Chapter 3

When I woke up, it was already morning. Liz had left for work, so I was alone. A cup of tea stood on the table next to an open package of biscuits. I checked the time. It was an hour and a half after the start of the workday, but it didn’t matter. Since yesterday, I knew I wasn’t going to work today. There were more important things to do.

I took my time drinking the tea. We always had good tea at home, but this time I made a deliberate effort to taste it properly. It tasted like tea. Nothing more. The only notable feature was that it was cold. I could have fixed that easily, but I didn’t want to.

After breakfast, I went to the bathroom and did my morning routine quickly. I didn’t want to waste time, so once I was done, I got dressed and left the apartment.

There were several places I needed to visit. Normally, I would take a taxi anywhere, but this time I chose the subway. It had become much less popular. Taxis were almost as cheap and usually faster, since traffic problems had been solved. But neither time nor money mattered to me at that moment. I just wanted to try the subway.

After a short walk to the station, I went underground. There were almost no people. Trains ran less frequently now, since so few people used the system anymore. While waiting, my attention fixed on the smell. It was distinct and unpleasant. A mix of grease, dampness, garbage, and human sweat, intensified by heat and poor ventilation.

Still, the smell didn’t bother me much. It wasn’t surprising. A brief thought crossed my mind. Humanity had solved traffic congestion, built electric cost-efficient cars, even created hyper-realistic simulations, yet couldn’t deal with something as basic as this smell. *Maybe it simply wasn’t important, since I never used the subway anyway.*

Eventually, the train arrived. The car was almost empty. A man and a woman sat together at the far end. Another man slept in a seat near the door. The smell around him was strong and unpleasant. He was probably drunk. Maybe homeless.

“Stand clear of the closing doors, please.”

I looked at him for a moment. I’d seen men like this many times before, so my interest faded quickly. Moving closer to the couple crossed my mind, but I noticed them kissing. I didn’t want to disturb them, so I sat alone, exactly in the middle. Between the couple and the sleeping man.

With nothing else to do, I focused on the sound of the train. It was a familiar mix. A low rumble from the motors and constant vibration, interrupted by long stretches of high-pitched screeching. I hated that sound, but didn’t cover my ears. I listened through several stations.

Once I’d had enough, I looked around for anything else interesting. There wasn’t much. It was an almost empty train. What could be interesting there?

My eyes drifted to the subway map above the door. *Five more stations.*

I covered my ears with my hands and let my thoughts wander. They formed a tangled mix. Yesterday. The simulation. The places I still needed to visit. Unrelated fragments that came and went without order.

When the train reached my station, I got off quickly. A few minutes later, I was back outside. Across the road stood a shopping mall, my first destination. I crossed the street and went in.

The contrast with the subway was sharp, yet it felt almost identical to every other mall I remembered. Bright lights. Loud noise. People everywhere. Flashy digital displays.

I needed to get to the fourth floor, so I took the escalator. I didn’t like elevators. As I rode up, I watched people moving on the floors below. For a brief moment, a question surfaced. *Why am I even doing all of this?* I already knew the answer. I didn’t like it, but I knew it.

The fourth floor housed a large food court. Exactly what I wanted. I stopped at the first stand, a small Asian restaurant, and ordered a few items I wanted to try. Then I moved on to the next stand. A typical fast-food place. The choice was simple. A hamburger and a small portion of fries.

I continued like this, going from stand to stand, ordering something at each one. There were around twelve of them. Maybe thirteen. I didn’t bother counting.

When the orders were ready, I started collecting them and bringing everything to my table. I pushed two tables together to make one large surface. I chose the spot carefully, minimizing how much I had to walk. Only when everything was in front of me did I start eating.

People glanced at me from time to time. I must have looked strange, sitting alone with so much food. I didn’t care. My goal was to taste it all.

Of course, I couldn’t finish everything, but that wasn’t the point. I wanted the range. Almost every taste was there. Even food I didn’t enjoy, I tried.

Sweet. Salty. Bitter. Greasy. Overly spiced.

I mixed flavors without thinking about whether they belonged together, took a bite, then threw the rest away. Texture mattered more than taste. Crunch. Softness. Heat spreading across my tongue. How long it lingered before fading. I drank something cold, then something burning hot.

At some point, I was full. I sat there for a while, until my body felt ready to leave.

Leaving the food court, I walked through the mall. People moved in both directions. Some fast. Some slow. Most stared into shop windows or their phones. Without thinking, I matched their pace.

The floor was clean and slightly reflective. Footsteps echoed. Music leaked from different stores. Fragments of conversation reached me, then vanished as I passed.

Near a clothing store, I touched a jacket hanging by the entrance. The fabric felt smooth. I rubbed it between my fingers briefly, then let go. Inside, everything was perfectly arranged. Rows of clothes. Mirrors. Bright lighting. I didn’t go in. I’d seen places like this too many times.

