Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

“What happened?” she gasped.

Ziad grabbed her hand and led her in the direction of the beach. They arrived at a beachfront hotel with its many layers of security. Ziad led them towards the back of the building and through a hole in a barbed-wire fence. From there, they made their way to a coffee shop in a garden overlooking the sea. There were plastic tables and chairs, and hanging plants that seemed so thirsty they looked like they might just get up and crawl to the sea.

“We’re at the hotel where the media stay. It’s safe here. Too many foreign journalists for them to bomb,” he said matter-of-factly.

Aya felt self-conscious, dressed in her pyjamas and slippers. Ziad ordered a Pepsi for himself and an orange juice for her. When their drinks arrived, he lit a cigarette.

“You smoke now?”

He shrugged, took a drag from the cigarette.

“Aya, the world you’re living in is a simulation.”

She stared at him, speechless.

“Think about it. Only a few decades ago Israel had in its arsenal the latest in digital technology. The primary use for this technology was to shore up and further advance the occupation. How is it logical that Palestine was so easily liberated?”

“Ziad, you’ve lost your mind.”

“Those who keep resisting are seen as insane by those who cannot see the prison walls.”

“Where are we now?”

“This is the real Palestine,” Ziad said, gesturing at their surroundings. “What you’re living in… everything you think you know… it’s all just a simulation. They’ve harnessed our collective memory, creating a digital image of Palestine. And that’s where you live.”

She reminded herself that she was in a dream, but at that precise moment she couldn’t remember when she had fallen asleep.

“Once I realised all of this… once I put the puzzle pieces together, I realised that I needed to get out. So I took a leap of faith.” He paused. “When you kill yourself, you exit the simulation.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You know how grown-ups always sleep,” he said, getting more animated. “For those who weren’t born in the simulation, memories return more easily. That’s why grown-ups sleep a lot… they need to be reset. As for us… we are the first generation to have lived our entire lives in the simulation. We are at the frontier of a new form of colonisation. So it’s up to us to develop new forms of resistance.”

“And Mama?”

Ziad hesitated. He looked like he was holding back tears. “Mama’s not sick, Aya. No matter what anyone says. She is torn: she wants to resist… wants to exit… but she also doesn’t want to leave you and Baba. So she stays there, drifting in and out of consciousness. She knows that this ‘right to digital return’ isn’t the same as the real thing…”

Aya felt the orange juice crawl back up her throat. Ziad noticed the expression on her face.

“What are you thinking?” he asked.

“I’m thinking that you’re telling me the only way I can be free is to die.”

“You have to trust that what I’m telling you is true.”

“And if you’re wrong?”

Ziad was silent for a long time. Finally, he put the cigarette out and looked at her.

“Pay attention to the song of the birds.”

Once she noticed the pattern, it became impossible to ignore.

Kereet-kereet… kereet .

In her head she counted: One. Two. Three. Four.

Kereet-kereet… kereet .

Two chirps followed by a third a few seconds later. Four seconds of silence, then the pattern repeated itself.

That morning, she spent an hour lying in bed listening to the song of the birds. The pattern repeated itself over and over again. A slow feeling of dread spread over her.

You’re a woman now .

Kereet-kereet… kereet .

A simulation. Her brain tried to imagine it, but it was like trying to visualise what happens after the world ends, or else trying to imagine the full force of the sun. The answer felt beyond anything her brain could conceive. Trying to think about her imprisonment in a simulation was like trying to imagine her own death. It was unfathomable, the experience too all-encompassing.

Later that day, as the teaching hologram droned on and on in class, Ziad’s words echoed in Aya’s mind. If what he was saying was true, then all of this was just a simulation.

She pinched herself. There was pain. But was the pain real?

She grabbed her e-pen and pressed the tip of it against the soft flesh of her wrist. She felt the sharp pain as it pricked her skin. She pressed the e-pen deeper, until with a pop it pierced her skin, and a drop of blood emerged from the puncture.

Kereet-kereet… kereet .

Sirens sounded all around her. She looked up. The teaching hologram was shining a beam on her. The entire class turned to look at her. She glanced back at her arm, at the e-pen jabbed into her wrist.

“Urghha—” Noises emerged from her mouth, but she wasn’t sure whether they made any sense. The door burst open and four nurses ran in. Her wrist was burning with pain.

“I don’t even know what to say,” her father said on the drive back home.

“Are we real?” Aya asked him as she sat in the passenger seat, staring out the window and absentmindedly tugging at the bandages on her wrist.

Her father stopped at a traffic light and turned to her. “Look at me. Your name is Aya. The year is 2048. You are fourteen years old. You live in Gaza City. Your favourite colour is purple.” He paused. “You are a real person.”

“Why do the birds have the same chirping sound?”

“What?”

“The song of the birds. It’s a loop.”

Her father was quiet for a long time. Finally, he spoke.

“When I was your age, I was very close to two boys about my age. I lived in Gaza, one of the boys lived in Tunis and the other lived in Beirut. We were all Palestinians, all from Haifa, but we had been scattered around the world like shotgun pellets. Laws and borders made it impossible for us to see one another. We would sometimes wonder to each other: if our grandparents had never been run out from their homes like cockroaches, would the three of us have been neighbours? Would our personalities have been different without this weight inside our souls? What would it have felt like, to have a home and to belong to that home unquestionably?”

“Why are you telling me all of this?”

“Sometimes, home is simply a matter of changing your perspective.”

The traffic light turned from red to green and they were moving again. Aya turned to look out at the park, where young mothers normally pushed their baby carriages for exercise, and teenagers played football on the grass. Now, all she could see was a large dirt field, where a group of limbless young boys hobbled on makeshift crutches. Her breath caught in her throat.

“Aya…” her father began.

She started to speak but then stopped. “Nothing.”

Her father looked at her, holding a seemingly infinite sadness in his eyes.

That evening, Aya walked into her mother’s bedroom. She was asleep on her back under the covers. Aya sat down on the floor beside the bed.

“Mama, can you hear me?” she whispered.

Her mother did not stir. Aya studied her face, the way the soft hairs in her nose gently swayed with each breath. She reached under the covers and grabbed her mother’s hand.

“I miss you,” she whispered.

For a moment, Aya could have sworn that her mother squeezed her hand.

One evening, Ziad came to her in a wheelchair. Both his legs were cut off at the knee, his jeans neatly tucked under his thighs.

“Ziad, what happened?” she asked, panicked. He looked thinner, his fingernails dirty, his jeans stained.