A disc flying through atmosphere, if you throw it just right, will rotate endlessly on a cushion of air, a breath of Zephyr, and if only the world keeps falling away it will go on and on. But the throw must be perfect. No wobble, no sputter, no dive, just artful spin. Not a discus released by Apollo’s lover Hyacinth with his long, beautiful arms, but something more modern: a frisbee.

Green grass. A bright day with sun like perfume, or clean laundry. Radiant heat dulling the late spring moisture. Heliotrope. Sounds like a Greek Hero, but it’s a color. The company color used according to the strict dictates of the brand bible to accent everything from the reception staircase to launch ad motion graphics to employee swag - in this case, the frisbee.

“Of course what if. Still it’s a lot of money.”

“But isn’t it the reason? The reason for the lot of money? What else if not to buy eternity?”

No one ever thought that it would actually work. But in those days you had so much money from the endless cycle of technology bubbles and insider gambits that paying the equivalent of someone else’s lifetime of savings on a lark, a one-in-a-million gamble, seemed like a reasonable investment.

From a philosophical perspective, the odds looked better. What they were offering you was infinite time, and given infinite time, sooner or later everything would happen. You were young and rich. You would die. You would live again.

“The Egyptians saved up so they would have enough means for the other side.”

“The Ancient Egyptians.”

“Right. What did I say?”

That day you decided, or started the process that would eventually arrive at the decision, as you leaned against the chrome counter with the magazine rolled in your right hand, the office air conditioning running a little too frosty, left hand on the cold surface of the counter, which felt antiseptic, more operating room than communal kitchen, realizing that your greatest strength had always been believing in science fiction.

we will rewind your aging process. Once the medical technology is discovered. If the medical technology is ever discovered. Given the nature of infinity, this will happen.

You were the kind of person who drove faster over the speed bumps in the HQ parking lot in order to feel them less. You wore cutoffs and bare feet to upper management meetings. The pavement felt a certain way walking to the car. Like it existed.

You would think that the journey from frozen sleep to waking life after all that time (just how much time you do not know) would be agonizing, but they sheltered you from it, you don’t even remember it. It makes you wonder if you have woken up at all. Perhaps this tastefully decorated hotel room is a construction of your mind moments before your heart stops, a simulacrum floating somewhere in the undiscovered sea of the past.

Driving along the Pacific Ocean, winding s-curves from luxury car commercials. The water and sky blur together at the horizon into a haze of blue-gray infinity. A convenient idea, the horizon. Limitations of vision make the world somehow seem more real. A trick of obfuscation. Then, against one-in-million odds, you see a whale breach out in the crystalline blue. Unforgettable. Almost too perfect.

You stare at the ceiling from the vantage point of your bed. Time passes, but you do not feel bored. There are no clocks here. You try to find something to think about but you don’t think about anything. You have no apprehensions or expectations. What does feeling feel like? All in good time the doctor keeps telling you, all in good time.

Your sense of who you are or, more precisely, who you were, is vague at best. Like a rendering of an artefact reconstructed from just a couple fragments. You can interpolate. But there is no substantive detail, just glitches and flashes of information and compiled guesses. Although isn’t that life, anyway? The facts just are, but the guesses are where fortune resides.

Looking at images like a toddler learning words, in the hopes, you presume, that it will help rebuild your memory. Tree. Dog. Car. Rainbow. Tortoise. City. Whale. That one is interesting. A whale, you think, seems like an invention designed to optimize the ether it inhabits. Like evolution producing a spaceship designed to journey through the cosmos. The perfect traveler in its environment. A human, by comparison, looks like mistake-ism, or an intentional detuning of a product. Run the defective thing through the paces, see what results.

You wonder why the most trivial details are the ones that you can recall effortlessly. You can silently sing entire jingles for brightly colored breakfast cereals and remember TV advertisements for foods that cook instantly so Mom doesn’t have to slave in the kitchen. These things must be burned in from childhood, too indelible to be lost in the fog of time. The dead world on the other side of the River Styx is populated wholly by the inventions of the marketing department and maybe a cartoon character or two.

