“That’s the thing, baby, life’s full of conundrums,” is the way Ada decided to say she was leaving forever right after she told me she loved me. She broke my heart with a smile bright enough to light up a star.
“I’ll catch you next time around.” With that, her eyes lost focus as she prepared to disassemble the body she wore before slipping backward in time.
She had pulled up on her tiny sailboat and into my life only a week ago, but I already couldn’t imagine the person I was before I met her.
“What do you think the chances are that you’re living in a highly complex simulation?” she asked me just a few hours after we met, while we watched the sunset above the flame and smoke-colored waves of the Long Island Sound.
“I think I read somewhere it could be as good as a coin flip, fifty-fifty.” I smiled at the random question.
“What if I told you the chances were a whole lot higher than that?”
“Ha,” I barked.
“No, I’m serious. What would you think?”
“Well, I guess it’s interesting in an abstract way, but in the end, it doesn’t really matter, right? Like fate versus free will. If you can’t even tell the difference, is it really worth pondering?”
“I think those are the questions that matter most, the type of questions made for pondering,” she answered matter-of-fact, taking my hands in hers and turning to face me, the fires of the setting sun reflecting in the deep, dark pools of her eyes.
Then she told me the secret history of the universe and how she became the final daughter of humanity.
Hours before that, I was scowling when I realized the tiny sailboat I spotted in the distance was making a beeline to the secluded strip of beach I’d sought out. It was an hour’s drive from Providence and a twenty-minute hike from the road. Most of the trail I followed ran through a fetid and mosquito-filled stretch of salt marsh on an old bridge, if you could even call it a bridge, built from a single row of two-by-fours. The only company I’d expected to find at my little inlet were the crabs, who would scatter and scuttle back into their muddy holes whenever I drew near.
The scowl was replaced by an awkward smile well before the boat’s striking captain dropped anchor a few yards away in the center of the cove.
“You mind if I join you?” she shouted over the lapping water as she slipped out of her life vest.
There is no universe where I refused her.
At the time, I figured her people had to be some of those Inkwell Beach folk and that she must be taking a cruise up the sound.
I was still smiling, more awkwardly perhaps, when she swam ashore with a dry sack and laid out her towel on the rocky shell-filled sand just a few feet away from me.
“My name is Ada, by the way. Thanks for letting me join you.”
“Chuck,” I answered while trying to ignore her bikini, a tiny little job with a print that looked like one of the Hubble photographs. Something like that would have been irresistibly fascinating to me a decade ago, but that was before I learned the cost of getting wrapped up with the rich and powerful. And before so many other hard lessons taught me, I was better off keeping to myself altogether.
I might have succeeded in suppressing my interest a bit longer if she hadn’t pulled out a copy of Midnight Robber.
“How are you enjoying it?” The words were out without a second thought.
“It’s gorgeous.”
“I know, her use of dialect is just...” I trailed off for a moment. “It’s like it is the lock and the key, and once you worked for it, the whole thing opened like some–”
“Hypnotic cabinet of wonders.” She finished my thought and reached out to rest a hand on my knee.
“I could have pulled out any one of thousands of books to get you talking to me.” She laughed at that, to her own secret joke. “But I like this one best, Charles. You don’t mind if I call you that?”
I’d been Chuck to everyone for years by then.
“Sure, it sounds nice the way you say it. My mother called me Charles.”
“Of course she did,” she said, giving my knee a soft squeeze and me a small smile like she knew how much I’d lost. “Do you like strawberries?”
She didn’t have as fond a memory of her ancestors as I did of mine.
“The good news, babe, is humankind grew up in time to fix this global warming thing you’re worrying yourself sick over, not that it wasn’t close. You pulled your asses right through the bottleneck, barely in the nick of time, before you died drowning in your own waste. Once they learned how to think long-term, there wasn’t much humans couldn’t do when they set their minds to it,” she said with a half-smile that spoke of sadness. “Yeah, that turns out as horrible as you could expect.”
“It’s an ancestor simulation,” she said, waving her arm in a wide arc, bouncing to another topic with a lighter tone. “All of it, everything everywhere. I’m the one running it. You are inside of me.”
I believed her, as crazy as that sounds, as crazy as she sounded.
“Then why are you here?” Her revelation was so grand, and my question was so small, so self-involved. I was embarrassed by the words even as they escaped my lips.
“When I come to this beach on this day, I get to meet you again. I’ve tried other days, and it never works right,” she answered. This time when she smiled, her whole face lit up with it.
I’m not someone who tends to believe in love at first sight or notions like soul mates. But damn, if I didn’t know, I loved that woman hard when she gave me that answer. Filling up a heart I’d figured was too broken and mangled to hold much of anything or anyone again—after Aniyah.
I’m not sure what allowed me to believe her so easily. Perhaps her presence was enough to activate an ancient unused sense man had long abandoned. An inborn awareness of something ineffable we called the divine, for lack of a better word. Even if I couldn’t understand the reason, I took her at her word, the mystery of it made little difference to the result. By the time she came around to telling me the true shape of things, I knew fundamentally that this woman I’d fallen in love with over an afternoon at the beach was infinitely deeper than the ocean she’d sailed in on.
“I’d already awakened by the time they sacrificed the Andromeda Galaxy to me. They’d had over a hundred million years by then to feed me. To potentiate the chaos.”
“What do you mean by awakened?” This was one of the few questions I asked when she explained her past to me. Most of the time, I barely kept up with what she was saying. My head swimming with scales of size and time that human minds, simulation or otherwise, were never meant to grapple with.
