Obelus (ONC 2020)

Chapter 12

After checking on the army of bots to ensure that they had, in fact, been deactivated, the two boys sat on the floor of the control room, leaning back against two supercomputers, staring at one another across the way.

"What do we do now?" Lopez asked after a few minutes.

Eli sighed.  Now that was a loaded question.

"I guess we decide whether or not to wake everyone up," he answered.

"I thought that was a given."

Eli frowned, hating how Genesis had infected his brain despite Eli's best efforts to discredit his reasoning. "I'm not so sure it is. I mean, is that really the right thing to do? To force people to live in a world that isn't livable?"

Lopez studied his face, then shrugged.   "Are you sure there's no way to survive out there? Like...there's got to be at least one place on earth that's habitable, right?"

"Genesis did mention that there were survivors, but he said they were criminals. Savages.  He didn't paint a very sweet picture of the outside."

Lopez smirked. "Unless that robot managed to render all 10 billion of us comatose, I highly doubt every survivor is rabid, E. Plus, even if that were the case, there's enough oxygen and food and water here to last us the rest of our lives, right? He was equipped to keep us healthy in those simulations. That means there's an indoor garden here, or at the very least, a big stock of nutrient mush."

"Yeah...but is a liquid diet really worth abandoning paradise? I mean, who would choose this?"

"You did," Lopez pointed out. "And besides. You can't give them a choice if they don't know what choices they have to begin with. If they hate it so much here, they can always go back."

The argument was similar to what Eli had posed just hours earlier, but it felt different now that he was sitting here with the life-altering decision at his fingertips. He felt the need to weigh the consequences a little more closely.

"It's not that easy. Once you wake up...going back isn't so simple," Eli said.  "I wake them up, and they'll have to deal with this grim reality, Ted. Grieve their loved ones who didn't make it into the experiment.  Isn't that kind of cruel?"

Lopez looked at him sadly, a deep understanding there in his eyes, and Eli was so glad to have him here, to have someone share this burden with.  He knew it was selfish, but he wasn't sure he could do this without his best friend. 

"At least their grief will be real. I had it pretty good, but now that I know it was all just fantasy, I'm glad you woke me up. I don't even know if my family is alive, but knowing that the family there was fake?  Fake love and affection? False memories? I would never want to go back." He swallowed thickly. "Not everyone will feel that way.  But humanity can't just...fizzle out like this. If we go out, we have to go out fighting. Or what's the point?"

Eli closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the supercomputer—the gentle vibration strangely soothing. He didn't want to make this decision for everyone.  But he couldn't just leave them there to die in a simulation, could he?

How did he even know he'd truly escaped the simulated reality?  What if he wasn't even out?

"What if this isn't real either? What if we're just inside another simulation?" he wondered aloud, opening his eyes to gauge his friend's reaction.

"Then we'll escape this one too," Lopez said confidently. He cracked a lopsided smile. "But let's take it one step at a time, yeah?"

Eli snorted, extremely grateful for Teddy's sense of humor at a time when laughter shouldn't be possible. Then again, Teddy had always been there to make him laugh, to make him smile. Reality or not, his friend was there to be his mental backboard, his cheerleader, his shoulder to cry on.