The gust of hot air felt somehow cool as the train rumbled into the subway platform. I heard the loud clanking of wheels against tracks as two fluorescent lighting tubes directly over my head flickered on and off three times, just like they always did when the train passed underneath them.
Just a few seconds ago my eyes were fixated on a rat scurrying across the tracks right underneath a little curly-edged red and white sign that said “CAUTION: RODENTICIDE,” sniffing empty chip bags and soda bottles looking for his next meal. My eyes were glued to the rodent as the train came. He didn’t even scurry out of the way. Didn’t even react. My heart leapt as the train barreled over him, but I quickly decided that I didn’t have to be worried for the little guy; his apathy towards the train suggested experience. The oncoming train was more of a threat to me than to him.
The free-for-all began as soon as the train doors opened, and soon, I felt like one of the rats. I suddenly realized how many people I was surrounded by—I’d missed that little detail while waiting, my gaze fixated on the tracks, my consciousness somewhere completely different.
Of course, it didn’t take long for me to snap back into reality. I stood in the same spot every day for this exact purpose. My spot was about a foot and a half away from the pole closest to the platform’s large middle staircase, skillfully chosen because once the train stopped, the doors would open directly in front of me, and there would be only four steps between me and the open doors, which I would take leisurely as everyone else scurried around me.
Despite the large number of people who joined me on the platform, today was a lucky day. After taking my usual four steps, I planted my body right at the edge of the open door and waited for people to get off, positioning myself in such a way that I would be able to sneak right in through the crowd no matter how many people surrounded me. I rushed in once the last departing person brushed my shoulder. Some people decided to sneak in and push themselves through prematurely, but I never joined in that behavior. It was rude. I didn’t like to be rude.
It occurred to me that the only true rules of the subway were the unwritten ones. Sure, the signs said that you weren’t allowed to give unlicensed performances or take up two seats or beg for money, but those rules were broken all the time. Even the more frequently enforced ones, like smoking, were broken occasionally when the perpetrator thought they could get away with it.
But certain rules—not sitting next to someone when there was an empty seat a reasonable distance away, taking the seats on the end first, the ones in the middle next, and the ones in between those two seats last of all, occupying the standing room by the doors before moving in and hovering over people—those were never broken.
What happened next happened in the course of about two seconds. First, I scanned the train car for any open seats, obeying the unwritten rule of choosing end seats first. There were none, but there was a middle seat next to a clean-looking woman that was open, so I quickly took it.
Then, I took a survey of all the people in the car, looking for any potential threats. I saw a few familiar faces today. There were some people sitting down already who I saw often. There was a woman taking her daughter to school. The girl’s hair was in braids, like they always were, and she swung her feet, her arms clutching her pink backpack. There was the man in the blue business suit holding a briefcase; he got on at the same stop as me, and we often competed for seats. He always had this intense expression on, a glaring contrast to the glazed-over eyes that were so common. There was the guy in the hoodie—he always wore the same dirty-looking navy blue hoodie—with his eyes closed and his head resting against the wall behind him.
Those were people I saw all the time. Some others I saw occasionally. There was a woman wearing a fuzzy purple jacket and a large, ridiculous-looking hat. Unlike navy hoodie guy, I never saw her wear the same thing twice. I wondered where she was going. Was she going to work? If so, what did she do? I suddenly wondered why it was that there were so many people on the train who I didn’t recognize. It was early in the morning. Wasn’t everyone going to work? Why else would you be on the train this early on a gloomy Monday? I supposed some people had variable schedules, but didn’t most people go in at the same time every day? Wouldn’t that be cause for a lot more familiar faces?
The unfamiliar-looking man in the end seat next to me wearing a brown paint-stained jacket got up as the train slowed down at the next stop. Jackpot. I quickly slid into his seat as soon as I was sure he wasn’t going to sit down again. As I did so, I felt a hair in the back of my head get caught in the clutches of the metal-framed advertisement behind me. Ouch.
The ad was for a trendy new dating app. I looked around me once again. What demographic were they targeting, exactly? I realized that I couldn’t lean back in the same way as I had been without my hair pressing against the advertisement, which was kind of gross. Maybe the middle seat, positioned in front of the indentation of the train’s window, was the superior seat, after all.
Stops passed. The man in the business suit who had gotten on with me brushed against my knee as he walked out. He turned back and lifted his hand and mouthed something in apology. Nice guy.
The doors closed and the train started again. I braced myself to leave; my stop was next. Time to go to—funny, for a second there I forgot where I was gong. The train picked up speed and I thought I caught a glimpse of the guy in the suit from the window. The lights flickered in the train car, just like they always did as the train went into this tunnel.
In the Control Center, an alarm sounded.
“We have a nonconformist on Fulton Street,” a man said, touching the screen in front of him to expand a report from one of the Sim’s AI monitors.
