He tried to banish all negative thoughts like that from his mind. The SEAL commander, Fishman, kept saying freakish things like we create our own reality and the universe you live in is built and furnished by you and only you — you live what you create. That was a little too New Age for Pacino’s taste. At his core, he thought, he was a pragmatist, and all too often, pragmatists were mistaken for pessimists. Reality was what it was, he thought. Reality was as solid as a cold brick wall.
In the lockout chamber of the attack submarine USS Vermont, Lieutenant junior grade Elias “Grip” Aquatong reclined against the bulkhead, clad in a wetsuit, weight belt, scuba tanks, fins, his mask strapped on but up high on his head. His thighs were heavily laden with the non-lethal Mark 6 modified Taser, and the M4A1 carbine with attached grenade launcher, with his Sig Sauer 1911 .45 ACP pistol in a watertight container. His shins were strapped with two long K-Bar knives and the one his sister had bought him, a slender ten inch stiletto knife that would stop a man the size of a grizzly bear in his tracks. His weight belt was crowded with watertight containers of .45 ammo, grenades and the 5.56 mm ammo for the carbine. Guns are great, Commander Fishman had preached, but they’re useless without ammo. And in combat, ammo goes fast, and the battle goes to the party who brings more bullets to the fight. Aquatong put his hand on his belt and felt for that ammo, trying to reassure himself.
Commander Ebenezer “Tiny Tim” Fishman came up to him. “How you doin’, Grip?” he asked quietly, looking into Aquatong’s eyes.
Aquatong smiled. “I’m good this time, Skipper,” he said. “Not like last time. No need for your ‘simulation theory’ speech.” Fishman didn’t smile. “I’ll tell you what, though. I think the AOIC, Pacino, could benefit from it.”
Fishman thought for a moment, stroking his chin. “I’ll be back in ten,” he said.
On the passageway deck outside the lockout chamber, the entire Panther boarding party, with the exception of Lieutenant Anthony Pacino, slept. Chief Bernadette “Gory” Goreliki snored quietly next to Pacino. Pacino looked up to see the SEAL commander, Fishman, leaning over him.
“How you doin’, AOIC?” he asked.
Pacino squinted up at him, at first intending to give him the story Pacino was trying to make himself believe, that he was perfectly calm and unafraid, but that was so far from the truth that there was no way he could pull off that lie. Despite Spichovich’s warning about needing to learn to have a poker face and learn how to bluff credibly, Pacino thought this was a bad time to practice telling a bald-faced lie just to see if he could get away with it. What a world, he thought, where his homework assignment from his boss was to learn how to lie.
“The truth, Commander? I’m nervous as fuck.” His voice had trembled, just slightly. Pacino picked up his canteen and tried to unscrew the top, but his hands were shaking too hard. Fishman reached for the canteen.
“Totally understandable,” Fishman said, his voice low, gentle and reassuring as he unscrewed the canteen cap and handed it to Pacino, who took a drink, some of it spilling out of his mouth and running down the front of his black wetsuit. Fishman dropped to one knee and looked left and right at the sleeping Panther invasion crew, who all remained asleep. “I want to share something with you that might make this easier for you. Maybe it will lighten the load you’re carrying.”
Pacino looked at Fishman. “Anything you could do to make this easier for me, Commander, by all means, proceed.”
“Have you ever heard of the simulation theory?” Fishman asked.
“Sure,” Pacino said. “Ever since Elias Sotheby made it mainstream. We’re all living in a video game. This is all a simulation. A computer-generated quasi-reality. None of this is real. The one true god is a software engineer, watching what happens in this simulation. Of course I’ve heard of it. And it’s all bullshit.”
“But is it? Consider this,” Fishman said. “I believe the one thing in the universe that matters is a decision. Have you heard of the branch of analysis called ‘decision theory’?”
Pacino made a dismissive gesture. “I haven’t, but it sounds like a business school buzzword like ‘paradigm shift’ or ‘the new normal.’”
“Far from it, Mr. Pacino. Let me ask you a personal question. What was your last major decision? Your last life-changing decision?”
Pacino bared his teeth in what he thought was a tough expression. “To go back into the airlock of the Piranha after it got torpedoed. But that felt more like instinct than a conscious decision.”
“Exactly the point I’m about to make,” Fishman said. “Do you ever wonder what would have happened if you’d pushed yourself to the surface and saved your own life and just let the submarine sink without you?”
“Sure,” Pacino said. “A thousand times.”
“That,” Fishman said, “is exactly what I’m talking about. Alternate endings.”
“Alternate endings? I’m not sure what you mean.”
“Imagine, if you will, you’re a person who has lived a nice, safe life that ends when you’re ninety-five years old. Call that the ‘Base Life.’ And after you die, you go to the afterlife, and in that afterlife, you wonder about what would have happened if you had made different major decisions. Example, that bully on the school bus in third grade? What would your life be like if you’d punched him so hard he hit the deck, and all your classmates witnessed you being a badass and gave you a standing ovation?”
“Okay,” Pacino said uncertainly. “I guess I’m following you.”
“So, Mr. Pacino, imagine reality — for your life or any life — being a tree. Every time you make a major decision, you create two new branches of that tree. One branch is the decision you made and the reality you live as a result. The other decision leads to a different branch and its reality is completely different. If you look at this, with all the major decisions you make in life, that tree has thousands of branches. Yes?”
“I’m with you so far, Commander.” Pacino wondered where this was all going.
“So what you’re living right now, this is an alternate reality, played out to demonstrate to your soul, which is right now residing in the afterlife, what your life would have been like if you’d made a different decision. So, basically, the reality actually happened for your base life. But this?” Fishman gestured to the passageway and the sleeping Panther invasion force. “All of this? This is a digital simulation. A computer simulation. A video game. All constructed to demonstrate to your base life’s soul what would have happened if you made a different decision than what your base life had actually decided.”
“Whoa,” Pacino said. “So, this, none of this, is real?”
“It’s totally real,” Fishman said. “For us, in this version of reality, this is completely real. But for every reality we sense, there are ten thousand other realities going on at the same time, each one of those created out of a different decision.”