The heart shaped locket

She sat with him as hope fled taking his life with it. Opening his hand she gently scooped up the little heart shaped locket. It wasn’t much, a cheap piece of jewellery, the kind you buy for a kid at the dollar store.

Slipping the keepsake into her pocket she cursed herself for being sentimental. Hope breaks the weak, deny reality and it will kill you, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly, that is the only promise this world keeps.

If it is a world.

If it is a place.

In the beginning the arrivals clumped together trying to understand what had happened and all the crazy came out to play; perhaps there had been a rapture, maybe an alien invasion, the Russians, the Muslims, the Jews, perhaps their own government was experimenting on them.

No one knew.

They had woken up one morning in a town, in the foothills of a mountain range somewhere. The air was clean, the water tasted good and every day was sunny and warm. Hell it turned out was a perfect spring day.

Without clocks or calendars it was hard to be sure how long they’d been there, but it had been long enough for suicides and hunger strikes, long enough for more than one of them to simply give up and slip away. If you lived the day in front of you then all good, but some couldn’t seem to do it that way, they just kept looking way out ahead of themselves living for a snow fall or autumn that never came, others looked behind and held onto wafers of memory in hopes of a reunion.

She left his body, it would be removed in the night, they always were. You never saw they or them or whatever it is that moved about the town removing waste and replenishing food supplies, but in the morning the dead were gone and there was fresh milk in the fridge.

And she wondered if this is what it is like for pigs in a piggery.

The pigs did try to escape, in the beginning groups of them headed off in different directions and when night fell they set up camp only to wake the next morning back in town. But groups kept trying, staying awake for days to eventually succumb to sleep and insanity. No matter how far they walked the days were relentlessly perfect and the world was empty.

Logic suggested that they were being kept as livestock, they were not required to labour or work in anyway, not even for their food. The town would be more accurately described as a dormitory it lacked all the traditional amenities of a real town. There were no cars or trucks, internet or tv, there were no restaurants, no police, no malls and no schools. There were also no children or teenagers and no elderly.

‘Perhaps’, she mused, ‘we are more like hydroponic plants being kept in optimal conditions for fastest growth and abundant yield.’ Irritated by letting thoughts like these get air time she picked up her pace until she found the satisfying rhythm of a steady jog and the locket jingled away in time.

Listening to the locket she wondered how it had managed to be here, she had nothing with her that was from the before, just wispy memories of her life, her job and that she used to do things, what these things were, she couldn’t have told you. Her hands were soft so she imagined that she’d worked indoors, but her skin was tan and her body was fit so she mustn’t have been a lazy person.

Lost in thought she began to pick up the pace and the ground lurched beneath her feet, then seemed to find itself again. For a moment she doubted, then without thinking hurled herself into a sprint and the ground began to heave and weave like a snake, astonished she pulled up abruptly, the ground found itself again and became solid.

In time to the rushing beat of her heart she walked home quietly chanting ‘It’s not real, it’s not real’.

Sitting at the tiny table, sweaty hands leaving prints on the faux ash surface, she traced the grain with a thumbnail as questions careened around like the carts on a roller coaster.

‘If this is a sim, which it certainly seems to be, then whose sim is it? And where is it?’

‘If this is a sim, am I a sim? Am I physically in the environment or is it just my consciousness?’

On and on it went, til a headache kicked in so she drank some water and lay down. The sun was setting and not long after the power will be turned off and there was nothing to do but sleep.

The following morning she went out after breakfast to see who was about. It was hard to know how many people were here to begin with, no one thought to take a head count, but as time went by more and more chose to stay in their dwellings. Some remained social checking up on others, taking walks through the town and gathering in the small park to talk.

A half dozen or so of the early risers were already there, she sat down with them at the bench and reached into her pocket, pulled out the locket and lay it down. Nothing else needed to be said. She told them about the unruly road and her belief that it proved their theory that they were in fact in some kind of simulation.

‘I want to see if we can break out of it.’

‘We can’t do that without know what’s on the other side.’

‘Well we’re not going to find out from the inside are we?’

‘Sometimes jars are for keeping things in, sometimes jars are for keeping things out.’

‘Where’d you get that from? A fortune cookie?’

‘Look we don’t know what the purpose of all this is, ok?’

‘No, but let me tell you what I do know, this wasn’t voluntary, I didn’t choose to be here, did you? Do you remember buying into this? ‘Cause I sure as hell don’t.’

Sitting at the now silent table she glared at the ones who disagreed with her and ignored those who’d had nothing to say. To calm herself she picked up the locket and rubbing it between her thumb and forefinger came to the realisation that she felt hope.

++++++++++++

His armpits reeked with anxiety, it was all going to hell in a hand basket, an entire harvest of graduates was lost to sloppy programming and an ageing storage facility. The fail safes had, well, failed and forty percent of the population was deceased. Billions of dollars worth of human infrastructure gone in a matter of weeks.

Whichever way he ran the numbers the vessel was so close to the point of no return that even if they brought it back to the quarantine station only a fraction of the cargo would be viable. And the cost of salvage far exceeded the cost of claiming against the corporation’s insurance policy.

And what to do with the remnants anyway? Who would be responsible for maybe as many as 200,000 adult humans stripped of their identity, skills and memory?

Sighing at the thought of the mess of questions to be answered later and the probable loss of a sizeable bonus, he keyed in the codes and moved onto the next problem of the day.