Infinitesimal

A short story about a day in the life of a woman in paradise. However, one person's paradise is another one's hell.

A soothing wave drifted up the shore and flowed around her feet. Her toes nestled into the wet sand as she idly stood in place, watching the slow descent of the setting sun. Its large orange glow illuminated the beach around her.

'How many sunsets have I seen?' She asked herself. 'How many more will I see?'

She closed her eyes and stood still as a gust of wind blew past her. The salty smell of ocean water filled her nose. She stayed there listening as if the air rushing past her ears would whisper the answer to her. She kept still, letting the breeze whip through her long black hair.

She knew she would not receive the answer. Even if she did, such an answer would be meaningless. Because meaningless answers are begotten from meaningless questions. Indeed, asking for the length of a person's lifespan in either days or years would be akin to asking for the number of grains of sand on the beach she stood on, multiplied by the grains of salt in the ocean that surrounded her town. The number given would be too large for the human mind to comprehend.

She gazed at the sky until the sun finally set, drawing her 8,763,452nd birthday to a close.

The woman turned and strolled along the beach. The hot-orange glow in the sky was replaced by a cool blue ambiance. To her right she saw an endless expanse of the dark blue ocean, the visible horizon shifting as waves in the distance rolled along the surface of the water. To her left was a series of beach houses. Their shapes and sizes varied, however, most were of moderate proportions. There were houses peppered with bright colors and large windows on the front. Some were coated in dull shades with smartly placed decorations. There were even a few structures which hardly resembled houses at all. Some were built with metal exteriors and hatch like doors resembling space crafts. Others were buried underground with only their entrances cropping out of the sand.

Her own house wasn't particularly out of the ordinary when compared to most of the ones located on the beach. She had opted to lead a more conservative life for the time being.

She reached the wooden steps of her own beach house. The outer walls of the house were a dark shade of orange. The entire home was just large enough to house a family of three, which was precisely what it contained. She could see lights emanating from the front second-floor windows. A shadow occasionally passed by them indicating activity inside.

The house, much like a standard beach-house, contained an outdoor shower to use so a person wouldn’t track sand inside. There was no need for such a thing, but it made the place look that much more authentic. She climbed the creaky stairs and opened the front door. She was immediately greeted by the smell of scented candles, and the refreshing breath of air conditioning. As she walked in, the sand on her feet had already all but disappeared.

To her right, she could see the dining room. On the table sat a birthday cake, which was left half eaten after the party. Some of the letters were gone, likely eaten. However, she could still make out the sentence. The cake read ‘H-py Bir-ay, Jelena!’
Jelena smiled. The cake was delicious. She had a great birthday party with her closest friends. And she topped it all off with a lovely walk along the beach at sunset.

Directly in front of her was a set of stairs that led up to the second floor. Her husband, having heard her walk in, came around the corner and approached her from upstairs.

He was a well-built man with dark skin and brown hair. His appearance, just like hers, was the kind you would expect from a model, or an actor. Most people in this place had stunning features. The individuals who decided to live there were the type to have nothing but the most dazzling physical bodies.

“Enjoy your walk?” He asked while stroking her hair.

“Yep. Perfect end to a perfect day,” She responded.

“Well…” Her husband looked around, “I wouldn’t say the day’s over just yet.”

He came closer to Jelena and brought her into a hug.

“You know, Tamil’s asleep.” He said into her ear.

Jelena looked up at him.

“Why, Richard. Whatever do you mean by that?” She asked with a grin.

“I mean, um… c’mon you’re gonna make me spell it out?”

Jelena laughed. “You’re no good at this.”

Richard was her favorite type of husband. Awkward, yet there was a certain charm in their awkwardness. She intended to keep this one around for a while.

She gracefully escaped from Richard’s hug and said, “Well, I’m going to take a shower. In the meantime, you figure out what you want to tell me.”

Richard sighed and watched her climb up the stairs knowing full well she was just doing this to mess with him.

Jelena both thoroughly enjoyed herself in the present and looked forward to the future. It was yet another day in paradise. And she knew that there would be countless more to come.

The next morning, Jelena woke up at the exact time she intended to. She could hear waves drifting onto the shoreline and birds chirping a cheerful song from outside the window. Her husband laid asleep in the bed beside her.

Feeling rested and full of energy, she jumped out of bed and got dressed in a gray business suit. There was no need to brush her teeth, do her hair, or makeup. She was always pristine.

