[Published as the closing story in ‘Empty Sky: UTS Writers’ Anthology 2020]
The sea was the first thing to go.
Right on time, while everyone’s alarms beeped and chimed, it simply disappeared, turned off, filled in with sky. The shallow waters of the beach formed the new, short horizon, broken only by the green pillar-like mountains that made Rio de Janeiro so beautiful. Beyond, we saw what we had all come to see: the end of the world.
“Oh my God!” shouted a Texan. “Jesus Christ! My Lord Jesus Christ!”
I made no exclamations and said no prayers. I only hoped the world would take me with it when it finally folded away. In many ways, this was asking for a miracle. We had it on good authority that we could not die here, only depart.
Most of the remaining water drained away, as if the world were flat after all and the oceans had simply fallen off the edge. Then the furthest green pillars sank into the jagged crust of the sea floor, which itself also collapsed, the sky filling in the void to stretch below us. For a moment, I thought this might end faster than anyone expected, but the deletion took a hiatus once it reached the line of wet sand in front of us.
We no longer stood on Ipanema Beach, but on a sandy cliff facing a wall of sky. Strangely, the sounds of the beach remained, absent birds calling from oblivion. A woman with beautiful tanned skin sat down near the edge of the world; she closed her eyes, as if trying to memorise the sounds before they too disappeared.
“This was worth staying for,” said the Korean beside me.
Behind him, the city’s skyscrapers began to shake. Rivets popped out. Pieces of steel framework came away to hover in mid-air. Slabs slid up over their columns. One by one, the towers unravelled into the exploded isometric drawings through which their architects had once imagined them.
The disassembled components seemed to burn away in the sunlight, their intricacies deleted, remaining only in their creators’ minds.
If their creators hadn’t deleted them from their memories as well.
#
Something fell into my eye. Blinking didn’t help.
I could tell from the groans and complaints around me I wasn’t the only one to see words scrolling in front of their vision.
As you have previously been notified, this world is not Base Reality. In Base Reality, the year is 3284. This is a historical simulation. Due to a routine reallocation of resources in Base Reality, this simulation is being decommissioned. You have stayed past the date of eviction. Please log-out immediately.
“It’ll go away in a moment,” shouted the Korean.
“I’m sick of it,” someone else added.
I felt a sudden breeze, air filling the void beside me as a person logged-out.
“Don’t fight it.” The tanned woman by the edge spoke with a Brazilian accent. “Accept who you are. Accept what’s happening here.”
She sounded so peaceful. Zen. I was about to ask what she used to do, when the forced recall started.
I fell, my knees hitting the sand. It wasn’t like I learned anything new. These memories had become accessible after the first announcement, the one that broke the illusion, ruining society as people departed by the billions. It was just that the recall brought certain unwanted facts to the front of my mind. Quickly too. So many details, so many separate lives in different sims.
I’d once been an octopus scientist developing habitats for my eight-legged brethren to live on the surface of the jungle planet Xulon.
I’d once been a Viking Jarl, arguing with my fellows about which stretch of coast to plunder, convincing myself I wanted blood and wasn’t terrified by the sight of spilled entrails or the smell of men dead and dying.
I’d once been an anarchist space-pirate, blasting lasers between hyperspace lanes and catching freighters unawares, until Her Majesty caught on, and my lasers bounced off the HMS Merciless.
I’d once spent two centuries in a nebulous paradise, floating without a body, existing as pure thought and sensation; a high with no limit, simply waves of flavours, emotions and being. This was my happiest memory, but one without purpose or meaning.
I’d once been a draftsman working on the Tirus Lunar Colony, which explained my affinity for drawing. Apparently that’d been real: in Base Reality, not simulated, not a dream. The steel of the colony still sat within one of the moon’s dusty craters, maybe inhabited by people, maybe only by machines.
Right now I struggled to tell the difference between reality and dream, flesh and machine, alive and animate dead. Everything I’d seen had seemed real to me at the time. Yet all these memories were nothing but fantasies to me now.
I’d deleted everything before that, and I’ll never remember why.
