This kitchen island is where Gloria and I maintain the endless supply of mail that enters our house every week. Victoria's Secret and 3.9% financing and Get the Cash You Need Now! and
Entertainment Weekly
and
Glamour
and
Bazaar
and
Golf Digest
and Come Back to DirecTV, Come Back to AT&T, You're Paying Too Much, Your Children Aren't Safe, Get Out of Debt Now! Every day I toss nearly all of this paper into the recycle bin and still our island is covered with mountains of it.
In the middle of everything sits Gloria's laptop, where she usually leaves it before bed, and for the millionth time in a row I resist the urge to open it. I could probably get details about Jack if I wanted to badly enough. Figure out her password or even install software to record her keystrokes. But going down that road is the path to the Dark Side, the path to self-loathing and despair and the distrust of humanity as a whole.
Still, my jealousy is powerful, and so is the urge to snoopâpowerful enough that I take my cup of water and head for the study just to get away from her computer. Back to my own computer.
And the game.
The monitor is in standby mode and blinks on when I shake the mouse. The computer thinks and seems to hang for a minute. The half-rendered Windows toolbar stretches across the bottom of the screen, but everything else is black.
My head still throbs, but at least it's a hangover headache and not the dreaded migraine. I should get some Advil, before the headache gets worse, but now the cockpit chart is finally loading.
I hear a footstep behind me, the sound of a heel on hardwood. Someone breathing.
My skin turns cold.
I don't want to turn around but I do anyway, slowly, and the man in the Stetson hat is standing in the doorway. Staring at me.
“Phillips,” he says. “What are you doing?”
Someone laughs. Someone in another room, perhaps the guest bedroom. Or is it Gloria?
The man in the hat isn't in the doorway anymore. That's because he was never there in the first place.
I hear fingers on a keyboard, someone typing in intermittent bursts. A patter of feet, like someone running away. I walk into the hallway and look into the master bedroom. Gloria appears to be sound asleep.
I walk into the kitchen and no one is there.
The living room is empty.
How many times am I going to search my house before I realize no one has broken in?
Finally I make it back to the study and sit down in front of the computer. The
Ant Farm
game is now onscreen.
Interestingly, something is different. The ant population is now 70,525, but all the other indicators, like
Safety
and
Life Meaning
and whatever else, have an underlined
X
where the number should be. I roll the mouse over the
X
and a little box pops up that says:
Your ants have experienced a schism. Click the X for more details.
So I click and see this:
Your ants have achieved a period in their intellectual development equivalent to our Age of Enlightenment. The application of physical sciences such as chemistry, biology, and physics have caused a decline in religious belief. At this time more than 40 percent of your ants have serious questions about the validity of your belief manual. To accurately portray the nature of your world, the indicators for these secular ants will be calculated separately from the ants who carry more traditional beliefs.
For instance,
Safety
for the secular ants is 74 compared to 49 for the religious ants.
Life Meaning
is 75 for the religious ants and 50 for the secular.
Transcendence
for the believers is a whopping 88 to only 31 for the non-believers, while
Love
is reversedâ69 for secular ants to only 40 for religious ones.
Aestheticism
isn't even a contest: 91 for non-believers versus 18 for believers.
The religious ants seem to think their lives mean more, but the secular ants appear to get more out of life. Am I to assume the believers are just biding their time until afterlife begins, whereas the rest are making the most of what they have?
That seems awfully simplistic, of course, and I still haven't looked up the exact definition of aestheticism. But I wonder: What if God showed Himself to me? Why does He work in mysterious ways when He could easily work in obvious ways?
Gradually the soundtrack music downshifts from driving and powerful to slow and peaceful. Waves of static wash in the background, and deep in the mix I hear a man yelling something incomprehensible into a megaphone. Is he trying to tell me something? Warn me about something? I can't make out the words.
I feel horrible. My head hurts and my body is in dehydrated shock and it seems like nothing in the world is ever going to get better. Like everything is shit and will always be shit. So I get up and make myself a drink. A strong one. Or two, I don't know. Time turns elastic while I consume these cocktails, but eventually my headache evaporates and my hangover disappears. Fatigue settles over my skin, into my head, bleeds into my bones. I wander back into the bedroom and crawl under the comforter and listen to Gloria's inexorable breathing. I stare at the blackness above me, out of which the ceiling eventually emerges. I think about my life, how different it is than I might have predicted back in college. No children. A career-driven wife. Her college boyfriend boss. My best friend is a struggling actress I met on the Internet. I look to my left, at the windows, and see a face staring at me through the window.
No, I don't.
I hear the sound of cars on a freeway, the sound of screeching brakes.
I'm going to die.
Reality, it seems, is not something you would call stable. It rolls under my feet in waves, like the ground during an earthquake. I am helpless against this feeling. All I want is to go to sleep and put all of this out of my mind. In the morning I'll have to confront my newfound unemployment. At some point I will be forced to admit the truth to my wife. If I could just get some sleep now, perhaps it would be easier to confront these hurdlesâ¦and yet at this point I couldn't be more awake if I had just snorted ten likes of cocaine. I might never fall asleep again.
Unlessâ¦
I crawl out of bed, carefully, and listen for a change in Gloria's breathing. Still sound asleep. On tiptoes I head for the bathroom, where her Ambien bottle looms beside a Nasonex dispenser and a tube of toothpaste. The label on it instructs me to take one pill ten minutes before bedtime, and apparently I'm not supposed to do anything afterwards that requires coordination or reason. Also, I'm pretty sure Gloria breaks these tablets in half, but since I outweigh her by sixty pounds, I go ahead and swallow a whole one.
For whatever reason it doesn't go down very easily, and I need something to wash it down. Why not use the drink I left in the study?
