Working Title: Of Course

Of Course

“Hey. Can I ask you something?” I propose. She looks at me, and her look shouts at me that she thinks it’s strange that I thought I had to ask. “Of course,” she says. I start, per usual, with a tangent, “So, you’ve heard of simulation theory, right?” with a brief pause as I, for some strange reason, expect her to respond to a pretty random unwarranted question. “So, basically, it’s like The Matrix, right. The belief that, it is statistically more likely that your natural existence is a simulation than it is for it to be real.” Another brief pause occurs, as I contemplate the fact that I had just assumed she would know about that. Luckily, she does.

“Yes and?” she says. Something about that arrangement of words, the way she said them, or the way her body language manifested into a tangible specter of the two-word sentence she uttered, gives me the impression she means that, in an annoyed way. Though I’m often wrong about things like this. I disregard it and continue as if she wasn’t annoyed. Just in case.

Second tangent. “Just so you’re aware,” I raise my hands up as if she were a police officer and I was a teen who was walking home from a public bus station at 11pm and heard a lot of bad stuff on the news about cops. “I’m high right now, but I had this really interesting story idea.” It registers in my mind that the analogy might have been too specific. “He’s just an average everyday guy, but every day he also thinks he notices some strange things.”

“Like what? Like ghosts?” she asks.

“No. Like, things that don’t make sense or that you feel have happened already.” I struggle to come up with a good analogy to better help express my point. All that comes to mind is more broadly related words. “It’s all the weird concepts of things that we can’t explain like Déjà vu, or the Mandela Effect, or dreams that feel like premonitions.”

“Oh, ok. Yeah, sure,” she says and then for a second looks as if she’s happy that we’re now on the same page but can’t lose focus because I haven’t even arrived at the question yet, and we’ve been talking for five minutes. “So, this guy in the story, right? He starts noticing all these weird things, but ironically, in a meme sort of way.” I’m laughing now as I escalate to the part of the story that I considered to be funny but forgot about until saying it out loud just now.

“This guy, he always gets this weird feeling about how long it’s been since his last bad thing that happened. And he starts to think to himself ‘oh its tax season, I always have car troubles during tax season’, so later that week he forgets to correctly tighten the lug nuts on his wheels, when one ran flat after his shift that day.” I pause for another second, thinking about how specific this story is getting.

At some point during my summary / telling of this story, I realize that I am no longer making eye contact. I’m monologuing and pantomiming the story to an audience of accumulated dust on our tv stand. Where I now have to imagine the look she has on her face, as not to disrupt my performance by turning away from such a captive audience. I imagine she’s looking at me with concern, or she’s looking at me intently like she’s proud of what it is that I’m doing.

“Cut to later in the story. Him and his two best friends have been investigating these things, they think it’s funny, and so does he, but he also acknowledges that it is happening though.” Deep breath. I look at her now, as if I’m about to pitch her the best used 2016 Barcelona-Red-Metallic Toyota Corolla she’s ever seen in Lake County, no matter what the Carfax says. “This is where it gets interesting. The closer we get to the core of this simulation mystery, the more his friends start turning on him. Telling him, that it’s getting too sketchy. That he’s tampering with things that shouldn’t be understood. I can’t stop now, I’m too close, we’re finishing this! He shouts, valiantly! Drowning out his friend’s concerns.”

“So, we now get to third act stuff where these strange glitches are getting stronger and more noticeable, and now the Narrator of the story... Oh yeah! There’s a Narrator in this story, he’s just called Narrator but follows closely to the main character,” I explain, to make sure she’s really visualizing this novel I made up this morning. “Like the guy looks around and sees fog, but he doesn’t process it in the way everyone else sees it. He sees it as a shift in the simulation as it is actually transferring that processing power to somewhere else in the simulation, making another aspect of the simulation more convincing.”