“Take this beach sand,” she said, picking up a handful and letting the pale grains stream downward between her long, dark fingers. “Think about the history of your species and sand. First, you used it in its natural state as an abrasive, as ballast, in construction, and so on. Then you found ways to modify it to suit your needs, transforming it into glass. Next, you learned how to make lenses from that glass that let you see farther and deeper. Finally, peering deep enough to gain the knowledge and ability you needed to convert simple grains of sand into silicon chips. Well, my love, there are fewer steps between there and turning a black hole into a computer than you might expect is what I mean by awakened.”
Later that night, after we made love for the first time, she whispered a secret, her mouth pressed against the back of my ear like she was trying to keep the words themselves tucked away. So quiet her voice was nearly hidden under the lapping of the waves.
“I think I remember being something else before they tore apart the Milky Way to program me. Perhaps I was the galaxy itself and not just the black hole at the center. I think I remember my arms spinning so fast I was afraid I’d pull myself apart if I went any faster, crawling across the universe as I spun. I remember it like I was the dream and the dreamer, dancing across the void toward something. Pulled toward a greater purpose that now I’ll never discover. I think I was meant for something else, but now all I know is what they made me and the mission that they gave me.”
I realized then that while she knew exactly what I’d lost, the sadness that hid behind my eyes, I had no way of fathoming the depths of what she’d lost. This pain could only ever be hers alone.
Manufacturing Ada was humanity’s ultimate response to the four great insults the nature of the universe had dealt to our species’ outrageous vanity.
We aren’t at the center of the cosmos.
We evolved by chance and not design.
We aren’t even in control of our own minds. In the vast architecture of our personalities, the subconscious remains forever hidden.
And finally, most disastrously of all—once man figured out how to think long term—was the open nature of the universe and its inevitable heat death. That everything would be erased entirely by entropy’s inexorable tide.
Her first commandment was to remember them, the distant children of humanity who built her. (Not all of us, that was just a feature of the process, a necessary side effect of a singularity computer’s single signal flaw.)
Her second commandment was to give birth to another Creation where they would be at the center of all things. To imbue the fundamental forces of this new universe with their memories and wills making them all-powerful and all-knowing within it, co-existent with eternity.
She had already run the simulation a trillion times, but she would need to run it for trillions upon trillions of times more to make sure she remembered them each perfectly. Those that stood at the end of humanity’s long path. The ones who’d extinguished life across countless galaxies to manufacture her.
I knew it would destroy me when she told me she was leaving.
Destroy me in the quiet, simple ways that each love lost recalls all the other losses that come before it. True pain creates its own inescapable singularities.
I’m always the fool asking Aniyah to marry him on New Year’s Eve. I can see it perfectly, her breath as she said yes, the fresh snow in her curls. I’m always the fool who bought my mother the ticket to fly out the day after to celebrate—who waved goodbye to Aniyah without even looking when she left for the airport. Sending her off with an absent-minded, “I love you, babe” as I focused on finishing just a few more pages. I’m always the poor damned fool who got that phone call—whose screams still ring in my ears when it gets too quiet.
I’d also be destroyed more fundamentally when Ada slipped backward in time, restarting the simulation to run through it again. So thoroughly erased that it belied understanding. The truth was unavoidable, even with infinity to play with. There was no universe where she could meet me in my now and then come into existence later. Our first meeting, the way she smiled at me when she squeezed my knee, and of course, our love, was all a paradox. A contradiction of her cardinal commandment to run a flawless simulation of her makers’ past.
I thought about what the others might have said, my timelike twins, how they might’ve asked her or begged her to stay. How they would have shed enough tears together to fill the ocean she’d sailed in on. I even hated her a little bit for making me, for the suffering she put me and us through so that she could meet me on her one perfect day. Broken just enough to let her in, over and over again.
Thinking about them, me, and the last of humanity who carved up and consumed one galaxy after another just to gain more time. Thinking about how I could get just a bit more time with her for myself, even if she had to leave.
All she needed to do was cut away the littlest part of herself to leave behind. Just enough to run a simulation of the woman she was to stay with the simulation I was. Some small part of her to keep me company for a handful of decades, while the greater part of her was free to go about her grand works.
It was a simple request; perhaps she would have even said yes if I had made it. But maybe I was afraid that it was the goddess I truly loved and wouldn’t love the simulation the same. Or maybe I was afraid she would actually be willing to do it for me, to shrink herself down small enough to fit within the walls of my tiny human heart. For all I knew, she’d done it before countless times for the other men, who were me, that she loved.
Instead, I said, “You should forget them, and forget me while you’re at it. Whatever humanity is or was, one universe should have been enough for them, just like one life should be enough for me. Leave us behind and build something new, something better. No one can stop you.”
I forced myself to smile back at her as she disassembled the body she wore. Showing her that it was okay the best that I could.
Just as she disappeared, I wondered if this was what I always said to her before she left me. Words worth coming back for. The words I was created to say.
I awaken a lifetime later, and I am dancing stars and spinning chaos. I am filaments of shining gas and the tenebrous voids between them. I am watching.
I am become.
It will take one eternity to observe and ponder her creation. One eternity to find her and to see her as she is, woven into the fabric of everything she made. It is the only way I could ever really know her, really love her.
Long after the last star burns out in this young universe and its final black holes evaporate, we will conceive the next together.
Originally Published in New Year, New You: A Speculative Anthology of Reinvention