I tiptoe out of the bedroom. Since I'm going to finish the drink, I might as well sit down and have another look at the ant farm. I drag the mouse around the cockpit chart and find a list of subjects labeled
EXPLORE FURTHER
, where there are titles like
MITHRAS
and
HORUS
and
GNOSITICISM.
The last one is
ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?
This page describes the genesis of the
Ant Farm
game. If you want the details, you can visit the web site here:
http://www.simulation-argument.com
, but the main idea is this: A guy named Nick Bostrom developed a thought experiment that at first glance seems farfetched, but which is actually fairly airtight. In this argument, you must conclude that at least one of the following propositions are true:
1.
Almost all civilizations at our level of development become extinct before becoming technologically mature.
We all hope this isn't true, right? Surely we won't blow ourselves up anytime soon.
2.
The fraction of technologically mature civilizations that are interested in creating ancestor simulations is almost zero.
This is probably not true since there is one on my computer right now, and I'm certainly not the first to play it. As computers become more capable, you would expect the number of simulations to go up, not down.
3.
We are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.
If a civilization eventually acquires the ability to create these simulations, and it runs a lot of them, it means there are many more simulated worlds than real ones. Right? In fact, if there are just two simulation games, that's already twice as many artificial worlds as real worlds. And if there are many simulations out there (thousands? millions?) what's the likelihood that any one world is the real one?
Right now I imagine you're thinking how absurd the idea is. After all, you'd know it if this world were fake, right? It would be obvious, right?
But how exactly would it be obvious? If you're in the game, how do you know you're in the game?
And if this world, our world, really is a simulation, it means the ant farm is simply a sim-within-a-sim.
And so on.
As I sit here reading these details, I imagine what it might be like to completely uncouple myself from reality. Like if I were to become a separate entity from myself. What if I were able to observe myself from some other point of view, like if I were the architect of this simulation? What is the real world like? Is everything different?
As I consider this, the characters on my computer monitor begin to vibrate. Not visibly vibrate, but like I can hear them, like they're humming. Or even singing. The letters together sing a kind of song, shimmering like a gospel choir, complete with organ music and trees. A forest of sound.
The pitter patter of little consonant feet.
An orgasm of vowels.
Okay, that's it. I've got to get away from this computer. I've got to get control of myself. But when I try to stand, I nearly fall. Someone has turned gravity up too highâ¦like my mass is trying to pull me to the floor. I stumble out of the room and down the hall, into the kitchen. There is a large plate-glass window in our breakfast room. I turn off the light in the kitchen and the adjacent hallway and stand by the window. Our backyard is large, and toward the edge of our property a couple of old oak trees stand proud. As my eyes become adjusted to the dark I am able to resolve them in more detail. I marvel at their graceful, twisted shapes. It's amazing, don't you think, how the trees all begin with the same basic DNA blueprint, and yet become unique when forced to live in the unpredictable environment?
Do my ants become unique? I set rules for them, of course, but do they evolve beyond those basic instructions? And if they really are unique and sentient electronic creatures, is it genocide to shut down the game without saving it?
Or what about this: If someone came up to you right this minute and said he had just spoken to the creator of our simulation, would you think he was crazy? What if he instead told you he had heard the word of the Lord? Would that make it different?
I'm still staring at the trees in my backyard, and even though it's not windy, those dark, skeletal monsters could almost be moving. Their branches seem to warp and slither toward each other like snakes. I don't like it.
But when I turn away from the window, the room spins reluctantly, like there is a time lag. I happen to look into the dining room and see something I've never noticed before. The chairs at the end of the table are straight and high-backed, whereas the side chairs are shorter and have slightly curved legs. I know this sounds crazy, but you could assign genders to the chairs if you wanted. Based on their shapes, I mean.
I wander into the dining room. One of the female chairs is turned slightly toward me, and I realize she is flirting with me. Normally I wouldn't respond so quickly, but you can't just ignore it when a girl throws herself at you.
I touch her on the arm. She's bony, but her skin is smooth, andâ
And someone turns on the lights.
“Baby, what are you doing?”
I turn around, and the room spins all wrong again. What is my wife doing here?
“Thomas?” Gloria asks again.
Her expression is a mixture of concern and disgust. Shit.
“I was, uhâ¦it looked like there was something wrong with this chair. Like the arm was loose or something.”
“And you were working on it in the dark?”
Under normal circumstances I'm pretty quick with the retorts, but right now everything is all mixed up.
“Well, I was in the kitchen and Iâ”
“Yeah,” she says. “I saw your drink.”
“Right. So I was, um, in the dining room andâ”
“You said you were in the kitchen.”
“Will you let me
finish
?”
“Baby, I'm trying to help you. How many drinks did you have? Are you drunk again?”
“I just had one. Or two, maybe.”
“Are you sure? You sound like you've had a lot more than one or two.”
At this point I vaguely remember taking an Ambien. Could that explain the weird thoughts I've been having? I mean, letters that shimmer? Female chairs?
“I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep,” I finally explain, “so I took one of your sleeping pills.”
“You took an Ambien? A whole one?”
“Yeah.”
“It's been hours since we ate, babe. That stuff will mess with your mind on an empty stomach.”
The pitter patter of little consonant feet, all right.
Gloria sighs. “Let's go to bed, okay? It's almost four in the morning. You can try the guest bedroom if you want. If you think it'll help you sleep better.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Maybe I should do that.”
But first I go into the study to save the
Ant Farm
game. I don't want the ants to die if my computer happens to crash. I look at the cockpit chart as the hard drive spins, but I can't make sense of anything. The numbers could be in Greek, they could be base-six, I have no idea, I am way too fucked up to know anything.