“The Narrator now has no choice now but to take this seriously. So, he summons the calvary right?” I ask, while I pantomime an ocean wave, which, to me, makes sense because I picture a calvary of people to be a sort-of flood of knights on horseback cresting over the grassy green hills like foamy tides crashing onto a beach. I do understand that she has no idea I’m picturing that, so to her the simulation just summoned a tidal wave. I’m I think to myself I’m pretty close to the twist ending at this point, so I let it go because a tidal wave doesn’t necessarily detract from the climax.

“Finally, we get to the big reveal. And I don’t want this to sound narcissistic or arrogant either, but” I say as a final disclaimer to her, while I think to myself if maybe this ending is in anyways obvious, or cheesy, or “too much for a 4-quadrant film adaptation”. “He gets to the core of the simulation, and he sees a mirror floating in the air like an unfinished bathroom vanity resting atop a deep-otherworldly black ocean.” My heart beat is so fast at this point, my excitement crests as if I was in my own audience listening to me tell this story, and in a final masturbatory self-affirming statement, I reveal: “And he touches the mirror, seeing himself in the mirror, and in this moment the story shifts and describes a literal pan over to the mirrored perspective, as the Narrator reveals it was him who created the simulation.”

Deep breathes cascade out of me like water trickling down a decorative stone waterfall replica that runs on AAA batteries. It also has RGB lighting, and is Alexa enabled but that’s beside the point. “But! The narrator begins to talk to the main character now, he explains to him how hard it must have been to get to this point, and reveals the final truth about this world he exists in. He is a God - (Yes, capital G) - there are many Gods, but he is a specific one, with like, a God sounding name.” I consider if I built up too early to a smaller reveal, and this now seems a bit like a bait and switch, just to arrive at the actual, more complex, idea as a means to establish rules in a universe that I just invented today. Like I’m pitching Season 2 to Netflix, even though they haven’t agreed to produce a Season 1 yet.

Now I’m panicking to rush to the actual reveal, as I’m afraid that this story misstep has taken away from the overall quality of the piece. “So, the original main character, I just call him MC, maybe it will end up being like John or something, or maybe I can make the character a woman, so it doesn’t feel like I’m making myself out to be the main character. As if I’m telling the audience that I think I’m a God.”

“So, the original main character, she ends up asking ‘what does this mean now then?’ She’s - (yes, I have without warning changed the MC to a she, having not given a second thought to the fact that I have been referring to the both the MC and the Narrator as “He” this entire time) – She’s curious if she’s going to be thrown back into the simulation. ‘No,’ the narrator begins to explain to her. The Narrator says that the loop is cyclical, and she created you to live vicariously through you with the goal of living a regular life in a simulation of her own making.”

Now I slow down the explanation of this next part as a means to get my point across, not as any sort of demeaning or elitist slight – (Which is always a concern of mine) - “The Narrator says, “since you are effectively me, you are too powerful to be held back by even your own simulation, you will always end up here having figured it out. This is now when you release me of my burden of being the Narrator.” This is why, I chose to slow down.

“Now that you have broken free of the simulation it is your responsibility to run the simulation so that I may rest. It’s you who will now be the Narrator until I someday meet you back here where we do it all over again.” I worry that my delivery of that line was in a cold-anticlimactic tone, and out of breath, but damn did I really like that ending because of how there’s so much world building to be had in that story.

I’m looking at her now waiting for feedback, still catching my breath, reflecting on whether or not I missed any more key details. She makes some comments about how the story is cool and interesting and if there any specifics as to how I came up with this idea, or what I think of it. I admit to myself that it may be weird to blur the lines of reality for the sake of storytelling, but I love refracting my life through a kaleidoscope of alternate weird/exciting hues. I finally ask her, “So,” I let out a slow exhale as to not come across as out of breath as I really am.

“Does any of that sound normal to you?”

“Of course, it does,” she says.

“Of course, it is,” she says.

“Yeah, of course it is.” I let out, nodding my head, still wondering if I should have shared that, or how lucky I am that she didn’t just stare at me like an EMT asking “Can you hear me?” to someone at a crash site. Doesn’t stop the fact that I still feel frozen in this moment. The extended pause alerts me that this conversation has probably run its course, so I say,

“Anyways, I’m gonna get some rest now, alright?”