But here nothing has any labels or branding. You do not know if this is for your benefit or if this is just how things are in the future. Maybe brands aren’t something that exist anymore. Could it be that there are no more breakfast cereal jingles? That the world is post-jingle? You remember when a song to sell a product actually stated its attributes.

The doctor laughs when you ask her if you can leave the room. Of course, she says, you are not a prisoner. You are not even really a patient. You are a client. Go ahead, she tells you. So, not out of curiosity or any sensation really but the fact that it is there, you go out the door of your room and into the hall. It is nothing surprising or exciting, just a long carpeted hallway leading to double doors. You walk down the hall towards the doors. You are surprised at how few medical staff are present. No one, really. You reach the doors. You pause.

You go back to your room.

She won’t say what year it is. She is afraid that it will come as too much of a shock. Or this is what you have surmised. She hasn't really offered an explanation. The doctor cautions you to take things slowly. It’s like being born, she says. The world is too much for your mind.

You do not know who the president is. Or if there even is a president. Or a country. Or any of the countries that you know from the past. She does not tell you these things. You do not know anything. The food here is normal hotel food. Good but not too good. Now that you think about it, it doesn’t really taste like anything. You ask the doctor if you can speak to her superior. Of course, she replies and leaves the room to fetch someone. But he comes in almost instantly - far too quickly unless he was standing outside the door. For a moment you have the impossible notion that they are the same person. “Where is this?”

“You’re asking the wrong question. What you want to ask is ‘when is this?’”

“I asked that. She won’t tell me.”

“It’s not that simple. We don’t have any framework to place the present on a timeline compared to the time when you lived. It’s not a question we even have the ability to address.” “That makes no sense.”

“‘How is this?’ might be closest to the mark.”

“How is this, then?”

He smiles hollowly. Pats your leg. Leaves the room.

Ocean waves are described with math and physics. The thing is invisible, you can only see it’s effect. Fish don’t see it. Aquatic mammals don’t see it. Whales, for example, don’t see it. They feel it. To be a whale is one thing, but to be a wave, an invisible thing, moving through another thing, changing it. That’s something.

You are sitting on the couch, staring at a painting on the wall. Not even at the painting, just at the side of the room with the painting. There was someone else. This much you remember. When you next see the doctor (is she even a doctor?) you ask her about this. Did you sign up alone or with someone? You need to remember on your own, she says. Now you are sure that there was someone else. You wonder why they are hiding this from you. Perhaps you were taken in, conned. Maybe it is not the future at all. Maybe this was all a ruse to take your fortune, and it is only a few weeks later and you are being held in a warehouse in Turkey or Ukraine. No, that’s ridiculous, you think.

If you are still asleep, there would be ways to discover that you’re still asleep. Logical inconsistencies. You wonder if the painting on the wall is the same painting that has always been on the wall. There is a dark blue swathe of color on the top and then vertical acqua borders framing the rest of the image. A green semicircle that looks a bit like a hill with bright blue and pink rectangles standing on the hill-thing. You wonder what the painting is supposed to be. But it’s not supposed to be anything. Just abstract.

“Is there someone here with me? A man? Could be a woman, I don’t know which...a partner? Did I sign up with someone else?”

“You are not going to like this answer, but it doesn’t really matter. Everything and everyone here, you and me included, are here as a result of recovered pieces of information. We can recover more. You can help.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Do you remember a thought experiment called Schrodinger's Cat?”

You do. Why do you remember only the most useless scraps of knowledge?

“The answer to if someone is here with you is a little like Schrodinger’s Cat. We’re all just fragments of another time and place - another world. We’re like a dream that world had a long time ago and the dream exists but the dreamer is long gone. The more you can remember, the more we can reconstruct, and the better chance we have of bringing back that person you may or may not have signed up with. Does that make sense?”

“You want me to try and remember?”

“If you want to.”