I sat on a bench for a minute. Nearby, a couple argued quietly. A child ran past me, then came back laughing. Someone behind me talked on the phone about being late. None of it held my attention for long.

I stood up and kept walking.

An escalator took me up one floor. Another brought me back down. The motion felt steady and familiar. Halfway up, I checked my phone, saw the time, and put it away. At the top, I turned around and went back down without stopping.

Near the end of the corridor, I picked up a mug from a display outside a home goods store. It was heavier than it looked. The surface felt cool and smooth. I turned it once in my hand, then placed it back.

For a moment, I considered buying it. I wasn’t sure why.

Eventually, I reached the far end of the mall and turned around again. Everything looked the same. The same stores. The same lights. The same flow of people. Nothing stood out.

After a while, I decided to leave.

It was still too early to go home. So I walked without thinking about where I was going. There were quite a lot of people on the street for a workday. Shops passed on my left. Clothing. Cafés. More clothing.

I’d been on this street before, but couldn’t remember if anything had changed since the last time. It didn’t matter.

People passed in both directions. Some alone. Some in pairs. Some carrying bags. A couple argued near one of the store entrances. I caught only the tone, not the words. Somewhere nearby, a child cried, then stopped. Everything blended into a continuous background noise.

Benches lined the street. As soon as I saw an empty one, I sat down.

At first, I just looked around without focusing on anything. It was already getting dark.

My sense of time felt distorted. It moved unbearably slowly, like a snail crawling across a vast, empty plain. But sometimes that rhythm would break. A falcon would grab the snail and carry it skyward at impossible speed, and an hour would pass in an instant. 

After a while, minutes maybe hours, I noticed a child staring at me. *Was it the same child who had cried earlier?* The thought appeared on its own.

He made a face, then ran off. I tried to copy it, unsure how successful I was.

The sun had set.

I called a taxi and walked to the pickup point. I usually came home much earlier, but usually there was a reason to do so. Today, there wasn’t.

The taxi arrived quickly. I got in and closed my eyes.

————

“You’re later than usual,” Liz said from the bedroom.

“I had a lot to do.”

“At work?”

“Yeah.”

I undressed quickly and went into the bedroom. Physically, I wasn’t tired. Emotionally, I was exhausted. The unease I’d felt all day hadn’t gone away. It had only grown heavier.

“Are you tired? Do you want to sleep?” Her voice was gentle, as always. She was trying to make me feel better.

The irony was that what I wanted most at that moment was to be left alone. More precisely, she was the one person I wanted to be with the least.

“Yeah. I really want to sleep.”

I had no intention of sleeping, but there was nothing else I could say to stop her.

I glanced at her face and immediately looked away. Seeing her made me feel guilty and sad. I had lost decades of memories of her. I knew I had loved her once. If I concentrated, I could even recall the shape of that feeling. But it was only memory. The feeling itself was gone.

She felt distant. The same way everything in this world felt distant.

“Okay. Good night.”

Liz kissed me. Warm and beautiful. Cold and meaningless at the same time.

“Good night.”

I turned away, pretending to sleep.

I thought about the results of my little experiments.

*I was in another simulation.*

The thought hadn’t come out of nowhere. I’d known it from the moment I woke up, even before I could put it into words.

I searched for something. Anything that would prove this was the real world. Some difference. Some resistance. Some sensation that couldn’t be compared.

There was nothing.

Every scene, every face, every sensation, every emotion arrived exactly as I remembered from the simulation.

I kept repeating the same thought. *Simulations should feel real. They should be indistinguishable from reality.*

The words sounded correct. They did nothing.

Reality had to be more than this. It had to push back. It had to refuse imitation.

It didn’t.

With each failed attempt to convince myself, the unease grew quieter and heavier at the same time. Heat under my skin. Sweat along my back. I shifted in bed. Liz slept beside me.

I turned away immediately.

*She was real Liz.*

And that was the most terrifying part.

Nothing felt fake. But nothing felt more real either. It occupied the same space as memory. The same weight. The same texture.

I knew I couldn’t prove this world was a simulation.

But I understood something worse.

I had no way to prove that it wasn’t.

————

I lay on my back, staring into the dark.

I tried to keep the thought sharp, not let it blur into something vague. If I lost it now, it would return later anyway.

I went over everything again. What I felt. What I tested. What I failed to disprove. The order no longer mattered. Every path led to the same place.

Eventually, my focus narrowed to smaller things. My breathing. The weight of the blanket. The quiet sound of Liz shifting in her sleep.

Everything felt normal.

I repeated it once more, carefully.

*I am in another simulation.*

The sentence didn’t change anything. It didn’t strengthen or weaken the idea. It simply remained.

After a while, the thoughts lost structure. They didn’t stop, but they no longer formed anything new.

I don’t remember when I stopped following them and fell asleep.