Escape.Oh, the pure, irrepressible calm the thought of it brought me. To rest, yes, to retreat from everything. No more standards to uphold, no clients to see, no bills to pay, no dinner dates to sit through, no more apologizing for the mere fact of existing unhappily in a fundamentally unhappy world. A place where I could just read books, relax, and be my true unapologetic self.
At night, while Theo dissolved into medicated sleep, I would stay up asking myself,What am I missing here? Why all this emptiness, this fixation on all the worst parts of existence? Why can’t I just be happy, be good? Why am I working so hard to sustain a life that I hate?
And just before I, too, would surrender to sleep, my mind would always replay my years before the memory deletion, when my pain was still so deep and personal that I could only think of surviving it.A mind like yours, everyone at the Public Defender’s Office had said when I announced I was leaving for a corporate firm.What a waste.
And it was a waste. Because even after all I’d sacrificed to save myself, I was still as helpless and miserable as I was at ten years old. Because Hive did not heal me. They did not remove my trauma. They just made me forget it, leaving me utterly unable to connect with the life I had constructed before the procedure. The abuses and the choices they’d forced me to take made no sense to me anymore. The work I did, the apartment I lived in, the man I loved, the self-preserving nature of my choices. None of it made sense to me. It was the life of a person I did not recognize. The life of a person I despised.
And so, just a little over a year ago, I chose to escape.
I went back to Hive, this time looking for a more aggressive solution. Advanced simulated reality. The Programs, as they called them. The wellness retreats of the future.
After many exhaustive and somewhat harrowing consultations, I decided to become a part of the Nostalgia Program, which was a capsule of an innocent, perpetually youthful time, riddled with character and color. The perfect simulation for people who’d had unhappy childhoods, or in my case, for people who’d been left with no childhood at all.
Nostalgia: Saturday morning cartoons, July afternoons going to the park and hanging out with whoever, in bed late at night trying to find the perfect ringtone for your stylish, app-free flip phone, weekends hunting down boy-band posters with your friends and that brand new silver walkman so you could listen to all your favorite CDs on the go. A magical point in time when there was just enough technology and consumerism to make you feel excited about the next new thing but not so much as to overtake your entire life, to become your entire personality.
According to Hive specialists, Nostalgia was the perfect place to slow down, read, socialize, work enjoyably, form healthy relationships with real people, and essentially justlive.
Of course, the Programs, being still at an early stage, were not without their imperfections. Hive’s technology was used to maintain the body’s biological processes while the individuals’ consciousnesses were connected and exposed through a headset device to the same computer-generated environment, the stability of which relied on finely calibrated systems and prearranged information.
In Nostalgia, we were allowed to know only what we needed to know to make sense of the world around us, and so we were kept, individually and collectively, away from themes and concepts that had the potential to make us question the world we were living in. And even if a concept from the real world happened to slip from our subconsciouses into the Program, it was immediately incorporated as something you read in a book or saw in a movie.
This was partly the reason why the Outside existed. Everything we didn’t understand we could simply explain through the existence of another parallel world.
Like that book I found.Acquiescence.
It was hilarious, really. The glaring unsophistication of it all. But at the same time it was what had made the Program feel so real. It was so simple that it was nearly honest. An Inside world that was constantly disturbed by a mysterious Outside force, a universe just beyond our reach: reality.
That was the point. Everything about the Inside was supposed to be a simplified, almost infantilized version of reality. Streets named after colors and childhood games. Jobs teenagers would dream of. People with no last names. Oh, how I used to crave such anonymity, to be anyone other than my father’s daughter and enter a world where I was wholly untainted by the past.
Everything was made and handled for us. And if it so happened that someone’s subconscious mind disturbed the Program too much by recalling reality too often or too obsessively, then the individual was either returned to the Center for recalibration, a concept often used to explain someone’s temporary removal from the simulation, or they were removed from the Program altogether so as not to disturb the system as a whole.
The Center with its mysterious assessments, was essentially the algorithm through which they were able to monitor our experiences and prevent such occurrences, for one’s mental instability had the potential to destroy the simulation for everyone.
“If life was in your hand, would you unclench your fist?”they would ask us, for in the world of Nostalgia there were no such things as depression and suicide. We were not provided with the language to express such extreme personal despair. To give us a true human experience, they did allow us to retain our sense of curiosity and critical thinking and even exposed us to small doses of pain and unease so that then the moments of happiness would feel more precious, similar to real life. But there were still limits to the things you were allowed to recall and feel. Nostalgia was a universe with a single law: the moment you recognized the simulation, you could no longer be a part of it.
There were other Programs by other creators, such as the Eudaemonia Program, where the individuals were submerged into a constant state of happiness to the point where they did not recognize themselves as happy but simply existing within an abstract concept of happiness. But that wasn’t what I wanted. What I wanted was to be given the opportunity to become someone better. I just didn’t think I could do it here anymore, in therealworld.
And I was conflicted, of course I was. For months I asked myself,What is so wrong with you, Anya? Can’t you see how sick this is?But then this little deformed creature inside my head would perk up and ask me instead:Am I really to blame? Is the question of what is wrong with me personally more important than what is wrong with the world collectively? Why has reality become a place we need to escape anyway?
In retrospect, having survived the Program, I would tell you that it was something far more sinister than a simulated reality marketed as an advanced wellness retreat. Because that place lost in time where all was good and holy did not exist at all. Had never existed. Nostalgia was a mere byproduct of the cycle of remembering, misremembering, and forgetting. Bad things happened back then, too. People just didn’t know so much about them. The core of their happiness was their understimulated ignorance. The past was not a world unlinked to the present. Memories were not still pictures that you could put next to each other and tell a certain story, but living, breathing things that constantly changed the shape of the world.
Knowledge accessible to everyone with an internet connection was supposed to be the star-bright guide to a better future. But the guide had become opaque by the sheeramountof information there was out there, the importance, meaningfulness, and truthfulness of it disintegrating one monetized screen hour at a time.
The line between what was real and what was not did not exist anymore. But Nostalgia, this grand return to the innocence of a different time, was a lie too. It was modeled after that time, surely, but its likeness was so superficial, so far from the world it was trying to recreate, that it couldn’t even be called a simulation anymore but a simulacrum, a copy of something that was not itself an original.
And I could see now, too, how terrible it was to be in there, to exist under this complete eradication of human culture, identity, and history. Because Hive and the creators made it seem as though the only way the human race could exist in peace was as a homogenized version of itself.
But, of course, a year ago, I didn’t know all of this. So I tied up my affairs and signed up for a year of simulated experience. What went wrong after that… I didn’t know.
I was supposed to be given a new past and new memories and be immediately integrated into the world of Nostalgia, just like everyone else. I was not supposed to lose these fake memories and certainly not develop a crippling fear for the Center, the place where we were evaluated and recalibrated to fit the simulation. And I was not supposed to meet Kai. Or at least, I didn’t think I was.
Now, enclosed in this white, sterile room, I didn’t even feel like a human being anymore. I was this tiny, dissected thing half existing here, half there, with no way to connect the two halves of myself in any possible reality.
I could only lie here, helpless, infantile almost, moving my fingers over the cool, sleek screen of my phone, its white-blue luminescence bleeding through my fingers while I waited for the creator to come in and explain to me what was so wrong with my brain.
And then what? Another calibration, another simulation, another lie to be lived?
God, I thought, after a year of not knowing what God is.We have done it.We were using technology to escape technology. There was nothing beyond that, nowhere else to hide, to restore, to heal. The core of human existence could now only be sustained within a wireless network of transmitting data. Those three lines in the corner of a screen, saying that we are all connected.