“Another one?”
The woman next to him kicked his foot against the floor to propel his swivel chair towards her colleague’s desk.
“See,” the man who initially spoke said, zooming in on a young man wearing a baseball cap and a loose-fitting plaid shirt. “He’s going the wrong way. The Sim’s working on overdrive just to accommodate him.”
“That’s not possible!” his colleague replied. “Where’s Jones? Maybe he walked a different way, and the Sim responded.”
“I thought of that,” said the man. “Look. He got off the 2 train and went West toward his office, just like always. It’s this Bot that’s the abnormal one. He started walking the opposite way towards the water!”
“There must be some mistake,” said the woman. “He’s supposed to be with Jones. The whole Sim is running for Jones. It’s not supposed to be loading streets that Jones can’t see.”
“I understand the purpose of the Sim,” said the man. “I’m telling you, this isn’t because of Jones.”
The man zoomed out to a map of the simulated city; an exact replica of Manhattan, down to the people who inhabited it. The Sim was the first of its kind, designed to trick its sole conscious human inhabitant into thinking he was living his regular life. The reason for this wasn’t given to the lowly employees responsible for its operation, but rumor had it, the creator wanted information that the subject wouldn’t divulge any other way.
Motivations for its creation aside, the Sim was remarkable. It was indistinguishable from the real thing—that’s what the people who had gone inside to test it had said, anyway. The graphics were lifelike, the people inside of it moved and talked like real people. The only catch was that it could only be viewed from one vantage point at a time. It still required a massive amount of processing power, but running the whole thing at once would be unheard of.
The two colleagues looked at the map of the city. Most of the island was sketched out in black and white—these were the parts that were dormant, all streets and cars and buildings and subway stations and parks that weren’t in use. The in-use sections showed up in color. Typically, this was only one place at a time, but this time, it was two—two which were, by now, a few blocks away from one another.
The first lit up section was an ordinary city block where a clean-cut man in a blue business suit was walking to work. The second was a bookstore. A young man in the green plaid shirt had gone there to browse. He was currently holding a tome about human psychology.
“I don’t understand,” said the woman. “If Jones isn’t watching, shouldn’t this kid just disappear?”
“It’s odd, for sure,” the man replied. He clicked on the young man, and the name ‘EC-4040’ popped up. “At least it only seems to be happening with the Environmental Characters. As long as it’s not anyone too close, Jones won’t catch on.”
A book of human psychology dropped towards the floor in a bookstore as the man who was holding it dematerialized in an instant. Before it could even reach the floor, the book dematerialized, too, along with the entire bookstore and the entire block in which it was located.
An instant later, just a few blocks away, some wrinkles re-materialized on the face of an old woman inching down the street using a walker. Some jagged edges returned to the cracks on the sidewalk, and it appeared to the man in the blue business suit that his vision had somehow gotten just the slightest bit more acute. He shook his head to re-orient himself. He’d have to start getting some more sleep at night.
“Taken care of,” said the man. “These things are happening too damned often for us to keep doing this manually.”
“So this has happened before?” the woman asked.
“I just told you this has happened before!”
“Have you told the Board?”
“What’s the Board gonna do? The Board doesn’t care as long as Jones stays in the Sim for a few more days and says whatever the heck he’s going to say.”
“But if it’s happening now that means it’ll happen in the future, too.”
“And I’m only being paid to care about this one, so that’s not really my problem, is it?”
I hated the rush-hour grind back home. The morning wasn’t so bad. Sure, it was crowded. But everyone was sleepy, and the whole experience was equally so.
Now, everyone was still tired, but also wired, and there were more people, and I somehow managed to get a seat, but it was a not-quite-middle seat, the least desirable, and I was squished in between two large people.
I was tired, too. I felt like half my life was spent on this train. Now that I thought about it, where was I all day? Work. That was it? Doing what? God, the daily grind was really starting to get to me. I barely even remembered getting on the train. The whole thing must’ve happened in a daze.
The only familiar face was the man in the blue suit, who pushed his way through some people hanging out by the doors and stood right in front of me. We made eye contact, so I half-grinned at him politely before averting my gaze. Before darting my head in the complete opposite direction of him, I saw him nod in acknowledgement.
The train picked up speed. Most of the people around me were looking down at their phones, but I stayed focused on my surroundings. After all, I’d heard that there was a lot of crime on the subways, even though I’d never witnessed any myself. Where was my phone? I must’ve left it at home. It didn’t matter. I’d get it later.
The train slowed down. As it crawled its way into the station, the woman sitting next to me stood up and pushed her way through the crowd of people to the doors. I assessed the empty seat next to me. It was as good as mine. I thought about sliding over—on any other day, I would’ve slid over automatically—but I remembered getting my hair caught earlier, and how gross I felt leaning against the dirty framed advertisement that no doubt had claimed plenty of hairs in the past. I decided that someone would no doubt sit next to me anyway, and what difference does it really make if you’re sitting next to one person or two? So I stayed, and the man in the business suit sat down in the holy-grail end seat next to me.