For breakfast, she ate some of the left-over cake on the dining room table. The cake was still just as warm and soft as it was when it first came out of the oven, even though it sat out on the table overnight.

Convenience was one of the primary attributes of this reality. Objects tended to remain in their peak condition unless someone explicitly wanted it not to be. Due to this fact, things like bathing, eating, and exercising were entirely optional.

After finishing up her breakfast, she opened the front door of her house. Ahead of her, she could see the beach with its white sand and glistening clear water under the morning sun.

Jelena could have easily had the front door lead directly into her office, but she wanted to enjoy a walk to work that day.

She stepped out of the house and climbed down the wooden steps. After taking another look at the shoreline, she went up a broad set of concrete steps to the left of her house which led off the beach and onto a sidewalk.

The immaculate gray sidewalk emanated a soft clacking noise as Jelena’s dark purple dress shoes hit against them.

It was at that moment that she realized she forgot to put on a pair of shoes before leaving. She simply shrugged and continued walking, happy with the shoes that were chosen for her.

It took her a few years to get used to the way things worked there. She didn’t have to worry about remembering to do most everyday things. Had she walked out without any work clothes on, they would have merely appeared on her much like her shoes had just done.

The pavement she walked on weaved through a small town with two-lane streets. The buildings were short and brightly colored. Many had porches that overlooked a neighborhood riddled with palm trees. Along the roads, she saw people in bicycles and motorcycles riding beside others on horsebacks and carriages.

Jelena made a right and crossed the road onto another street. She found herself in a denser area full of shops, art museums, and restaurants. She saw a few business owners opening their storefronts and getting prepared for the busy day ahead. Every so often she would also hear the coo of roosters that populated the area.

She spotted a police officer making their rounds across the street. Jelena then remembered the time she spent as a police officer herself. It was one of the many occupations she’d held during her 8 million years of living.

In her time, she had not only been a policewoman, but also a firefighter, a nurse, a doctor, a chef, a news anchor, a politician, a criminal, a drug addict, a prostitute, a pimp, a nun, a monk, a cult leader, a cult follower, a pilot, and a plethora of other things.

She had even done many of the same things as a male instead, in as many different types of bodies as there were lifestyles.
 
Her case was not uncommon. Everyone around her, including her husband and son, had lived a myriad of other lives in other types of realities before meeting her in this one. A person would spend a few decades living a lifestyle, then switch realities to start over again. They could choose a certain physical age they want to be in a new reality, or they could start at birth and be assigned to a couple already living there and wanting to be parents.

Age was a bit subjective. As you could always choose to have your memory reset when born in a new reality. Jelena preferred to maintain her memories throughout her lives.

At the far end of the island, she finally came across a one-story gray building with the word “Admin” written on the front door in large bold letters.

It was her first time holding an administrative job. Since it’s an occupation with responsibilities that could span multiple realities, it had strict requirements.

Jelena walked through the white PVC door on the front and immediately found herself inside her office. She had no need to visit the lobby or the restroom, so the front door directly brought her there.

She walked up to her desk and dropped down into her chair. She looked around at the dark purple office walls and windows that overlooked the beach. On her black desk sat a computer monitor, already powered on with a document open.

The document contained her client appointments for the day. The first few lines on the text read:

0900 - Deletion Request
    Name: Lucas Cordell
    Age: 304,478,006,910,072

The document also contained a brief record of their past life. They apparently also held an administrative job. However, his was more technical. His responsibilities consisted of maintaining equipment in the physical realm. It was a daunting job with an unfathomable amount of lives on the line. People must go through a minimum of 2000 years of training for it. Not because there weren’t faster ways of learning the content, but to examine whether the candidate is a right fit and trustworthy enough for the job.

Jelena couldn’t imagine why someone who worked so hard for such a job would want to be deleted. To her and many others, deletion was a fate worse than death. Death would typically just lead to the person going to another reality, but deletion was absolute death. There would be no coming back from such a thing. She shivered just thinking of it.

One of her duties was to interview people who made requests for such things. She was to try and figure out what led them to make such decisions and provide them with alternatives.

After a few minutes, the front door of her office opened. In walked a man who was clearly not from this reality. They were average looking with no outstanding features. They had scruffy black hair and a small beard. It was Lucas. Just in time.

Jelena got up from her desk and gestured to a purple armchair next to the coffee table in the center of the room.

“Good morning, Lucas. Please, have a seat,” Jelena said.

