# Deal's Worth Part 13 of 22 (1,647 words) "On the sixtieth second, all custom signals to your brain stop for eight hours. Your avatar freezes in place, though the world around it keeps running as normal — which means many simulation-years will pass while you're out. Afterward the signals resume automatically and your avatar unfreezes. You can use the method whenever you need it. You should experience a great many years before exhaustion sets in, though I'll admit we're uncertain how quickly mental fatigue actually accumulates under these conditions". "Pinky. To bellybutton. For a full minute". "The gesture is arbitrary. Every gesture is arbitrary". "You could have made it a salute". "Someone in engineering found this funnier". --- The entity spoke once more, and this time there was no lightness in it anywhere. "Understand what the Simulation is, because people romanticize it and the romance causes problems later. It exists solely through human-made computer technology. Every human being and everything humans produce can only ever be external stimuli to that technology. Musical or articulated sound has never been shown to originate inside the human brain — and if it ever has, nothing we've built has detected it. What happens instead is this: physical custom signals reach your physical brain, and your brain interprets them into particular, depending on the custom signal, thoughts, imaginings, smells, tastes, pain, imagery, sounds, weight, heat, or whatever else I may be failing to remember to mention. That is the Simulation you will experience." "Your thoughts are never digital. Not once, not for a moment. But you will control a digital avatar nonetheless. And all of it runs on physical machines maintained by non-digital people, typing on actual keyboards, in actual rooms, who go home at the end of their shifts". Eric thought about that for a while. Machines in rooms. People going home. Somewhere out past all of it, in a room he had never seen with his own eyes, Amy was holding a tablet and watching the inside of her husband's head. The automated voice returned, flat and patient, and asked whether Eric wished to continue to the worldbuilding process — the one by which he would create his own universe. He decided. "Yes". --- (Thoughts arise from neurotransmitter-triggered electrical signals cascading through thousands of neurons. The spatial-temporal pattern of that firing is a thought's physical form; no firing, no thought. Different brains may use different patterns to produce the same thought — but force identical patterns, the same neurons in the same locations at the same timings, and identical thoughts should follow. That is the entire premise behind the technology: that a brain can be made to fire on command, and that communication by imagination alone is therefore only an engineering problem. Incoming signals can drive patterned firing through entrainment, where field oscillations pull neuronal groups into synchrony, or through the intrinsic firing properties of neurons at a given membrane potential. The hypothesis is simple enough to fit in one line: identical copies of neuronal firing, and identical copies of their firing patterns — spatial location and all — produce identical results in any human brain. The VRC stopped treating it as a hypothesis some time ago.) Chapter 2: Searching for Eric Several hundred simulation-years after Eric finished building his universe, on the subject of what came after the last breath, there are many who have existed long and know through experience, there are always many who are new, and Eric's Universe is just one of many that have answers with limited ways to learn them. --- Jeff's phone was playing music from his hoodie pocket, which in a forest this big amounted to a small, stubborn bubble of sound following him down the trail. He walked with a thin plastic-tipped cigar pinched between two fingers. Smoke hung behind him in lazy loops. Sunlight came through the canopy in slanted bars, and he walked through them one after another, light, shade, light, like a man being scanned. The song ended. The next one had a long, silent intro. And in the quiet, a memory surfaced, the way the smell of a hospital hallway can drag you backward years. A different bed. A different body that wouldn't answer. And a voice that hadn't been a voice, arriving in the place where his own thoughts lived, in a weight and accent that weren't his: "Testing. Can you hear me?" Jeff stopped walking and let the memory play out, because once that one started, it always did. He remembered the VRC. The interview. The patient, unhurried presence explaining it. Their having made his brain imagine things and used that as a phone line. He remembered being told, calmly and in enormous detail, what the Simulation was, how it ran, who lived in it and what they were made of, and what