“We’ve got a nonconformist on the 2 train.”
“Two in one day?”
“Yup. Same train car as Jones, too. Looks like the AI is getting better at spotting these.”
“Or it’s flagging random Bots,” said the woman, reaching over her colleague to zoom in on the offender in question. “This girl’s not doing anything strange. She’s just sitting there.”
“She’s not on her phone,” the man said. “That’s strange right there. And she must’ve done something abnormal, or the system wouldn’t have flagged her.”
“Doesn’t it say?”
“Not specifically,” said the man, expanding the report. “It just says ‘Ignored Programming.’”
“Well, keep an eye on her,” the woman said.
“Oh, really?” the man said sarcastically. “I was just gonna disable her right here and let her dematerialize right into Jones’ lap.”
The woman rolled her eyes. “I’m so surprised,” she said, reading the girl’s profile. EC-6801. A Subway Environmental Character. These things aren’t even supposed to be conscious.”
“They’re not,” her colleague replied. “Maybe I should’ve reported this to the Board.”
“Why didn’t I think of that?” said the woman.
“Alright, he’s getting off now. She’s supposed to get off at the same stop as him. Once they get off and diverge paths, we can disable her.”
“Once they diverge paths, shouldn’t she disable automatically?”
“Not what happened to our bookworm last time.”
“Look, look, they’re getting off.”
The colleagues watched intently as Jones and the woman sitting next to him exited the train car. They went onto the platform. Jones went one way, and the woman went another.
“Alright, almost there,” the man said, hovering his finger over his computer screen. “He’s going up the stairs… now!”
He tapped the screen to disable EC-6801, but nothing happened.
“God damn it,” he said. “The thing’s frozen!”
“Let me see,” his colleague said. She pushed past him and tapped the screen. “What the—it’s not working!”
“I just told you it wasn’t working!”
“Move over—“
I was at my stop, but suddenly, I didn’t recognize it. Wasn’t this the way I usually walked?
A feeling of panic set over me. I felt a strange sensation in my head; a feeling of pressure that I’d never quite felt before. It was the same feeling I’d had on the train—that I was coming from nowhere, and didn’t know where I was going.
I started walking faster. I’d heard of this happening before. What was it called? Amnesia? Maybe some fresh air would help. I’d just have to get out of the station. Yes, I’d get my bearings once I went outside.
In the Control Center, an alarm sounded.
“We’ve got a nonconformist in the 14th street station,” the woman said.
“Another one?” said the man. “That doesn’t look good. That first girl is about to leave the station.”
The woman’s face turned white.
“I told you to contact the Board! We’re gonna lose our jobs!”
The man continued tapping his screen trying to disable the girl in the Sim. Nothing happened. He slammed his fists on the table. They both knew what was on the line. The simulation had never run three places at once before. It would overload, and then Jones would wake up from his induced sleep, and then—well, whatever happened next wouldn’t be good for the two colleagues in the Control Center.
“Hurry up and do something!” the woman cried. “The whole thing is going to crash!”
“I’m trying, damnit!”
“Try harder!”
My legs felt wobbly as I climbed the stairs. My memory hadn’t come back to me yet. I looked around for someone to ask. No one. That was odd. The platform was packed. I started rummaging through my pockets for a wallet. I surely carried a wallet, right? Nothing.
The stairway seemed to go on endlessly. I kept climbing, until finally, there were just a few steps left. I was in another station now, where I had to go through a turnstile and climb more stairs to get outside.
All I needed to do was get outside. I started running then—running as fast as I could. I was almost outside, I could see the light above me. I was almost there!
Black.
Whoa this was awesome. I felt the suffocating feeling she must have experienced at the end. Would love to know what happened and why it was happening in the first place. I smell a universe being created…
Congrats Melissa. I was struck by the realism of the subway. I’v lived in Manhattan, Staten Island, and East Williamsburg and you could have been describing my recollections. The simulation tapped an uneasy angst I am now feeling about our SS, surveillance state. Last week a woman contacted me about an interview, not a public one, but so she could glean info about making a career as an artist. It seemed she wanted to do a business assessment projection that would enable her to become a well paid artist. WTF. In looking up her name took to her Facebook alias, WTF. I asked her about that and to send examples of her work. She replied a few days later she blithely dismissed the alias thing as her non business social media. Her business was nonexistent. WTF. In google image reverse one image was from another name and one image was from an IKEA catalog. WTF. Your story suggests the simulations will ultimately break free and become human, this woman and the SS suggests humans are becoming simulations.