You were famous in your time, in certain circles at least. Silicon Valley risk-taker. People perceived you as having vision. You revelled in their admiration then, but now it means nothing. You attended parties in beautiful Northern California Mid-Century homes on bluffs over the ocean. Sea spray and twilight. A property where a great author once lived. Where a TV show filmed its finale. A highway tunnel named after a movie star makes you sad. Was there someone with you driving through the tunnel on the way to the party? You can remember it both ways. With or without a someone. A hand takes yours in a vintage convertible. And that’s how you decide that you were not alone, that you shared the cold sleep of life delayed. The idea seems distant, something just out of reach. You tell the doctor’s supervisor one day when he stops by to check on you. Good, good, he says, uselessly.

You walk down the carpeted hallway to the double doors but you are afraid to go through them. What if what is on the other side has changed? You hear a man’s voice. At first unintelligible. Is it your imagination? Or is it your someone?

Here’s the thing about imagination: It allows you to hear what you want to hear. To see what you want to see. It’s the way you know that you are the player in the game that is your life and not just background in someone else’s. It lets you make the world in your image. But there’s danger in that too. If you want to hear a man’s voice, maybe that is enough to hear a man’s voice. You ask the doctor if anyone else is staying there or if you are the only one. Of course, she responds, a little condescendingly, with a laugh.

Why did you assume that she is a doctor? She’s wearing a white coat, but she never stated specifically that she was a doctor. What would shock you? she asks. Nothing would shock you.

There are four options. One: you are still frozen, and dreaming. Two: you have not even been frozen yet, this is just the process that your mind is going through as you are put into sleep (maybe you can still stop it). Three: this is the moment of your death, without time for context, stretched endlessly but unchanging. Four: you are alive and awake and this is the real world.

What is a soul?

The office was paneled in dark wood. Mahogany. The young woman with the pleasant face in the nondescript clothing gave you what she called an intake exam. But it wasn’t a medical exam. Or even a psychological exam, as far as you could tell. It consisted of oblique questions designed to trip you up, you surmised afterwards, or to establish some sort of pattern. Word associations like bluebird, prison, darkening, trepidation. Unanswerable questions requiring an answer: What is resolved? Nothing worth pursuing. Previously unattainable attained? Color spectrum. The third drawer? Drugs and relics. Contour of the ice? Endless.

There are no windows in the hotel room, or the hallway. You go through the double doors and discover another hallway that appears almost indistinguishably the same. Except for a set of doors with rectangular windows in them on the left side of the corridor. For some reason you are afraid to look through them. But you look. They reveal an indoor swimming pool. You ask the doctor if you can go swimming and she says, why not? Perhaps you are underground.

Now you are certain the painting changed. The pink rectangles are moving when you are not looking. The swath of blue is expanding and contracting, subtly but for certain. You try not to think about it and find a swimsuit and plush white robe in the otherwise empty closet. You put them on and walk barefoot down the hallway, like you would in a hotel. There is no one else at the pool so you leave the robe on a lounge chair and swim. You remember how, but for whatever reason, you never expected not to.

You soon lose count of how many laps you have done. The monotony is comforting. Then you feel eyes on you. You look up expecting the doctor or perhaps her supervisor. But, instead, you find a nondescript, middle aged man in a pair of floral swim trunks and flip flops. He appears to have emerged from a sauna door that you previously failed to notice. So you did hear a voice.

“Hello,” you say, noncommittally.

“I wish I had something to talk about with you, but I just don’t care,” he interjects.

“Yeah, me too,” you respond.

“You figure it out yet?” he asks.

“They won’t tell me a thing.”

“Maybe it’s better you don’t know.”

“This is...nothing,” you say. “Worse would at least be something.”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Try me. Where are we?”

“We’re nowhere,” he says, almost sadly. “It’s nowhere, but it stretches forever.”

“Great. A riddle—”

“You need the journey. Without the whole shebang it’ll just be the meaninglessness of a joke with no punchline. Go talk to the Rat.”

“The Rat?”

