Mateo and Ramses didn’t leave the scene of the crime because they didn’t
want to get caught, but because they didn’t want to get caught yet.
They still needed to give their friends enough time to conduct their more
precise experiments and examinations. As far as the two of them were
concerned, though, they had enough proof. Nobody looked over the edge of the
ravine to see if they were okay. That was how a lot of video games were,
once you passed out of a certain area, you were free, even if any pursuers
should still be able to follow you. NPCs were programmed to stay within a
particular radius, because it was easier to code them with specific context
than as individuals with freedom of movement. Of course, that didn’t make
much sense here. The simulation was so incredibly sophisticated that they
were all fooled for years before getting the hint that something was off, so
why would there be such limitations? They still didn’t understand how any of
this worked. It just seemed so inconsistent.
“What did you mean back there?” Ramses asked as they were back up onto the
road. “You didn’t think that this was a simulation?”
“No, I said that I didn’t think that we were in a computer,” Mateo
corrected.
“Okay, and why’s that?”
“I dunno.”
“You don’t?”
“My memory has been erased, remember? I think I remembered something just
before we hit the wall, but now it’s gone again.”
They continued to walk a ways in silence. They ended up in a sort of
downtown area, situated on the opposite side of where they lived from where
they worked. Mateo had never been here before, but a new memory was coming
in. This wasn’t mission hills, or the area surrounding it. In the real
world, it was very suburban. It wasn’t located between two urban centers
like this. This was wrong. Everything was wrong. More evidence, which they
managed to ignore all this time until they had no choice. Someone left their
skateboard on the sidewalk. Mateo picked it up, and sent it through the
window of a clothing shop. No one was hurt, it just landed in the display
case. The shopkeeper came out, and started waving his hands, just like the
construction workers. He didn’t say anything, though, probably because there
was no reason to program these particular NPCs to speak.
Ramses kicked the sideview mirror off of a car as they were passing by. The
driver got out, and said, “hey!” but that was it. He didn’t try to stop
them, or anything. It did look like he was calling the cops, though, so that
was a minor improvement. They jaywalked across the street, blocking traffic,
and forcing drivers to honk their horns. There was a small restaurant here
with outdoor seating. Mateo grabbed a burger off of someone’s plate while
Ramses took a drink right out of their hands. “Ugh,” he said. “I hate this
flavor.” He just dropped the glass on the ground. They were becoming a real
nuisance, but still, no one tried to do anything to stop them. It was
getting dark now, perhaps a little earlier than it should for May? Or was it
September? It was impossible to know, since none of this was real.
They turned into an alley, and opened a random door. It took them through a
kitchen, and into what appeared to be a dance hall. They could see a woman
in a white dress, and a man in a tuxedo. Classic wedding reception. Mateo
grabbed the microphone from the DJ, who wasn’t even playing anything. He was
just bouncing to an imaginary beat, and pretending to scratch at the
records. “I’m really happy for you, Imma let you finish, but Kanye had one
of the worst videos of all time!”
“Who?” one of the bridesmaids asked.
“I dunno,” Mateo said. The rapper didn’t seem to exist in this reality,
though he was rattling around in Mateo’s brain somewhere. “Love is a joke,
and none of you are real, I mean it!”
Ramses grabbed the mic, and put it up to his own lips. “Is real.”
Mateo took it back. “What? What does Israel have to do with anything?”
“No, none of you is real,” Ramses tried to explain.
“That’s what I said.”
“You said are real. That’s wrong.”
“No, it’s not wrong, they’re not real. Look at ‘em!” Mateo pointed to the
crowd. They were watching and listening intently, smiley as ever, like this
was a usual reception, and nothing strange was going on. They weren’t
engaging at all. He could say anything, and they would still just stare up
at him like he was making sense. “Whatever. I’m outtie...five thousand!” He
reached down, and tipped the DJ’s table over. The DJ just kept bouncing to
the music that wasn’t playing, and pantomiming his job.
