Simulation

Chapter 2

I have to beat the player.

"I trust you slept well?" Xenia asked. Zacharias had brought me to the dining hall and I was sitting with the three of them.

"You could say that." I said, biting into the piece of toast. "Are you going to explain this whole thing, now?"

Xenia sighed. "Let's go the the monitor hall." She walked to the place I met her before and sat on her desk. "Your world is a simulation."

"What do you mean, 'a simulation'?"

"For centuries my people, the real humans, have been testing by simulations. All the people you know are simulated."

"So why am I different?"

"We have four different simulations. At the beginning of every simulation, there is only one real human. But as that human produces an offspring with the same 'powers', the old human dies, or we make them 'disappear'. Your father, for example."

I pushed a bubble down my throat. "What's a simulation, though?"

"A simulation is one person, you, in a world of simulated people. No one has the mind of you, infact they don't have much of a mind. They are controlled to act 'normal' by our techniciations. They can't think. They have no thoughts."

"Except for me?"

"Except for you. That's why the bullet stopped. In simulations, you have power because you can think, and the simulations can't."

"That's a lot to process."

"Yes, it is. But there's been a problem."

I looked up from the ground. "What do you mean?"

"Your father, not Neal, Cameron, has been captured by Rogue sims. Their controllers gave them partial thought, but still controlled by their controllers. These controllers have gone evil and parted from us."

"How did you know I was special?"

"We have cameras everywhere, and we saw the bullet. We see out of every eye except for the special ones. When we saw you through Estelle and your mother's eyes we tried to look through yours but we couldn't."

"Wait," I said, processing the information. "Are you saying that your people made Estelle, my twin, mean to me?"

Xenia bit her lip. "Yes, that's true. We had to though, to train you, to see if you were good or just a dud."

"Good for what?"

"To help fight the rogue sims and their controllers."

"Surely I won't be doing this by myself!" I exclaimed.

"You've noticed the other suites around you? Those are the other thinkers that will come soon enough."

"Wait, are you a thinker, and all the other controllers? Can't you go and fight them?"
"Well, not exactly." Xenia said. "We do have thoughts, but we don't have dominion over the simulations. We do control them, but when we enter we lose our thoughts. Our thinking is weaker than yours, we're partially like the rogues."

"Does my 'ability' as you call it, work in here?"

"No, it will only work in a simulation field. We're in the center of all of the simulations." Xenia pulled up a holographic map. It was a circle, with four slices and a star in the middle. "This is us," she said, pointing to the star. She pointed to a red dot. "That represents your home."

"So all the other dots are the other thinker's homes?"

"That's right, Ivory."

I thought about my name. "Wait, do you controllers name all the newborns?"