they hadn't been told. He had said yes to the same kind of deal Eric had said yes to. Which meant Jeff walked around Eric's Universe knowing a great deal that the people around him didn't. Not everything. Nobody knew everything. But he knew enough that some conversations were like watching a movie he'd read the script for, and trying very hard not to mouth along. The intro ended. The music picked back up. Jeff let out a breath through his nose. The cigar had burned down while he wasn't paying attention, and the ember kissed the pad of his thumb. "Sss—ouch. Crap. Damn." He shook his hand out and flicked the stub away. That was the other thing about him. Almost nobody in Eric's Universe could feel the plain physical kind of pain, the burned-thumb, stubbed-toe, toothache kind. Jeff could feel every bit of it, a privilege he would have happily returned with the receipt. The stub bounced once and landed in the leaf litter beside something that caught the light. Cyan. He thumbed the music off and crouched. A fourteen-sided die sat half-sunk in the dirt, cyan and white, small enough to close a fist around, its edges sharp enough to look freshly cut. Not a scratch on it. There wouldn't be. Nothing in this universe could scratch one of these. A slow grin spread across his face. He knew exactly what it was, the way you know a winning scratch-off before you've finished scratching. He touched it with one fingertip and pulled the finger back, like testing a stove. "One," he told the empty forest. "Two—" The air in front of him folded. Leaves lifted off the slope in a ring and hung there. Pressure pushed against his eardrums, and it wasn't just pressure. It was weight, the heavy, humming sense of standing near something that could flatten the hillside if it sneezed wrong. Light glowed outward from nowhere, stopped, and an old man was standing on the trail. He was short and bald, with a beard trimmed like he took it personally, a cardigan buttoned one hole off, and sunglasses. One of his hands was still raised mid-gesture, as though he'd been pointing at something in another place entirely and hadn't finished. Jeff stuck his hand out. "A genie! What's up? How's heaven doing? So to speak." The old man didn't take it. He tilted his head, the way a person listens for a noise upstairs. Jeff looked at the sunglasses. The sunglasses looked at nothing. "Oh," Jeff said. "Oh, man, you can't—" "You're holding your hand out," the old man said. "About... there." His hand came up, sure and unhurried, and closed around Jeff's as if he'd been watching it the entire time. Firm grip. Dry palm. "Yogi," he said. "And heaven's doing great. Couldn't tell you what it looks like." "I'm Jeff." Jeff shook, still staring. "How did you—" "Later. I was listening to the bottom of the seventh. Bases loaded." Yogi exhaled with the grief of a true fan. "Somebody's going to have to tell me how it ended." "Sorry about the timing." Jeff hesitated, then asked anyway, because not asking felt worse. "You were born blind?" "Born that way." "And you never had anybody wish it fixed? "I know what I could've done." It wasn't unkind. "I'm old, and I like my routines. I'll get around to it." He turned his face toward Jeff, and even through the sunglasses there was a sense of being examined. "You're not new to this." "What gave it away?" "You didn't scream. First-timers scream. One woman hit me with a purse." "Brave woman," Jeff said. "Hitting a genie." "She didn't know what I was yet." "Did she find out?" "She found out I'm very forgiving," Yogi said, "which was lucky for her." Jeff scooped the die out of the dirt and pocketed it. Touching it again wouldn't do anything. It couldn't summon anyone else while Yogi was still on the clock. --- They walked while they talked, because Jeff didn't know how to stand still around good news. Yogi kept pace without a cane, stepping over roots just before his foot would have caught them, which Jeff decided to be impressed by later, when he wasn't busy being impressed by everything else. "So what have you been wishing for," Yogi asked. "Powers, mostly. Some durability stuff. A couple of fun ones." "Why powers?" "Competitions. Magic power competitions." "You win?" "I came in fourth once." "Out of how many?" A pause. "It was a neighborhood thing." "Mm." "The official ones are no joke, though," Jeff said, a little defensively. "People show up with combination magic, enchanted weapons, the works. You watch somebody's grandmother cleaning house, and it makes you reevaluate your whole training routine. And I want to hunt a legendary creature eventually." "Found one?" "Not yet." "Those'll kill you." "Sometimes," Jeff agreed. Yogi laughed, short and surprised, the laugh of a man who is currently a genie and knows precisely how and why. "Well," he said. "You're young." "I'm older than I sound." "Aren't we all."