Obelus (ONC 2020)

Chapter 3

Eli moved through campus in a daze.

He'd woken up from his nightmare in a cold sweat and spent the rest of the night Googling common dream meanings and phobias.  He'd ended up in the dark recesses of the pseudoscience Interwebs, but even then, he couldn't find what he was looking for.

It was almost like the information had been privatized.

Or locked, his lizard brain mused.

He padded into his humanities lecture fifteen minutes late, barely registering the professor's huff of irritation.  He did, however, notice the look of absolute horror on his friend's face.

"¡Ay!" Lopez whisper-shouted, tipping his chair back onto solid ground like a normal person.  "What happened to you? You look worse than yesterday."

Eli slipped off his backpack and sat down, facing his friend, his partner in crime, his confidant.  "Okay.  So like.  Have you ever wondered if this—our world and everything around us—is even...like...real?"  He licked his lips.  "What if we're all just...I don't know...brains in jars reacting to external stimuli?  Or what if this whole thing is just a virtual reality?"

Lopez looked him over critically.  Then he sighed and reached for his thermos. "I need more bean juice for this, Plato."

"I know you're being sarcastic, but Plato is extremely relevant."

"Of course he is." 

Eli ducked closer, furtive.  "I had this super vivid dream last night, and it felt...it felt real."

"Don't they always feel that way?"

Eli's gaze dipped to the desk and Teddy's notes.  The boy had doodled all over his margins—expelling his boundless energy onto paper in the form of sports logos and offensive caricatures.   "No, this was different, Teddy.  I was in this strange place on a table with all these tubes connected to me and this weird device on my head." Just thinking about it sent a shudder through his body, brushing across nerve endings and scraping them raw.  "It was like I was in cryosleep or something.  A simulation."

Lopez tried to school his features, but Eli could see the smile pulling at the firm line of his mouth.  "Like The Matrix?"

"Yeah, I guess." Eli frowned at the idiot's tickled expression.  "This wasn't just a nightmare about a movie franchise, Ted.  I'm not kidding around.   I woke up somewhere else." 

Lopez sighed, clearly unconvinced.  "Alright, alright, I'll indulge you."  He waved his pen at the rest of the room. "If this was all some simulation built to keep us distracted or satisfied or whatever, then why isn't it some perfect utopia?"

"What are you saying?"

"I mean, I live at home with my parents and their devil spawn children. I'm probably going to get deported and never see you again. Meanwhile, you lost your dad, and you never speak to your mom. People are dying all over the place." Lopez shook his head. "Why create a reality like that?  Why create a world where we're bound to question the meaning of life and suffering and then kill each other when we don't arrive at the same conclusions?  What's the point?"

Eli shifted in his seat, glancing at the professor pacing at the other end of the room. He lowered his voice. "Maybe it's an experiment of some kind, you know?  A test to see how we address different situations.  Or maybe that conflict exists to make us appreciate how good we have it."

Lopez rolled his eyes.  "That's what my abuela says to justify god's actions."

"Except I'm not talking about an omnipotent, omnibenevolent being pulling on the strings of fate. What if it's our own minds creating these projections?  Or what if it's something else?"