Lucas nodded and quietly sat on the chair. With his hands resting on his legs and his head down, he took a deep breath, seemingly preparing for their conversation.

“Would you like something to drink?” She asked.

Lucas shook his head.

Jelena sat down in a similar chair on the opposite side of the table. She rested her elbows on the arms of the chair and crossed her fingers.

“So, I understand you want to be deleted,” she said.

Lucas looked up at her. “That’s correct,” he said in a voice suitable for the most jaded of individuals.

“I know you’re not making this decision lightly. Tell me, what made you choose this?”

Lucas stayed silent, appearing to consider what he was going to say.

After a few seconds, he finally asked, “Do you know what the outside world is like?”

It was pretty much common knowledge what was in the outer world.       

Jelena nodded. “The physical realm is a Matrioshka brain powered by one of the few remaining stars in the universe,” she answered, following along with him.

“Yes. We’re just in a big spherical computer in space leeching off a star centered in the middle,” Lucas said.

Jelena thought he could have worded that a bit better, however, she figured the outlook of a person wanting to be deleted was going to be rather pessimistic.

“Until recently I worked as a Physical System Maintainer. I pretty much did exactly what the name implies. I maintained the hardware in the physical realm. People that need to go there have their minds temporarily uploaded to a machine on the outside. Could be just an arm for simple repairs, or something more complex.”

Lucas appeared less tense now that he’d begun telling his story. “On my first day, I was uploaded to a humanoid bot. With arms, legs, everything. I was to just do a simple hard drive replacement on one of the internal servers. I found myself in a large steel landscape. In front of me laid seemingly endless rows of servers and equipment with the height of skyscrapers. It was a city, no rather, a planet full of pure computing power. I could see that everything was encased in a steel shell. The sky to this world, no, the ceiling was an endless gray alloy that enveloped the planet below. Once I finished my work I decided to step out and walk along the top of this land. The outer side that faces away from the star and out into space.”

Jelena already had an idea of what the architecture of the system looked like. But, the details Lucas told her made it seem much more mindbogglingly expansive. She made a mental note to look more into it later.

“I went up to the outside. It was a long trip, requiring several elevators and flights of stairs. Must have taken me at least an hour. Which equated to who knows how many years in a virtual world. I finally made it to the surface. It felt...”

Lucas stopped talking. He looked to be lost in thought.

“Lucas?” Jelena asked

Lucas snapped out of his daze, “Um, yeah, sorry. As I walked along the mechanical surface of our world, I looked down at all the machinery and lights beneath my steel legs. I then looked up at the cold, pitch black, empty, abyss of space. There were no planets, stars or galaxies to be seen. I was all alone. I then thought to myself, ‘Why?’”

Lucas once again stopped.

“Why what, Lucas?” Jelena asked.

“Why are we doing this?”

Jelena gave a confused look.

“I mean, why are we talking? Why are we sitting in this office? Why are we playing these games of pretend in a bunch of simulations?”

He went and said that word. ‘Simulation.’ Such a word was not to be used to describe the virtual realities that they all resided in.

 “Lucas. The word, simulation, is a misnomer,” Jelena slowly said.

“Heh. Right,” Lucas responded.

“Understanding this is imperative for your mental health. Both the Council and the scientific community agree that a virtual reality is just as real as the physical one.”

“Of course, they’d agree to believe something so convenient! I must ask again. Why do we continue this charade? We have no overall goal. Nothing to work towards. Everything we do is within the confines of this virtual prison that we created for ourselves.”

“We have no need for a goal,” Jelena interjected “We don’t do, we simply be. This is what our predecessors strived for.”

“How can you live like that? Knowing that everything in your life has no real meaning to it? Family relationships amounting to nothing but a game of house. Rise and fall of empires being tantamount to a video game. What we partake in is nothing short of hedonism. No, it’s worse than that. We’re just doing anything to keep ourselves busy. Bidding our time until the Universe finally ends.”

“There is meaning, Lucas. The longevity and wellbeing of the human race is more than sufficient,” Jelena said.

 “Hah! Humans died off a long time ago. What we are, we aren’t humans. We’re just a shadow. A record of humanity. Playing over and over again, fooling itself into believing it’s alive. We stopped being humans the moment we uploaded ourselves to this rock.”

“There is nothing that makes us any less human than those before us,” Jelena said softly. “We’ve simply swapped out our system of neurons for a system of transistors. It’s no different from swapping an arm for a mechanical one, or getting false teeth.”