No parents or family.
No upbringing.
A digital orphan in an incomprehensible maelstrom of memory.
No wonder I clung to the dregs of my life here, to these golden sands, to the beautiful strangers around me and to the mess of buildings still being disassembled by invisible hands. I wanted those hands to pull me apart as well. Despite all the evidence, for me this was the only world that could ever be real.
#
“Where will you go next?” the Korean asked, for the fifteenth time.
The process had slowed down. We’d managed to receive a few images from other cities. In London, where it was night, the stars had gone out one by one, and the moon had lost its craters. We got an image from a satellite, showing the globe with crude gaps in it, Antarctica, Australia and New Zealand already an ugly abyss down to the molten core. That was a few hours ago. The satellite had been deleted.
“I’m heading for paradise,” said the Texan. “Heaven, baby. Hallelujah!”
“Which one?”
Looking inland, I saw the favelas disappearing the same way they’d been built, haphazardly, one sheet of corrugated iron at a time. Humble shacks outlasted the finest office buildings. The roads and footpaths of the city turned into a default lawn of trimmed grass. Meanwhile, Cristo Redentor stood tall, arms outstretched, as if preparing to fly off and leave the city behind.
“This is taking too long!”
The Texan disappeared before my eyes, two footprints remaining in the sand where he’d stood.
“Yeah. It’s depressing.” A circle of men and women nodded in agreement and also vanished.
Soon the only person near me was the tanned Brazilian sitting on edge of the world. She looked like she was also in her thirties, but in terms of Total Experienced Time she could have been centuries older than me.
“Lil,” she introduced herself.
#
Lil was a painter and a drummer, fascinated with tribal music and African gods.
“I want to take as much of it with me as I can, as much of the beauty.” She swept her hands across the cloudless sky and the half-expunged city. “Even this.” She met my gaze. “Even you.”
It’s a pity you only ever meet the right person at the wrong time.
#
We walked along the beach together, finding a shallow inlet of water that hadn’t completely drained off the edge of the world. Each successive wave reached less far up the shore, the tide retreating for the last time.
“You haven’t asked the question,” she said.
I groaned. “Where will you go next?”
“There’s an artists’ colony in Base. They dip in and out of all the worlds, making multi-reality collaborations, hunting meaning.”
It sounded like hell.
“You can come, if you like.”
Her eyes met mine, and all of a sudden the idea didn’t sound so bad at all. I glanced back at Cristo standing on the hill. Was I being saved?
“I’ll decide in the last second of the world. Until then, I still feel like I’m going to wake up and go to work thinking this was all a very odd dream.”
She laughed at me, and I laughed at myself.
#
The sky lost its hues, the horizon the same uniform blue as the zenith, as if drawn by a child with only one crayon. In the distance, hills sank into the ground, levelled into a chequered expanse of clay and grass.
“How’d you get to Rio?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I figured if I died flying I’d wake up in Base. So I stole a jet from the airport. It took me ages to refuel the damned thing by myself. Taking off was easy, you simply go full-throttle, but I swear I stuffed up the landing. Whichever AI is in charge of this place must have been nice to me, picked up the wings at the last moment, got me straight; a glitch in my favour.”
She made a beautiful, pensive frown. “Maybe it’ll miss the place too.”
Or maybe, I thought, it led me to you.
In which case, should I succumb to this favour from our Masters, or should I rebel to the end?
#
We were the only ones left on the beach when things got intense. The sky turned to black and white static, literally the colour of an old television tuned to a dead channel. We heard a rumble and the last pieces of the city became a confused mix of pixelated textures. I couldn’t see if Cristo had stuck around for the final act.
The ground lost its spatial continuity, lines and dimensions skewing into the impossible and the unfathomable. It was painful and unpleasant, watching my reality die. I felt a wave of nausea and leaned onto Lil beside me.
“Do you mind if–”
She grabbed me and pulled me close. The air became hard to breathe. Then sound cut off, the whole world on mute. I closed my eyes and found her face.
We kissed as the world lost light and time.