The Simulation Grace Davies

This is it: the world ending. It started slowly, always slowly, people, animals, buildings going missing. Then streets, towns, cities, dissolving into a darkness that no one could see. But I see it now. I believe I am the last one left, floating, fighting, on the last slab of Earth that hasn’t been taken by the simulation.

It was all a simulation, by the way: Earth. Deja vu and optical illusions make more sense, but the beauty of it all is now heartbreaking. I fled civilisation a while ago, but I cannot recall the time. Days can pass like a shooting star as the Sun streaks across the sky, burning the heavens only for a few seconds. Sometimes the hovering, lingering, burning ball of gas makes me pray that the darkness would come sooner.

I’m in the mountains now; streams, swathes of grass, snowy caps and craggy alcoves stretching out around me like points on a compass. The huge, black peaks of the mountains carve the skyline and are occasionally humbled with a dusting of artificial snow. They look like piles of ashes, designed by a god with a lazy finger like a child in a sandpit. Water trickles down from the peaks, tumbling and accumulating, trembling and bounding down the side of the mountain. It falls catastrophically from a jut of rock into a river, which then worms its way through the feet of the trees. The forest itself swarms the base of the mountain, standing like a crowd in veneration, dispersing as the inclines become steeper. The green of the forest bleeds into a field, the river pooling into a small lake in a clearing between the trees and the tall grass.

It is Arcadian, undisturbed and insurmountably beautiful, like something from a painting or a photograph. And it is. A digital creation from the powers that be which is slowly being stripped away, like the cities. Slivers of the mountain fall away, leaving cross sections that are as easy to view as artwork: I can see the fissures and cave systems, slabs of rock with an illusion of history squeezed between the layers. The world is glitching and throbbing, leaving gaping wounds in the earth as trees are being plucked from their beds and the waterfall flows into nothingness. Everything broken off by the growing void, daring to fall, but never having the faith.

I feel strangely powerful in a world that is dissolving and weaking, yet I am still alive.

Today, the sun is setting slowly. In the field, it is calmer, solid. A trope of a quixotic pasture with the setting sun dipping the tips of grass in golden sunlight, like paintbrushes that have dashed the sky in strokes of amber and hues of peach. The sunset burns the field in its fiery light; the grass itself rippling haphazardly as breaths of wind suddenly die in the air, its programming cut short.

The sky begins to darken eventually as the sun is sucked into the horizon. A cool breeze slips past me, the grass nudging my back as a long breath of wind floats across the field. In the nothingness and nowhere behind me, the mountains are gone. The trees devolve into saplings before collapsing in on themselves. The water, however, is growing. It floods the nothingness, a shallow, constant pool trickling towards me. Another breeze inhales, tugging the grass towards me, and when it exhales, it crashes as a wave, the rolling fields flooding with water, cascading against my back.

The sun has retreated so dramatically, it has taken all the warmth and light from my surroundings, leaving a coal sky with no moon. The water is constantly rushing towards and away from me, flowing to and from nowhere, occasionally flinching, recoiling back, and hesitating for a second, before exhaling once more and charging back into the nothingness.

A sudden lurch in the waves drags me to the ground. My hands and knees meet the sodden soil underneath the water, my face so close to the surface that I can see my own reflection in the waves. My face is pale, eyes heavy and cheeks wet. I am shaking too. But the waves don’t waiver; they keep pushing me despite my desperate efforts to claw onto the remnants of reality, scratching at the synthetic stone and soil.

But it isn’t enough. A final breath, a push, an aqueous net wrapping around me, scooping my limbs and weak body from the firm ground and tumbling them into the waves. I bound unceremoniously through the gushing water, slamming against the floor, cascades of waves smothering me, dissolving into foam or deleted by the simulation, I do not know. My instincts are still real in this moment; the fear, gasping, gulping, guttural breaths, an inky above, an obsidian below. And I am forsaken to the below, falling into the above, so distant and small that it’s like I never fell.

Yousra Hassan

in a perfect world, sickness does not exist peace of mind runs rampant and healthy bodies sail the land loving and caring and swimming freely through the wild difficulty and tears are foreign concepts only the dead have access to fairness and happiness over-pollute the air hope so thick candy crystallises on the tongue it tastes of pink watermelons in a perfect world, bodies born of carbon-copy moulds occupy all the same monotonous boring, perhaps but so similar there is no room for judgment so similar, there is no room for violence that never has a justification so similar, ignorance isn’t a disease of its own in a perfect world, this world does not exist