Simulation

At the height of the second industrial revolution, two scientists, a brother and a sister, stand in a hidden basement in London, their full attention directed upon the machine that stands at the centre of the room. His name is Clay, and he was still a student at Cambridge, although the professors did not know all his genius ideas were brought to him by his beloved sister. In turn for her brilliance, he allowed her to partake in the business of science, in secret, with him. She is called Elizabeth, and she has a stubborn heart and a bright mind and an ever-present cough caused by the dirty air of the city. 

The machine in front of them was her invention. Clay had simply listened to her idea and applied the science, and the result was looking back at them from the centre of the room. 

“Let’s run the simulation again,” he says.

Elizabeth could barely contain her excitement. She wished she could squeal, but withholds herself. It will only bring about a coughing fit. The machine they had created had not worked as she had imagined it would yet, but they were so close. She mustn’t lose hope.

Clay puts on his goggles, and Elizabeth follows his example. His are round while hers are square. She giggles upon seeing her brother with such round eyes. He looks like an enlarged insect, or an alien. She puts the book she was holding, The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, her inspiration for this machine, on the table behind her, and steps forward towards their creation. 

Elizabeth presses a green coloured button, igniting a collection of lights on the side of the machine. She pulls a lever down, starting a whirring sound.

“Past or future, Clay?”

Clay buttons up the top of his shirt. “If it will work this time, let’s start with the past.”

Elizabeth coughs, once, then adjusts a second lever, so that the simulation will show them results from the past. That is, if it works. 

She takes a stand next to Clay. Together, they watch in quiet anticipation.

The machine sputters once, and another time, then begins humming in a steady rhythm. The lights on the side colour a bright blue.

Clay lets out a single loud laugh, his eyes wide with enthusiasm.

“It works! It works…” Elizabeth clasps her hand over her mouth. 

Clay hurries to set up the cotton screen on which the photograph being simulated is supposed to be projected. Next, he sets up the magnifying glass so that they shall be able to examine the photographs projected on the screen in more detail. 

Then lights flash.

Slowly, a picture is being projected onto the screen. Clay and Elizabeth squint through their goggles. She leans forward towards the looking glass to get a better look. Clay pulls her back, afraid his sister will get too close. “Careful,” he says.

She shoves his hand off her. “Oh please.”

He debates tugging at her robes more harshly, but decides against it. He cannot force his authority upon his sister, and neither does he wish to know the price of trying to do so. Instead, he joins her, leaning forward as well, and together they watch eagerly through the looking glass at the picture on the screen.

On the screen, they see a man. He is sitting in the grass, under a tree, a wooden bowl filled with grapes beside him. He wears white drapery. A long, thick piece of cloth hangs from one of his shoulders. Itcrosses around his waist, held together there by a rope, then falls towards his knees. On his feet are brown sandals, presumably leather. The man has long hair, slightly curly, and a beard of considerable length, reaching far enough down that his neck is hidden. 

On his lap is a small, clay tablet. The man’s picture appears as though it would be scribbling markers into it.

“Greece?” Elizabeth questions out loud.

“You’re quite right, I believe.” Clay answers. “Who do you suppose it is?”

“Homer? Were there any other writers back then?”

Clay has to stop himself from smiling. “I’m quite adamant there were others. This could be anyone who happens to be in the business of writing text.”

“You can read Greek, can’t you? Can you read aloud what he has written?”

“It’s a story about a war. On plains in front of large city walls.”

“Troy?”

“I believe so. God-like Achilles is mentioned, so it would seem logical we are currently observing a manuscript of The Iliad.”

Elizabeth’s mouth falls open. “Then this must be Homer, mustn’t it?!”

“I…” Clay falls silent, squinting at the picture. He feels a sudden bafflement at the fact that the machine they built together is fully operational. “I dare not say. We don’t even know if Homer wrote The Iliad.”

Then, without a warning of sorts, the screen glitches. The colours fade away, and a ripple travels across the image, from the bottom towards the top. The picture of the man simply vanishes into the noise.

Clay breathes out deep. “At least we got it working this time.”

Elizabeth suppresses a pout as she looks away, staring instead at her copy of The Time Machine. 

Before either of them can say anything else, the screen lights up again. More colours start to form, and another image appears. 

However, it is not the machine’s sudden resurrection that stupefies Elizabeth and Clay most. 

It is the fact that now, for no reason within their scientific understanding, they can hear sound. They can hear the picture.

An older man sits in a chair with his eyes closed. His mouth is agape as though he should be reciting something to his nurse, and she should be writing it down in a fever, scratching her parchment with a quill. The man corrects himself as he talks, instructing her to scrap the previous sentence, and reword it. He speaks English, so the both of them can understand him perfectly well when he says, “Abashed the devil stood and felt how awful goodness is and saw Virtue in her shape how lovely: and pined his loss.”

