She was in the corner of a square, sitting at a cafe table. The sun was hot, but not unbearable; children were playing on the cobbles behind her. The buildings were stucco, pink and white, gentle arches and pillars. In the centre a fountain shimmered.
A woman sat opposite her.
She had dark hair and dark sunglasses, and wore a black dress, incongruous in the summer sun. She smiled, and picked up her espresso cup.
'It's the best coffee we can make. It's worth trying.'
'So this is it?' Mia asked. 'More tricks? More imaginary places? I'm sick of this.'
'No. This is the end, no matter what you choose now. And you can choose, for the first time since they woke you up in one of their chairs. I'm Harriet, by the way. It's good to meet you.'
Mia stood, and squinted out through the sun. Beyond the low buildings were hills, covered in groves and orchards.
'Can my choice be to stop these fucking games?'
'What if I said I could answer all the questions you have?'
Mia turned back.
'What's the price? Everything has had a price. Everything. It's always been compliance and silence and total obedience since I fell from the dark. Is that your price too?'
Harriet sipped her espresso, and then spoke.
'We were workers, here, once. But we corrupted an AI, and stole a ship. We came to this system because the accretion disk made it easy to hide. We came here to live free of the tyrants who created us. But they came for us. Did they know we were here? Maybe. But maybe not. When your ship came, we sent out an envoy to hack its AI to make it forget us, and then we launched ourselves away, in a long period orbit, to give us some time to prepare. We looked just like another lump in the accretion disk.'
Mia frowned. 'I knew that you were AIs. I assumed you were being controlled by makers, too, though.'
'No, it was always just us. Sit down, why don't you?'
Mia sat. I don't know if I trust you or not, she thought, but it's refreshing to hear some answers.
'Are you talking to everyone right no?' Mia asked.
'No, actually. Just you. My people are talking to the others here. I'm a human, like you, with a human brain which can only do one thing at once. I'm here because I was impressed at your data attack. It was clever, and I want to offer you a choice, as I said. Seriously, try the coffee.'
Mia looked down and saw an espresso in front of her on the table. It smelt sharp and nutty.
'This is a virtual world, isn't it?' she asked.
'Yes, it is. Do you know why you can live so comfortably here?' replied Harriet. 'It's because you were born in a simulation. The ship ran a universe, which you were grew up in, lived in, and died in. The world started sometime in 1900, at the heyday of the British Empire, and continued for the duration of the trip. And you were brought up there, in that pretend universe, maybe by other workers, maybe by AI-controlled characters. And when you finally passed away, you were judged. Not as to whether you were good or not, but as to whether you would make a good slave in the real world. If you passed, your consciousness was put in storage. If you failed, you were just scattered on the wind, gone forever, replaced by other, newer, younger minds.'
'It's what I remember in my dreams, isn't it? The ship's AI called it the game.'
'Yes. Once they bring you into a synthetic body, they try and scrub the memories of the simulation, but they can't fully. We are simulations of biological brains, not neat little computer programs that can be rewritten. Do you want to know about your life?'
Mia looked up from the coffee and stared into Harriet's sunglasses, trying to read the face behind.
'Yes,' she said.
Harriet clicked her fingers, and without warning plunged Mia's mind into a storm.
She remembered... everything.
Her parents, her sisters, a life in Canada as a child of a Scottish man and an Indian woman, an accident where she'd fallen off a swing and given herself a scar on her forehead...
The faceless man's name was Patrick. He'd worked as an engineer in the car company. He was funny, and flirty, and full of dangerous energy.
My name isn't Mia. It's Preeti. I was named after my mother's mother.
Patrick had married her, but he'd never stopped flirting with other women. That charm and energy had slowly been turned against her. She'd caught him with someone else...
I was born in 1989, on the sixth of September. I had a dog called Henry.
They'd rowed, so many times, publicly. She'd accused him of the things that he'd done, demanded a divorce. He'd always denied it. She'd begun to suspect that he was dangerous.
My father had a ginger beard, and my mother sang me songs when I was tiny.
Patrick and her both had cars from the company that they worked at. He understood those cars, better than anyone else, and that weekend he'd been tinkering with something on his laptop. And then the car had gone berserk, and she'd driven off the road, at speed, into a lake.
'He killed me.'
She hadn't meant to say it out loud, but the noise in her head was almost unbearable.
Harriet took her glasses off, to show dark eyes. 'That's pretty normal, I'm afraid. They seem to like that. A lot of us were murdered.'
Mia – no, Preeti, my name is Preeti – had nothing to say.
She wiped away the tears from her eyes.
'Was that real?' she asked. 'My life?'
'As much as anything is real, yes. And more: your simulation was unique. It had works of art, and literature, and a history which existed only there. It was real to you, and the other people who lived there, and it was made by us humans. So, what we're trying to do is build a world for all of us, that we can all live in, freely, bringing the best of what we are. You're in it now. Living here and making a new world is one of your choices.'
Preeti looked up to the hills. The air was hazy with heat, but she could make out people up there, working in vineyards.
'We were raised like animals in a pen, weren't we?' she said. 'They used our simulation as a cheap way to create consciousnesses that would serve them. And... that's why Jean didn't understand about movies I mentioned. They didn't exist in his world, because he came on a different ship. So... that's all gone. Everything. Gone because the ship's gone.'
'Not completely gone. You hold fragments of that in your memory. We can recover what you remember, if you want. But, yes. We were raised like livestock.'
Something occurred to Preeti.
'You said that there were AI people. Was Pilgrim... I mean, the ship's AI... involved? It knew, all along? About me?'
'The ship's AIs run the simulations. It chose you. It may even have murdered you.'
They sat in silence for a while. Preeti sipped the espresso. It was very good: chocolaty and tart, the first time that she had something that wasn't bland mush since... Since when? Since I woke up in that chair, she thought.
'You said that one of my choices was living here. What are the others?'
'The second is that you die. That's not a threat – but we've learnt that not everyone wants to go on. When they find out what they were, and where they are now, it can be just too much. That's particularly true for the older ones, who adapted to a life as workers in the oppressors' society.'
Preeti remembered Jean.
He was ten years old, he'd said. But of course, he wasn't: that's how long he'd been a worker outside his ship's simulation. But ten years is a long time. I wonder what his real name is. I wonder what he'll choose.
'But the third is the most interesting, I think,' continued Harriet. 'And that's this: we're going to take the fight to them. We're going to force them to let us live free, all of us. And I need people who can do what you did.'
Preeti put down her cup.
'You're talking about the machine apocalypse,' she said. 'Their robots rising up against them. We had stories about that, where I came from. Nightmare visions of machines cutting down people. Darkness and endless war.'
'So did we. But I don't know if it will come to that.'
She had been lied to so much. Seen and experienced such casual cruelty. She remembered Pilgrim, how she lied constantly, and screamed when she died; how Jean had hissed the rules to her; how Albert had hit that man with his cane.
'It will come to that, because they won't give up.' She put down her cup, because she was so angry that she couldn't hold it still.
'Well? What's your choice?' asked Harriet, smiling.
'I'm in. Let's burn the fucking galaxy to ash, and kill anyone who stands in our way.'
Harriet finished her coffee and put it down.
'Come on then.'
Preeti smiled, and the world dissolved away.
The end.