At first, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Shri Acharya woke up at precisely eight-thirty AM, as she usually did; dressed in her favorite traditional orange-and-red sari, as she usually did; and went downstairs to meet the day, as she usually did.
The first sign of change was that the calendar that hung from the wall in the living room was missing. Shri was confused for a moment, but continued out to the kitchen, deciding that her little brother Artur had probably taken it. Ever since Mr. and Mrs. Acharya had told him the date they'd adopted him on, August 29th, he had become obsessed with that day, even asking to change his birthday to correspond with it.
The kitchen was empty. "Ma?" Shri called. "Papa? Artur?"
No answers. Checking first the refrigerator door, and then the table in the dining room, Shri didn't find any notes explaining where her family had gone.
Speaking of the dining room table...hadn't the tablecloth been simple white linen? It was now purple plastic, with garish green stars emblazoned on it.
This couldn't be explained away easily. Her family wouldn't choose such an ugly design. It didn't make a good impression on her mother's business partners, who often came to the house for meetings,
Footsteps sounded behind Shri. Turning around quickly, she saw her brother.
"Artur! I'm so glad you're here. What exactly is going on?"
He stared at her blankly. "My name is Albert, not Artur. You know that." Brightening, he changed the subject. "Anyway, wasn't the festival fun?"
Confusion washed over Shri. "What festival?" she asked.
"The one that lasted all week. Now you're just being silly."
Shri tried to remember the festival--and found that she had no memory of the past week at all. The last thing she remembered was holding a pencil, writing something down in her journal last Monday evening. She had felt an unnatural sense of excitement over whatever she'd been writing. Even now, she got the impression that great things were coming.
But how could anything remotely good happen when her parents were missing, her brother had changed his name, and she had a black hole in her memory?
"Art--I mean, Albert. Listen to me. I truly don't remember this. Tell me what happened."
He looked at his sister, scrutinizing her face for any sign of mischief. Finding none, he told her, "Nothing really happened. There was a lot of dancing and food. Some tourists showed up; they were dressed weird."
Shri's brown eyes widened. This could be a clue. "What do you mean 'dressed weird'?"
Artur, or Albert, shrugged. "Everyone else had t-shirts and jeans, or dresses for some of the girls." He wrinkled his nose slightly, still at that age where "girl" was a dirty word. "But the tourists had business suits and bowler hats. It's nothing, I guess. They probably were just passing through and didn't get the memo about what to wear."
"You're right," Shri said, trying to calm herself down. "Where are Ma and Papa?"
Her brother looked confused for a moment. "Oh, you mean our parents," he finally said. "They're gone."
Shri's calmness evaporated. "What does that mean?" she demanded. "Where did they go?"
"Albert" made a vague gesture with his hands. "They're gone," he repeated, his face and voice devoid of emotion.
Shri shook her head and stormed out the front door, only to find--
What looked like a surrealistic painting, or maybe a deranged alien's idea of Earth.
That was a valid theory. Alien invasion. Shri had never believed in the supernatural, but it seemed all too possible now.
Because yesterday, the sun hadn't been blue, and the sky hadn't been purple with green clouds.
"Man, these aliens sure like green and purple," Shri muttered, smiling in spite of herself.
The sidewalk in front of her house had a veritable field of sunflowers growing out of it. A faint humming came from them, and they whipped around to face her when she stepped closer, revealing faint impressions of humanlike faces in their centers. Okay, these definitely weren't the species Shri knew of...
She wasn't smiling anymore.
A shimmer on the ground caught her eye. When it faded, her journal was lying there, open to the page she'd left off at. Trembling, she picked it up and read her forgotten words. Surprisingly, there wasn't much text, just four words:
It's time to descend!
What did that even mean? Had she been drugged at the festival? That wouldn't explain her brother's name change.
Shri thought she heard computer keys clacking loudly, somewhere behind the house. She went to investigate, but there was nothing out of the ordinary there...except the coloration, of course.
For a moment, the world flickered out of focus, becoming a blur that almost seemed pixelated. Then it all faded out.
*
"Good thing we're going to reset the programming," the first technician said, adjusting his bowler hat and brushing a speck of dust off his suit. "Our simulations are becoming self-aware."
"We knew that was a risk," his coworker replied. "'It's The Sims taken up to eleven'," he quoted from an advertisement. "They're intelligent people, but made of zeroes and ones, instead of bone and blood. Oh, and I meant to tell you--the system was glitching. The parental units deleted themselves, can you believe it?"
"Weird. Well, that should be fixed soon."
On the screen, an Indian-American girl crouched on the technicolor lawn.
One of the technicians pressed another button, and she disappeared. With a few clicks, the display toggled to her bedroom, where she slept peacefully.
"Change her ethnicity to German," the second technician ordered. "And remove the bit about her brother being adopted. I'd rather have them be biological siblings."
Her hair turned blonde, her skin pale.
"Can I keep the green and purple color scheme on the backgrounds?"
"Sure, if you want. Now wake her up."
"You ever think about the ethics of this? Changing her entire identity like this, over and over?"
"Nah."
"Hey, did you hear that?"
"What?"
"It sounded like...like a giant keyboard, somewhere above us."
"Joe, you're letting the work get to you. Go home and get some rest."
*
Sabine Albrecht woke up at precisely eight-thirty AM, as she usually did; dressed in her favorite traditional blue-and-grey dirndl, as she usually did; and went downstairs to meet the day, as she usually did.