“You’ll find him. Don’t worry. You just need to look around a little.” He starts to walk away.

“Hey,” you call out. “Did we sign up for this thing...together?”

“Me? With you? When I look at you, I don’t feel a damn thing.” He shakes his head, laughing to himself, as he leaves.

Time passes. You cannot discern the difference between minutes and hours and days. When you go through the doors past the swimming pool at the end of the second hallway, you enter the lobby of a large, boring hotel. Why did you expect anything different when all evidence points to you being in nothing more than a hotel? A hotel at the far reaches of time. There is nothing to suggest that anyone else is staying here apart from the weirdo you met at the pool, and you’ve been starting to wonder if he is still here, if he was ever here.

You follow a sign pointing down a flight of stairs that reads TRANSPORTATION. The lower level of the hotel is an extremely clean train platform. You wait, mostly out of curiosity, nearly certain nothing will ever arrive at this Hollywood backlot of a station. When an airport-style tram shows up, it’s too late for trepidation. The doors woosh open and stepping on is inevitable.

You had hoped to see outside from the windows, but the tram runs underground or, at very least, in a tunnel. You wait. The smooth movement of the mag tram feels real. It’s quiet, just a little hum. And there are no other stops until the final stop, as if the tram was for you and you alone. The doors open and you get out. This is what people do. We respond to stimuli like we’re programmed.

You walk through a spacious, open vestibule with a massive bank of skylights that look directly up at blue sky. Your heart races for the first time since you were awakened. The thought of an outside world is overwhelming. You hurry to a slowly revolving airport door. You step in and it turns until you are outside.

What is this? you think. It’s not like emerging from an airport, with a rush of air that delineates the interior from the fresh or stale or ozoned or humid external world. In this case, the air is exactly the same. That same mall air. Like everything is interior.

An imitation kingdom looms in the distance. You realize, you are in—of all places - an amusement park. There appear to be rides and roller coasters and fabricated landscapes. But no people. You are in an empty amusement park with a sky that could be comped in vfx for all you know.

You follow the promenade towards the castle. What else would you do? Day turns to night and there are stars above. You look for familiar constellations. The Big Dipper is always the easiest. But there are too many stars for any familiar drawing by numbers. How did it become night? You don’t know if time is moving too fast or if you are moving too slow. In the sky above the castle you think you see a whale swim by. Like the one that breached out in the ocean back in another lifetime.

As you reach the castle, you realize that the scale is all off—it’s too small. There’s a concession stand and, to your awe and deep unease, the only other individual you’ve encountered here stands under an oversized umbrella wearing one of those plush cartoon costumes with the giant heads. Not quite the character you’d expect—a cheap knock-off of the famous one. Wearing a t-shirt that says “Pleasant Rat.” You remember encountering this kind of thing on a trip to China. Bad copies of intellectual property with accidentally poetic translations. You wonder if a Chinese enterprise bought the longevity company, but that idea stems from a logic that no longer seems applicable. You give the Rat a sheepish wave as you approach to signal that you come in peace. WTF.

“You think I’m a thing that you understand,” the Rat says. “But I’m something else. A way of understanding.”

“You gotta be kidding me,” you sigh. “Then tell me. Why are you here?”

“Total accident. An errant piece of instructions that came with the environment.”

This rat is kind of messing you up. “Can you take off the head?” you ask.

“I don’t know if that is a good idea.”

“Just do it,” you huff, exhaustedly. And yeah. That was a bad idea. There is nothing there. The suit is empty. You almost throw up and the Rat puts its head back on.

“You see I’m just a glitch. Part of the infrastructure of the Happy Kingdom simulation.”

The pieces start to fall into place for you. The horror of it all becomes clear. “You’re telling me the hotel is all that’s real? They let me think I’m leaving on a train, but I’m just entering a simulation?”

“Not exactly,” the Rat says.

You’ll follow up that unsettling thread in a moment. But first, the more pressing question. “When is this?”

“There’s no when, it just is. This is running, always.”