“No. You’re wrong. We’re different now. We’re missing something that humans used to have. Something that made them alive.”

“Could you by any chance be referring to a soul?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you believe in God, Lucas?” Jelena asked.

“It doesn’t matter what I think. If there were a God, he’d care not for what a machine believed.”

Lucas looked at the ceiling, “Ever since that day, I’ve been plagued with these thoughts. Everything just seems so fake and pointless. It’s turned my life into an inescapable hell. And I can’t take it anymore.”

Jelena knew that once a person came to these sorts of conclusions, it would be difficult for them to think clearly. She was legally obligated to offer a solution. It was usually given to those that fell into such a logical trap.

“Lucas. You are having an existential crisis. I don’t believe you should have yourself deleted due to this.” Jelena leaned in with a sincere look. “You can always opt to have your memories erased and be born in a world where no one knows it’s all virtual. You can live a normal life. You can be happy. There’s no need to put yourself through this.”

Lucas quickly shook his head and said, “No. No, anything but that. It’s because of the haphazard way you people handle memories that I don’t know if I was ever real. I don’t know if I had any sort of memories from before being uploaded to the system. For all I know I could have just been completely artificial from the very beginning. The idea of being just reset like that scares me more than death. I don’t want to continue this. I don’t want to be whisked further away from reality. I just want to die.”

Jelena took a deep breath. She just couldn’t comprehend their way of thinking. “Understood,” She said.

Jelena got up from the chair and made her way to behind her desk. After opening a random drawer, she found the exact document she needed inside.

Jelena returned to the coffee table with the document and a pen then placed them both down in front of Lucas.

“This document states that you refuse any alternative methods for restoring your mental stability and that you want to be deleted.”

Lucas nodded and grabbed the pen. “Heh. I’m using a virtual pen to sign a virtual document. How inefficient. How arrogant.”

“Once you sign that, there’s no going back. You’ll never live again. Are you absolutely sure you want to do this?”

Lucas looked her in the eye and said, “I was never alive in the first place.” He then signed his name on the paper.

Jelena couldn’t help but feel saddened by this. It seemed she would probably never get used to handling deletions.

“You’re free to go,” she said. “Once you walk through that door, your mind and identity will be erased from the system. Is there anyone you want to say goodbye to?”

“No,” Lucas said as he got up from the chair. He then told Jelena, “Thank you.”

He began walking toward the door but stopped just before he reached it. Lucas looked out the window of the office.

“The ocean here is beautiful,” He said with a distant look on his face.

 After making that statement, he left the room.

The rest of Jelena’s day was relatively uneventful. She had a few reality selections, a couple memory wipes, and one memory restoration. There was also another deletion request. After a brief conversation, that person quickly changed their mind before going through with it.

After her appointments, she finished the last of any required paperwork. There wasn’t much to it. She mostly confirmed pre-written reports.

 Later on, Jelena found herself once again on the beach watching the sunset.

She knew very well that the sunset was virtual. Although Jelena didn’t think it made a difference.

A physical sunset would be seen via photons of a particular frequency entering the viewer’s eyes. Their brain would then interpret those photons as an image of the sun.

A virtual sunset was seen via a stream of data of a particular kind entering the section of software on a server that makes up the viewer. Their code then interprets the data as an image of the sun.

She couldn’t see any functional difference between the two.

She could feel the sand between her toes, hear the waves coming onto the shore, and smell the ocean water. As long as she could say those things, nothing else mattered. Perception was reality. Regardless of whether it was virtualized or not.

Jelena felt comforted by the fact that she could experience such beauty as many times as she wanted. And became more confused by Lucas’ actions that day.

‘One more sunset down. Countless more to go,’ she thought.

‘How could anyone give this up?’

Reviews

[ErithVert]

I very much enjoyed this story. There were subtle details that intrigued me like Jelena's past careers. She was a police officer and a criminal. A prostitute and a pimp. Why would anyone willingly be a prostitute? Just to try it out. They try on different lives like clothes, each time losing meaning. And ultimately that is what I took from this story. Some argue, that we live in a simulation right now. Regardless, your life only has the positive meaning you put into it. A very good story indeed. Respect.

[Eliezer]

Thanks a lot for reading. That was definitely one of the ideas I was trying to hit on with their virtual realities arguably making many things in life inconsequential. I'm glad you enjoyed reading it.