On their way out through the front, both of them grabbed a handful of
wedding cake, and started stuffing their mouths. That was when Mateo’s phone
rang. “What up?”
“It’s Boyd. You crashed my car. Now the cops are talking to me at the
station.”
“How’d it go with the grass?” Mateo asked him.
“They’re all unique,” Boyd answered. “The grass is real. Everything is real.”
“All right. We’ll be there when we can, but as you said, we crashed the car,
so we’re movin’ a little slow.” He barely got the word out before they
opened the door to find themselves surrounded by cops themselves, all
pointing guns at them, like they were criminal masterminds, or something.
They just stood there for a moment, frozen, not out of fear, but apathy.
These cops weren’t real either. They may have thought they were, but
it was a lie. The world was a total lie. Ramses reached out towards them to
offer them, “cake?”
“Gun!” one of the cops cried. They all started shooting.
It was comical how they unloaded their bullets into Mateo and Ramses’
bodies. They were shaking uncontrollably with each shot, but never did fall
down. They didn’t have to. The bullets weren’t real! Finally, someone
managed to shout, “hold your fire!”
They all stopped, except for one guy. He just kept firing, slowly but
steadily. He wasn’t even hitting either of his targets. They were
good shots, though. Mateo and Ramses looked over to the wall a meter
away from them. Dust blew out of the bullet hole each time, and it really
was just the one bullet hole. He managed to hit the exact same point every
single time. Definitely a computer program. Definitely.
Once one of his mates managed to stop him, it was he who placed the
handcuffs on the suspects, and drove them off towards the station. Some of
the other cruisers followed with their lights blaring, and their sirens
going off. The others dispersed, and continued to police a world that didn’t
need their help, since everyone could simply be programmed to follow the law
at all times.
“I stole his car, let him go,” Mateo demanded. They were sitting in the
interrogation room now; all three of them. A piece of plastic from Boyd’s
car was sitting in a baggie on the table, presumably to intimidate them into
confessing.
“You don’t make the demands here,” the detective argued.
“You don’t make the demand here!” Mateo yelled back.
“Yes, I do!”
“Yes, I do!”
“Stop copying me!”
“Stop copying me!”
“Detective Sanchez, he won’t stop copying me!”
“Detective Sanchez, he won’t stop copying me!”
“All right, all right,” Sanchez interrupted. “Why did you steal his car?”
“Seemed like fun,” Mateo replied.
“All right, all right. Why did you steal his car?”
“You got them both in a loop,” Ramses said with a laugh.
“All right, all right. Why did you steal his car?”
“Why didn’t you?” Mateo asked her accusatorily.
“What?”
“Oh, give it up, Sanchez,” Mateo began. “They know you’re dirty, and working
with us. They’re trying to catch you in a lie.”
“I’m not dirty, I take a shower every night!” she contended, slamming her
hand on the table. She darted her eyes only to one side, thinking about her
own comment.
“Prove it!” Ramses shouted.
“Maybe I will,” she returned
“All right, all right,” the dude detective interrupted. “Why did you steal
his car?”
“I didn’t steal anything,” Mateo defended. “You’re the one who stole it.”
“Is this true?” the detective’s eyes teared up as he was looking over at his
partner.
“No, they’re joking,” she insisted. She looked back over at Mateo.
“You are, aren’t you?” She sighed, and went over to sit in a chair
against the back wall.
“Where were you last night?” the guy went on to ask.
Sanchez came back over, and pointed at Mateo. “You know where I was!”
“Don’t you lie to me!” the other guy urged.
She mouthed his words as he was saying them, then grabbed the
evidence bag from the table to take it back over to her little wall chair.
Meanwhile, the man nodded with a smirk on his face. “We got you. Your
partner confessed. He’s in the other room right now, giving you up.”
“My partner,” Mateo asked, “who’s sitting right next to me?”
“That’s the one,” the detective corroborated, still smug.