“Does the Earth...still exist?” you ask, afraid of what the answer might be.

Those dead, plush Rat eyes gaze at you with cartoon glee. Then he says, “No code for it. We don’t have the programming for Earth. What you’ve seen is all that is left. Unless you make it.”

Your mind is moving at the speed of light. Trying to parse implausibilities from impossibilities. “Okay, okay, okay,” you say, doing your best to hold it together, stay logical and empirical. “When did the simulation start? When I did the cryo thing?”

No response. Cartoon glare.

“Wait. What are you not saying?” you ask the Rat. “My life before that I was in a simulation?”

The Rat shakes its head.

“I’m just an uploaded consciousness…?”

“You are really not getting this,” the Rat says flatly. “Uploaded from what? Everything is just code. It’s all just programs.” Gesturing around the two of you now: “All this. You. Me. Fragments of ageless programs, still running.”

For once, the trivial memories prove useful, and you understand what you are. You remember what you used to call it, anyhow. You are Cargo Cult Code. Any big program or operating system is really a half-assed tapestry of code made by many programmers. Many of whom have moved on. And the more time passes the more a program accumulates code that works without being able to articulate why it works. Especially when it is machine made, and if the Rat is right, we are saying that it’s all machine made.

“Am I part of the infrastructure too?” you ask the Rat.

“You probably have some buggy piece of code that’s letting you run some aspect of the engine,” the Rat responds. “You might be generating all of this for all I know. Or you might just be a little piece of what is left.”

A mistake. A lucky or, perhaps unlucky, mistake. Still, you wonder what or who you might find when you return to the hotel. If you made the whale, maybe you could create the time and space you live in, instead of spending eternity in an empty hotel. And if you could make that, what’s to say you couldn’t make everybody else in it? You might be able to create someone just by wanting them to be there. Just writing their code. It feels hollow though, doesn’t it? The thought of creating a companion. It doesn’t seem real enough.

“What about the doctor and her supervisor?” you ask.

“Sysop infrastructure. No autonomy or agency.”

“And the other guy?”

“Junk code in some sort of recursive loop. Knows enough to know what it is but has no way to self-modify.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah, you think you got it bad.”

You pause. Decide to throw it out there. “Seems like I can make things from memory, though.”

“But they aren’t things. They are just you. They might not look like you, but they are just pieces of you doing what you tell them to.”

You get it now. What you are. Run the program through a little test sequence, see what it does. You look up at the sky. Make it day again. So easy it is meaningless. What else is there to say? you wonder. Then, finally—

“What’s a soul?” you ask the Rat.

The Rat’s vacant, cheerful expression turns to you, eternally fixed in a look of bemused surprise. “A soul is two programs modifying each other. Changing each other in subtle ways.”

Thwack! You pluck the spinning frisbee from the air with your right hand. The heliotrope frisbee. You insisted on the color because you liked the name. It has the weight of myth with a touch of the cosmic.

You got up early this morning and went for a drive. Saw a whale out in the Pacific breach and then crash back down with a torrent of splashing salt water so perfectly rendered you could imagine the sound of each droplet hitting the surface of the undulating wave.

“How was China?”

You throw the frisbee back. “Even bigger on the inside than on the outside,” you say. “Internally expanding. Developers buy land 200 kilometers outside of Shanghai and build towering apartment buildings and business complexes that are just waiting there empty for the city to arrive. For that space between to become Shanghai. It’ll take a decade maybe.”

You catch the frisbee, then say, “I stayed in a posh box hotel in the middle of nowhere. A meticulously detailed facsimile of American mediocrity. There was no one there. We visited an amusement park that was brilliant in its utter wrongness.”

“Sounds like torture.”

“No. Sounds like the future,” you say.

“Here we come. Our Chinese partners?”

“They’re already there, we gotta catch up,” you say. Then, “I had an idea. We build a self-modifying A.I. with a single prime-directive - figuring out what it wants to be. We are going to make two of them to start.”

“And then what?”

“And then we let them change each other.”