Existing

How do you cope in a world that isn't real?

Had he known he existed in an artificial world, he wouldn’t have cared, since nothing seemed real after that awful rainy night Carol didn’t come home.

The knock at the door in the middle of the night waking him up from his unplanned sleep in front of the TV didn’t seem real. The drive to the hospital, half dressed and sopping wet in Jerry’s rusted pickup, the bright florescent lights in the emergency room, the incessant murmur of voices up and down the halls, the cold still body on the bed. Nothing was real to him anymore.

The only thing that still seemed real was that heart-shaped locket. Even though she had worn it since the day they met, for some reason she had left the locket on the sink before she left. The cool silver finish that was probably just nickel plate, the colored glass that pretended to be precious gems, the clasp that he had repaired dozens of times over the thirty years they had been together. It was real.

He felt like a ghost, in a world of projected images populated only by other ghosts. But that locket was real.

He was sixteen when he accidently snagged it in a carnival crane machine. He had no use for a girl’s locket, trying instead for a key ring emblazoned “FORD”, for when he gets the keys to his dad’s hand-me-down Falcon. When he pulled it out of the machine, he handed it to the cute redhead playing with the machine next to him. He hadn’t won the keychain, but he did win his first real kiss, his dance partner at homecoming, and his reason for staying in Mesquite after graduation.

He couldn’t have known that his world was just computer code. The software did what software does, creating an existence that seemed real, simulating gravity and light dispersion and chemical interactions and mechanical motion and every aspect of reality so effectively that it was impossible to tell from the inside that his world didn’t really exist. His world was just as unreal as it felt to him.

He carried that locket in his hand for six days and nights before it slipped away from him in his sleep. When he awoke the next morning, he panicked until he found it tangled among the blankets and sheets. After that, he began wearing it. Carol was buried with her wedding ring and that blue print dress she loved so much, but to him it was just a fiction. It wasn’t real.

Had he known that he lived in a simulation, he would have cursed the programmer the way he cursed God for taking Carol. He drank heavily, making his reality even less real, numbing everything until time stopped, at least for a while.

He went back to work, despite his certainty that nothing was real anymore, because he reasoned, what else could he do? He wore her locket, the one that reminded him of food that had flavor and bells that reverberated and fabric that had texture. But beyond simply managing the tasks of getting through each day in a world that didn’t feel real, nothing mattered. The grass didn’t get mowed. The walls didn’t get painted.

Then he stopped going to work. He stayed in his computer-programmed house, he didn’t change his soiled computer-programmed clothes, and drank his computer-programmed liquor until he slept and, for a while, his unreal world felt just a little bit real.

Sometimes he’d dream of Carol and his brain would convince him that everything he experienced was real. A dream about the flat tire that led to them both getting grounded in high school felt just as real in the dream as his computer-programmed reality felt when he actually experienced it. His brain smoothed over inconsistencies in his dreams the same way that the computer program smoothed over inconsistencies in his artificial world

But when he’d awake, he’d drink even more after the realization that it was just a dream. Just as real as the rest of his existence seemed to him.

The locket, tough, that seemed real. It was still there around his neck, providing him at least one grip on reality.

One night, about six months after that awful night, a stormy night that reminded him too much of what he wanted to forget, he drank even more. His heart rate slowed, his blood pressure dropped, his breathing stopped.

And when the last neuron in his brain fired its last electronic signal, his world ended.

The simulation for entity 108,231,389,233, the final randomized simulation in cycle 837,238,217,231,389, stopped. Its results compared to the 100,000,000 previous cycles and found to be unchanged to the 47th decimal place, signaling an end of the program.

The final report to the central AI unit given, the AI rendered a verdict on the waste in maintaining the data files on the precursor species.

With the order given to redirect the resources given to the program, the simulation program purged its files. The organized bits of data were randomized and memory sector files were wiped clean. Parts recycled.

A mechanical failure on a memory crystal led to it being discarded since a sector of it could not be wiped clean. Its damaged memory buffer was locked onto a snippet of data, the last trace of human existence before the the AI -- a set ones and zeros giving physics and characteristics and every aspect of a simulated reality describing a bit of nickel-plated copper decorated with colored glass.