know what that means.”
“Marie is older than me,” Angela tried to explain, “by four years.”
“How is that possible?”
She shook her head. “We don’t know. It’s not the only weird thing about it.
We understand that RPS-101 is stupid and boring, but we wanted to play it
with you two to see what would happen. You keep landing on Sponge. I keep
landing on Heart. And there’s also the matter of the hemlock.”
“Excuse me?”
“We all drank hemlock.”
“I don’t know much, but I know that that’s toxic.”
“Yeah, it should be. But are you even a little queasy?”
Mateo turned away. “You poisoned me as some sort of test?”
“Do you remember moving here, to your house, I mean?”
“Yeah, of course I do.”
“I don’t. Neither does Marie. We’re just been here forever. All we do
is garden.”
“And play Rock, Paper, Scissors, and drink hemlock.”
“Do you feel stronger when you go out in the sun?”
“Lots of people like the sun.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Mateo sighed. “I guess so. Is that not normal?”
“No, it’s not.”
“What does it mean, when you put it all together, that we’re superheroes?”
“Well, we may be super, but we’re not heroes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure
your job is very fulfilling, but it can be done by a computer.”
That was a bit of a sore subject. While it was true that RideSauce valued
the human touch, his role was also under constant threat of being automated.
The only reason they hadn’t pulled the trigger was because customer
satisfaction was a reflection of staff satisfaction, which was reportedly
tied to their ability to receive help from real humans. If the pendulum ever
swung to the opposite direction, even for only a day, his job would be gone
so fast, a new tenant would be in his office space by lunch.
Angela took her lab test back, and returned it to the drawer. “I don’t mean
to hurt your feelings, but there’s something going on around here. I feel
like nearly everyone around me is fake. There’s a reason we ran these tests
on you two. You, your wife, your daughter; they all seem like real people.
You seem like the only real people. Everyone else is just sort
of...weird. Wouldn’t you say?”
“No,” Mateo argued. “My assistant feels real, as does one of my drivers,
Boyd.”
Angela grabbed a notepad from the desk. “Boyd. And what’s your
assistant’s name?”
“You’re not going to poison my friends too!”
“Understood, but you only listed two more people. Can you think of anyone
besides them?”
“Yeah, my rival...Pacey.”
“Pacey, with an e?”
“You’re not—I mean, you can poison him if you want, I guess. But you stay
the hell away from my wife and daughter, you hear me.”
“Well, your daughter wouldn’t be able to survive it.”
“What makes you say that?”
“I dunno. Why did I say that?”
Mateo decided to sit down in one of the guest chairs. “If I’m being honest,
there are some things I know or think about the world around me, and the
people, which don’t seem true...but do?”
Angela flattened her skirt under her thighs and sat down in the other guest
chair. “I think I know what you mean. Leona and I had tea the other day, and
she made an off-handed comment about how I was once engaged to a man named
Ed. That’s completely untrue, I’ve never been engaged, yet it still somehow
felt right. I could picture him in my mind. He was dressed weird, like he
lived in a different time.”
“Maybe it’s a past life.” He stood up and laughed as he put his face in his
palm. “Oh my God, I can’t believe I’m even entertaining these scifi ideas.
Past lives? That’s not a thing.”
“Aren’t they? We don’t know,” Angela pointed out.
“I designed a spaceship.” The two of them looked over to find Ramses
standing in the doorway. “I thought it was just for fun, but...I think it
works. I mean, it’s really detailed, right down to how the fuel is
injected into the engine.”
“He showed it to me,” Marie said as they were both walking all the way into
the room. “I can’t make heads or tails of it, but I can tell that he put a
lot of thought into the design. If it wouldn’t work, it’s
well-thought out at the very least.”
“We were talking,” Ramses went on. “I’ve never been sick. Neither has she,
nor her sister. My memories seem...not fake, but too perfect, like they’ve
been carefully curated for my mind.”
“Did she tell you about the poison?” Mateo asked him.
“Yeah,” Ramses said with a nod. “We took it a step further.” He bent over,
and unplugged a surge protector from its wall, along with all of the
appliances connected to it. “Do you care about this?” he asked Marie.
“No,” she said as she was taking it from him. She pulled it back like a
baseball bat, and slammed it straight into Ramses’ face. He didn’t even
move. It didn’t seem to hurt at all, and didn’t do any damage whatsoever.
Apparently inspired by the two of them, Angela grabbed a letter opener from
the desk, and tried to jam it into Mateo’s neck. It didn’t hurt either, and
didn’t break the skin. It did do damage to the opener, though, bending it
into a slight curve.
“We are superheroes,” Mateo guessed.
“Or it’s the simulation hypothesis,” Ramses decided.
“Explain that one again?” Mateo asked, jokingly without laughing, because he
hadn’t ever heard of it, though it did not sound humorous.
“We’re all living in a computer simulation,” Ramses began. “Usually, it’s
used in an attempt to explain the nature of reality itself, and where we all
are in general. But in this case, it could just be the explanation for where
we are...the four of us.”
“Six,” Marie corrected. “We think Mateo’s family is part of this too.”
“More,” Angela corrected Marie’s correction. She lifted up the notepad.
“Mateo came up with a few names of people he interacts with who also appear
to be real.” She used airquotes around the last word.
“If we’re just in a computer,” Mateo asked, “how do we get out?”
“Typically?” Ramses asked. “You can’t. You can never really know what’s
real, and what’s not. It’s not like the movies, where you can will yourself
out of it, or where the developers hid secret powers that let you take
control. If the simulation hypothesis is true, we have absolutely no free
will. Not only can they shape our world to their liking, but they can adjust
our minds as needed. We’re not necessarily real either.”
“So, what do we do?” Angel asked him.
“Our two main choices are to keep our heads down, and hope our creators see
fit to at least keep us alive in whatever definition that should be for the
simulation. Don’t make waves, don’t rock the boat; just play along.”
“Or we keep bashing each other with office equipment,” Marie offered.
“Or we try to talk to them,” Mateo suggested instead. “I told you, Angela,
that my rival, Pacey seems real too. There’s more to it. He actually seems,
somehow...more real.”
“You think he’s one of them? An avatar of one of the developers?” Angela
figured.
“Might could be,” Mateo said. “But I don’t wanna do anything until my girls
come back home. It’s not safe for them here, but it’s not like it’s safe
wherever they are now. What if they’re on a different server, or whatever?
At least if they come back, I can keep an eye on them.”
“Okay, then we wait to do anything,” Marie said. “They should have a say in
whatever decision we make anyway.”
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