“Well, I’m giving him up,” Mateo decided. “He stole my pencil in
first grade.”
Both of the detectives’ eyes widened. “He is?” they asked, perfectly in
sync. They scowled at Ramses. “We’ve been looking for you for years,
you..son of a bitch!”
Mateo just remembered something else, from a movie that didn’t exist in this
reality, but did in the real one. “I think there’s been some kind of
mistake. We’re actually supposed to be getting out of jail today, not
going into it.” Could this even work?
“Ugh,” Sanchez said. “You idiots.” She started to undo their handcuffs.
“Come on.” She led them out of the room, and to the exit without any further
issue.
“Need a ride?” a voice asked from the wall as they were passing by. It was
Pacey. “My company specializes in that. I’m kind of a big deal.”
“Your computer simulation is breaking down,” Ramses gloated at him.
Pacey chuckled once. “It’s not a computer simulation, and it’s
breaking because I let go of the wheel.”
“So it was you,” Mateo accused, “this whole time.”
“Depends on what you mean by it,” Pacey reasoned. “Some things were
real, some things were scripted.”
“Who am I?” Mateo asked. “Who are we? What did you take from us?”
“I didn’t take who you were,” Pacey started to explain. “You’re in love with
Leona, and Olimpia. Romana is your daughter, and Ramses is your friend, as
are the Waltons...though, they’re not exactly twins; it’s more complicated
than that.”
“Marie is four years older than Angela,” Mateo recalled.
“Heh. Yeah. Time, right?”
“What did you do?” Boyd pressed.
“I held them accountable for their actions,” Pacey said. “And you? You’re
just a dick. I consider bringing you in here to be a public service. A
bonus.”
“Let us out,” Mateo ordered.
“Yeah, I will,” Pacey agreed. “This dome was broken as soon as you went on
your joyride. If I had let the scenario play out, you would have ended up in
jail, and that’s not really what I want. I could have reset the premise, but
it’s clear that Underburg just isn’t working. I’ll be moving you somewhere
else, however, I’m not sure where yet.”
“The dome,” Mateo said out loud. That triggered something in his mind. His
memories weren’t flooding back in, but a few of them were squeezing through
the barrier. Dome. Dome, dome, dome, dome, dome. “Castlebourne. We never
left.”
Pacey was surprised, but not shocked. “Oh. I need to tweak my memory
suppressing machine yet again. Your brains; I can’t figure them out. Your
stronger than you should be. But to clarify, you’re not technically on
Castlebourne, so don’t expect Hrockas or Bran to swoop in and save the day.
Ain’t nobody here but us chickens. And the androids,” he added.
“So, it really isn’t a virtual construct,” Ramses determined. “We were
wrong. This is base reality.”
“It’s a reality,” Pacey corrected. “There’s no such thing as base
reality. It’s all about your perspective. Are you but ones and zeros on a
chip? No. Never were. Never crossed my mind to do it like that. Probably
wouldn’t work very well because of your patterns.”
“So our patterns are intact?” Mateo was remembering more about their real
lives.
Pacey nodded. “You jump forward in time every day. But I mess with your
memories on an as-needed basis. Sometimes you think it’s been a day, and
sometimes a few weeks. It just depends on what I need, and how much I’m
willing to fill in to account for the extra time that never really
happened.”
“Why are you doing this?” Boyd asked, basically the same question as before,
just worded a little differently.
“Half-punishment, half-reward. You’ve all done enough. Buddy, you’ve done
enough bad. I took you out of the timeline in my own way, because while the
rest of you have done some good, you’ve also been meddlesome. Just stay
here, and no harm will come to you. Just accept your new reality, and live
your life.”
Mateo listened to Pacey’s words carefully, all the while also remembering
where they knew him from in the first place. But if this guy knew the first
thing about them, he wouldn’t be asking such a dumb thing of them.
None of them was the type to roll over, and let someone dictate their lives.
“No.”
