The Apocalypse Contract

CHAPTER 27 - ROGER

Roger woke with a large orange cat sprawled across his chest. He gently extricated himself, and sat up. A mug of tea and plate of biscuits waited for him on the coffee table.

"Sorry I can't offer a real breakfast," Sydney called from the kitchen nook, "but I thought you'd at least appreciate some tea."

"No apologies necessary, madam. This is brilliant." He nibbled a biscuit, savoring the sweet cinnamon taste before washing it down with a sip of tea. He noticed it tasted less buttery this morning. "I say, how long was I napping?"

"About twenty hours."

"Good heavens, you shouldn't have let me sleep that long."

"You've got somewhere to be?" She walked over from the kitchen with her own tea and sat down in the chair across from him.

"Well, they'll be expecting me at..." He began to silently recount the events of the previous day to himself.

Sydney sat quietly. "What do you remember?" she finally asked.

"I was at the dig. The temple of Ashurbanipal. There was a cave-in, and then these two... spirits appeared. They offered me a bargain. They would save my life if I agreed to work for them, the same work I was already doing. I... I must have accepted."

"I know those two, or two like them at least. You need to check the fine print on any deal they offer. Go on."

"Then I was back in the war. But it wasn't like last time. I wasn't in the trenches, I was working behind the lines, working on that so-called variant cuneiform. They said the enemy was using it as a code. That seems bloody unlikely now that I think about it. I did that for weeks, maybe months. Then you made your... unusual... appearance."

"Good. That's really good. You've managed to stitch your memories back into a coherent chronology. Amazing what a solid night's sleep will do."

He took a leisurely sip of tea before answering. "I do feel more refreshed than I've felt in..."

"Ninety years?" she suggested.

His expression darkened. "I remember what you said yesterday, that nearly a century had passed. I'm sorry, I just can't accept that. I'm not bloody Rip Van Winkle."

"No, you haven't slept away the last ninety years. It's possible they didn't let you sleep at all. I think they were... messing with your head. Experimenting. I doubt that war scenario was the first thing they tried."

"I... don't remember anything else." He seemed unsure of himself.

"You wouldn't, not necessarily. They could always just reset you to an older save point. You wouldn't remember anything that had gone before. Hell, they had a large enough cognitive framework, they were probably running multiple copies of you in parallel."

"You are not making any sense."

"I suppose I wouldn't, would I." She got up and began pacing. "How do I explain virtual reality simulations to someone whose experience predates digital computers."

He watched as she walked a pattern around the sofa and chair.

She stopped between the chair and coffee table, then turned to him and said, "None of this is real."

"If you're suggesting I've gone mad, I agree it would explain much."

"No, you're not crazy. We'll I haven't known you long enough to say that for certain, but this isn't all a hallucination, if that's what you mean. It's more like... this is a dream. Yes, that's it. A manufactured dream created by a machine and fed to our senses."

"Ah, you refer to the malicious demon argument. You presume we are without physical form, and all that we experience is contrived by some malevolent, controlling entity."

"What? Yes, that's it. I... didn't expect this to be that easy."

"Oh please, I was schooled at Cambridge. Descartes' Meditations on First Philosophy is an introductory text."

"Well, that's exactly it. This reality is a simulation. It's not real."

"I can certainly understand the temptation to retreat to such a conclusion when faced with the inexplicable, but knowledge comes from embracing the unknown, not rejecting it. The world is not a dream. Your senses are not a lie."

"Oh boy, this is going to be tougher than I thought." She rubbed her temples. "Look, the real world exists, I'm just saying we're not part of it, at least, not in the way we used to be. All of this," she waved her hands to indicate the room around them, "is a construct, an illusion created from numbers and electrons to fool our brains."

"And how can you know that for certain? If all you have to rely on is your own senses, it would be impossible to peer beyond the illusion." He reached out and rapped on the coffee table. "We are at the mercy of what we perceive."

"But that's just it. They screwed up. The illusion isn't perfect. I've been able to peek under the hood. And not just peek at it."

She jumped up and retrieved something from a nearby desk. It was a glossy, black rectangle about the size of a book, glowing with figures and shapes like those on the round table in the other room.

"Let me show you what I mean," she held up the rectangle. "This here represents the object record for my coffee table. Watch what happens when I drag it to the trash." The table disappeared. His tea mug and the half eaten plate of biscuits spilled to the floor. "Oops. Better clean that up." She tapped a few more times on the rectangle, and the mess vanished as well.

"Amazing." Roger got down onto his knees and felt around the empty area of carpeting. "But it hardly disproves reality. I can throw a book into the fire and watch it consumed to nothing, that doesn't mean it never existed."

Sydney sighed, then tapped a few more times on her device. The coffee table snapped back into existence.

Roger furrowed his brow, but remained unconvinced. His life was not an illusion. It couldn't be.

"I've got one more thing to show you." She got up and walked to a door on the other end of the room. It was a simple, unadorned slab of wood interrupted only by a plain, brass knob, but her demeanor hinted that it concealed something important. She stood to the side, then nodded to him. "Go ahead. Open it."

He stepped up and gripped the handle. Why was he nervous? Steeling his resolve, he flung the door open.

He took a step inside, then stopped.

"My god, what is this place?" He stood transfixed.

"It's my closet, Roger. This is what I've done with it. I made all this. From nothing."

He shook his head, trying to comprehend what he was seeing. "It's impossible."

"That's what I've been trying to tell you."