Things got a little more interesting in other precincts, Biller went on to indicate. It was this infinity of possible selves and possible neighborhoods, the total and endless expansibility of Yet Another World, which gave it its magnificence. Deviants and avant-gardists could build neighborhoods as solid, in their way, as those of the suburbanites-kingdoms of barter, Dada, or rape, castles of chaos. Grown-ups masqueraded as children, men as women, and so on. Others created inhuman selves, gorgons, strolling penises, pornified Gnuppets. All ethics were local, and endlessly up for negotiation. Declaring whether Yet Another World was or wasn’t a game might be as difficult as declaring whether life was.
While I was mesmerized, Oona showed her typical impatience once she’d grasped the concept. Like a Noteless chasm, she’d glanced into the unusual thing and now wanted to get back to business, or have a drink and get laid, or whatever. It wasn’t that Oona wasn’t interested in infinity-she was, only just briefly. Possibly it was her ghostwriter’s instincts that made her wish to break the frame of the Escher drawing Biller and Perkus were elaborating before us, and examine it for fingerprints, find the human gist. “Biller,” she interrupted, “if you don’t mind my asking, how did all this admittedly marvelous virtual Communism buy you a real ocelot hat?” It was just like her to have nailed the breed of fur.
Biller understood her question perfectly, but he had to forage for language that would elucidate it to us one-worlders. “There’s a certain kind of stuff people like to collect,” he said. “They call it ‘treasure.’ It’s different from the other stuff in there, it isn’t easy to make. There’s a limit on how much you can make, and it takes a long time, people don’t like that. So you can buy someone else’s treasure, or you can steal it-”
“That’s what you do!” said Oona, exhilarated. “You’re a virtual thief. I love it.”
Biller shook his head, not insulted, just moving at a slower pace and unwilling to be hurried. “I manufacture treasure, and sell it. I’m a craftsman.”
“You mean you sell it to virtual people?” asked Oona.
“Real people,” said Biller. “They pay real money.”
“You’ve done awfully well for yourself.”
“I make good treasure. People pay a lot.”
“That’s what he was doing all that time in the alley,” said Perkus. “Making… virtual… treasure.” He seemed to find it pitiable.
“You mean you’re gainfully employed,” said Oona, not concealing disappointment, either. Here her radar for scandal wasn’t so unlike Perkus’s romance of dissidence-each was a little unthrilled at a secret life consisting of dull industry. Admittedly, this was something we all three had in common, for I’d surely done nothing in life except duck a day job.
Before Biller left he jotted down his new apartment’s address so Perkus could contact him, explaining that there was no telephone. Then he asked to use Perkus’s computer. We all shuffled in, assuming that we’d get some glimpse of Yet Another World, but after Perkus transferred his phone line, Biller instead logged on to the city’s Tiger Watch Web site. The monster had last been seen two days ago, on Sixty-eighth Street by a couple of Hunter undergraduates, rustling beneath an opened metal grating at a work site. There had been no casualties or damage, and the site ranked risk of an attack tonight as Yellow, or Low-to-Moderate. Biller sensed we were watching over his shoulder.
“I like to check before I go out.”
“That’s fine,” Perkus assured him.
“Do you want me to set up an alert on your desktop? It blinks if the code goes to Red.”
“That’s okay. I’m not online enough for it to matter.”
“Can you show us your… World?” said Oona.
“This computer’s too slow,” said Biller. He retopped his head with the ocelot, and was gone.
“I don’t want to worry anyone,” said Oona half an hour later, seemingly apropos of nothing, “but Biller’s little wonderland might eventually bring about the destruction of our universe.”
“Huh?” We’d been smoking marijuana, I’d been scheming on shifting Oona and myself out the door, shifting our evening to a more physical plane. Perkus had been auditioning CD tracks for us, airing rock groups he claimed as precursors to or missing links between other rock groups I’d never heard of. And I was confused before Oona had even spoken. When these evenings dragged into epics, I sometimes wished I could keep Perkus in better focus. Oona’s ferocities frequently nudged him to the margins here on his own main stage. But I had no option of asking her leave in order to be alone with Perkus, so I’d opt instead to remove her and myself. There were rewards.
“Have you heard of simulated worlds theory?” she asked both of us. “It’s something Emil Junrow was working on before he died, I actually wrote about it in I Can’t Quite Believe You Said That, Dr. Junrow.”
“Sure, I’ve heard of it,” said Perkus, voice conveying a defensive uncertainty. “What’s that got to do with Biller?”
“If you understand it, you must realize that the likelihood is that we’ll be shut down once we develop our own virtual worlds,” she said, plainly mocking. By using the word understand she meant to say she knew that Perkus, and certainly myself, didn’t.
“Please explain,” I said.
“Simulated worlds theory says that computing power is inevitably going to rise to a level where it’s possible to create a simulation of an entire universe, in every detail, and populated with little simulated beings, something like Biller’s avatars, who sincerely believe they’re truly alive. If you were in one of these simulated universes you’d never know it. Every sensory detail would be as complete as the world around us, the world as we find it.”
“Sure,” said Perkus. “Everybody knows that.” He tried to dismiss or encompass Oona’s description before she could complete it. “It’s common knowledge we could be living in a gigantic computer simulation unawares. I think science established that decades ago, for crying out loud. Your Junrow was-huh! — behind the curve on that one.”
“Right, right,” said Oona slyly. “But here’s the point. If we agree that the odds are overwhelming that it’s already happened, then we’re just one of innumerable universes living in parallel, a series of experiments just to see how things will develop. You know, whether we’ll end up destroying ourselves with nuclear weapons, or become a giant hippie commune, or whatever. There might be trillions of these simulations going on at once.”
“Why couldn’t we be the original?” I asked.
“We could be,” said Oona. “But the odds aren’t good. You wouldn’t want to bet on it.”
I didn’t protest to Oona that we felt like the original, to me. I knew she’d say that every fake universe would feel like the original, to its inhabitants. Yet everything around me, every tangy specific in the simulation in which I found myself embedded, militated against the suggestion that it was a simulation: the furls of stale smoke and gritty phosphenes drifting between my eyes and the kitchen’s overhead light, the involuntary memory-echo telling me one of the rock bands Perkus had played was called Crispy Ambulance, a throbbing hangnail I’d misguidedly gnawed at and now worked to ignore, the secret parts of Oona Laszlo I’d uncover and touch and taste within the hour, if my guess was right.