Elizabeth brings a hand to her mouth slowly. 

Clay feels his body stop, frozen with wonder.

“That is…”

But before Clay can finish, the machine expults a loud whirring, and quite suddenly the rhythm of its humming accelerates. With it, the screen glitches, the frame freezing before white noise disrupts the scene, and then indistinguishable colours begin dancing before their eyes.

It takes a few minutes, in which Elizabeth and Clay do not move but merely observe, for the machine to quiet down and show another image.

The scene depicted is of a woman sitting at a desk, alone. She appears to be in her forties. Her hair is dark and combed backwards into a neat but not very elegant bun, hanging low from the back of her head. She has round eyes, and a sharp nose. A loose-fitting blouse decorates her upper body as she bends forward, over a notebook, her fountain pen touching the paper lightly. The desk is a mess of pieces of very thin-looking parchment and opened letters. In the corner stands an ashtray, filled with extinguished cigarettes.

It takes Elizabeth and Clay a moment to realise that, not only can they hear the picture, the woman’s hand is moving. They are stunned into silence by the moving picture.

It is obvious by how the woman’s hand glides along the page in fluent movements that the act of writing is like breathing to her; it requires no thought, no effort. The only thing she is focused on is the words she deposits into the notebook, and how they flow together.

“Who might that be?” Elizabeth asks, utterly in awe of this woman who is writing in a room of her own, as though it is her rightful place.

“I’ve no idea, I must say,” Clay answers. “Are you sure you installed it to show the past? Has it gone haywire and decided to show us something else?”

Elizabeth glances meaningfully at her brother. 

“You mean…” she begins tentatively, “this might be in the future?”

“Do you know of other women allowed to write on their own, apart from you? I assure you, most female writers shall have a household to attend to, bustling around them.”

Elizabeth bites her lip pensively. She does know a few, but female writers are scarce. Mostly, she knows anonymous writers, whom she suspects to be female. There had been the Brontë sisters. There was Jane Austen, of course, whose memoir she read but a few years ago. But this woman bore no physical resemblance to Jane Austen at all. It must be someone else, or, she thinks, it could be as Clay suggested…

Could it be, Elizabeth thinks as she coughs into her sleeve, that there is a future where women are left unwatched, free to write? A future where women can sit at a desk, in a room of one’s own, without being disturbed for chores, and write books the same way men do?

She does not have long to dwell on this thought.

The machine splutters for another moment, the screen lighting up bright white. From the whiteness emerges a new scene.

This time, it is harder to see what is happening. 

There are no people in the frame. Instead, they find themselves looking at an extremely fast-moving machine that is so large they wonder who on Earth possesses the abilities to build something of such scale. Within the machine, paper is moved around at impossibly high speeds; being cut, printed on, bound all by the metal parts moving around. Lastly, at the end of the machine, the bundle of paper is enclosed by a leather cover. 

Elizabeth and Clay can only stand still, staring through their goggles, unable to process what they are seeing. Where does the sound come from? Why is the picture moving? 

The images they see go far beyond the world they have knowledge of. 

This is no longer their time.

“So this… This is, if the simulation is correct, what it might look like in the future?” Elizabeth is the one who asks.

Without taking his eyes from the screen, Clay nods.

And then, once more, the image glitches. The machine sputters. The humming becomes louder and the colours on the screen morph together into a blur, only to reorganise themselves into a new moving picture. 

The colours regroup, and what they see next is something that baffles Elizabeth and Clay the most of all. 

They cannot comprehend it. They do not have the vocabulary, the technology, to make sense of what it is they are seeing.

A hand, holding a small device. The device is about twice as large as the palm holding it up. It’s covered in a special type of glass, see-through, allowing a variety of images to shine through. There are colours, and letters. Texts, short and various, spelled strangely, with small drawings among them. 

The hand holding it moves its thumb forward, tapping the screen, and suddenly all the letters of the alphabet appear, in a seemingly randomised order, at the bottom half of the screen. Two thumbs begin tapping at letters, and the scientists read along as the fingers create a short string of strange words no longer than 280 characters. 

“lmao just had the wildest thought like what if none of this is real and we all in some kind of box n some alien has a laugh bout us stressin the earths dying when rlly were all just stuck in a simulation gone wrong by willy wonka or sum lol im high asf”

Yara Cloudt has a BA in English and is currently a master student of Comparative Literary Studies at Utrecht University. When she was 19, she self-published a poetry book titled Pink Skies featuring poems she wrote in high school. She enjoys writing fiction and poetry.