Chapter Seventeen #3
Everything was made and handled for us. And if it so happened that someone’s subconscious mind disturbed the Program too much by recalling reality too often or too obsessively, then the individual was either returned to the Center for recalibration, a concept often used to explain someone’s temporary removal from the simulation, or they were removed from the Program altogether so as not to disturb the system as a whole.
The Center with its mysterious assessments, was essentially the algorithm through which they were able to monitor our experiences and prevent such occurrences, for one’s mental instability had the potential to destroy the simulation for everyone.
“If life was in your hand, would you unclench your fist?” they would ask us, for in the world of Nostalgia there were no such things as depression and suicide.
We were not provided with the language to express such extreme personal despair.
To give us a true human experience, they did allow us to retain our sense of curiosity and critical thinking and even exposed us to small doses of pain and unease so that then the moments of happiness would feel more precious, similar to real life.
But there were still limits to the things you were allowed to recall and feel.
Nostalgia was a universe with a single law: the moment you recognized the simulation, you could no longer be a part of it.
There were other Programs by other creators, such as the Eudaemonia Program, where the individuals were submerged into a constant state of happiness to the point where they did not recognize themselves as happy but simply existing within an abstract concept of happiness.
But that wasn’t what I wanted. What I wanted was to be given the opportunity to become someone better.
I just didn’t think I could do it here anymore, in the
real
world.
And I was conflicted, of course I was. For months I asked myself, What is so wrong with you, Anya?
Can’t you see how sick this is? But then this little deformed creature inside my head would perk up and ask me instead: Am I really to blame?
Is the question of what is wrong with me personally more important than what is wrong with the world collectively?
Why has reality become a place we need to escape anyway?
In retrospect, having survived the Program, I would tell you that it was something far more sinister than a simulated reality marketed as an advanced wellness retreat.
Because that place lost in time where all was good and holy did not exist at all.
Had never existed. Nostalgia was a mere byproduct of the cycle of remembering, misremembering, and forgetting.
Bad things happened back then, too. People just didn’t know so much about them.
The core of their happiness was their understimulated ignorance.
The past was not a world unlinked to the present.
Memories were not still pictures that you could put next to each other and tell a certain story, but living, breathing things that constantly changed the shape of the world.
Knowledge accessible to everyone with an internet connection was supposed to be the star-bright guide to a better future.
But the guide had become opaque by the sheer amount of information there was out there, the importance, meaningfulness, and truthfulness of it disintegrating one monetized screen hour at a time.
The line between what was real and what was not did not exist anymore.
But Nostalgia, this grand return to the innocence of a different time, was a lie too.
It was modeled after that time, surely, but its likeness was so superficial, so far from the world it was trying to recreate, that it couldn’t even be called a simulation anymore but a simulacrum, a copy of something that was not itself an original.
And I could see now, too, how terrible it was to be in there, to exist under this complete eradication of human culture, identity, and history. Because Hive and the creators made it seem as though the only way the human race could exist in peace was as a homogenized version of itself.
But, of course, a year ago, I didn’t know all of this. So I tied up my affairs and signed up for a year of simulated experience. What went wrong after that… I didn’t know.
I was supposed to be given a new past and new memories and be immediately integrated into the world of Nostalgia, just like everyone else.
I was not supposed to lose these fake memories and certainly not develop a crippling fear for the Center, the place where we were evaluated and recalibrated to fit the simulation.
And I was not supposed to meet Kai. Or at least, I didn’t think I was.
Now, enclosed in this white, sterile room, I didn’t even feel like a human being anymore. I was this tiny, dissected thing half existing here, half there, with no way to connect the two halves of myself in any possible reality.
I could only lie here, helpless, infantile almost, moving my fingers over the cool, sleek screen of my phone, its white-blue luminescence bleeding through my fingers while I waited for the creator to come in and explain to me what was so wrong with my brain.
And then what? Another calibration, another simulation, another lie to be lived?
God, I thought, after a year of not knowing what God is.
We have done it. We were using technology to escape technology.
There was nothing beyond that, nowhere else to hide, to restore, to heal.
The core of human existence could now only be sustained within a wireless network of transmitting data.
Those three lines in the corner of a screen, saying that we are all connected.