San Amaryllis

The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room. At times, it looked like a sliver of daylight. But often, it was just varying shades of grey. Seeing it in this way only made it seem less real.

San Amaryllis. A beautiful city beside the sea. It’s an ideal place to retire, yet it is filled with attractive young people. Sierra was “born” here. But her parents were no longer around. They were not dead, at least, as far as she was aware, but they were just no longer in San Amaryllis. It was not uncommon for “children” to be abandoned in the city. What was common, however, were for abandoned children to simply vanish once their parents were no longer around. Sierra was an exception. Her parents did not choose to “vanish” her once they decided to leave. Perhaps they had intended to come back for her.

San Amaryllis. A wonderful place to be. Sierra’s parents first came to be in the city when they reached old age in the outside world. Their bodies were failing them, so they had decided to download their consciousness into this virtual world. This virtual world was a mish-mash of the very best of each era that existed in the real world. Of course, every resident got to choose what age they want to live as, as well as how they appeared. That’s how this city came to be filled with beautiful, young people. The place itself, seemed eternally beautiful. What made the city even better in the eyes of many, was the absence of pain and suffering. If one were to program a virtual city, that was of course, a major pre-requisite. As time went on, things did get boring. So the city had to evolve. Each iteration brought new things to be tried and experienced, and sometimes removed things that didn’t work. One new experience offered to resident couples was the ability to have children. Children here weren’t born in the traditional sense. They were really sophisticated AI programs that perfectly mimicked the real thing. Residents would just make a request to the system administrator and *poof*, all of a sudden, they had a kid. They can choose what age they want their children to start at and the kid would continue to age normally from that starting point. Or the parents could choose to not have the child age at all. In a virtual world, the possibilities were endless. In some cases, parents would decide that they no longer wanted a kid, or that raising children weren’t for them, and the system would just delete the programs just as easily as they were created. It sounded cruel, but they were not real people, so the consensus was, there was no harm done.

The latest iteration of San Amaryllis offered a new feature that was its most advanced yet. Residents were allowed to download into the virtual city but until now, they had no way of uploading out of it. In the time that the virtual city existed, technology in the outside world had finally caught up and was advanced enough to rejuvenate a human body back to its ideal form. The technology even advanced to the point where it could synthesize a new human body as long as the DNA for that body still existed in the real world. One might wonder, what the appeal was of going back to the real world after having experienced being in a virtual world that was free of pain and suffering. While some saw the absence of pain and suffering as perfection, others saw the virtual world experience as incomplete without them, and therefore, flawed. Of course, pain and suffering could be programmed into the virtual world easily, but there was very little interest in simulated pain as it didn’t feel real enough and it “defeated the purpose.” The upload feature gained traction as a result. Since the feature started being offered, being in the city just became a temporary thrill for the super-wealthy, until their bodies were repaired in the real world. For the longest time, Sierra held on to the belief that her parents were working on a way to enable her to join them in the outside world. After a long period of waiting, she had finally given up hope of that ever happening.

Sierra wandered the city aimlessly. She still often thought about her parents - where they were, if they were happy, if they still thought about her. She started wondering if there was a way out for her as well. If her parents weren’t going to come back for her, maybe there was a way to reunite with them in the outside world. She met with and talked to as many people as she could. Some knew more than others. Those that have been in the city the longest seem to have the most information. All information seem to point to a man who was simply known as the engineer. It seemed he had a hand in creating the place. She sought him out and found that he lived in a penthouse suite right in the middle of the city. When Sierra arrived at his place, she was surprised with how accomodating he was to her. He ushered her into a large room filled with books on all walls, except for one that had a window in the middle of it. She thought there was something peculiar about this window. It was located on a wall that, from the layout of the room, wasn’t facing outside at all. The outside world was unknown to her, but she could see a glimpse of it through the window in his room. The engineer saw her recognition of what the window showed.

“Yes, that is what you think it is,” he confirmed.

“So is it possible for me..”

Before Sierra could finish, the engineer held out his hand. In it was a red pill.

“Before you take it, I have to warn you that I haven’t had contact with the outside world in a very long time. I’m not entirely sure what you could be uploading into out there, or if there is anything to upload into at all. You are created entirely here, which means you don’t have a physical body in the real world. Most likely, you will end up in a robotic body.”

She suddenly had a vision of ending up in a spider-like robotic body. She quickly shook any doubts from her head and took the red pill.

“Good luck, Sierra,” said the engineer.

When she woke up in the outside world, the first thing she did was to check for spider-like legs attached to her body. She was pleasantly surprised that her arms looked human, but a closer inspection revealed that they were synthetic instead of biological, which wasn’t unexpected. She wondered if her parents would recognize her, in this body. Then she wondered if she would be able to find her parents at all. She seemed to have woken up in an empty laboratory. She proceeded to unplug the cables connecting her to the machines in the lab. She walked out the door of the lab and into a narrow corridor. After about an hour of navigating through endless doors and corridors, she finally reached the door leading outside of the building. Once her robotic eyes adjusted to the bright sunlight, she saw nothing but endless desert. The world, it would seem, had ended, and no one in San Amaryllis knew about it.