The Elias Anomaly

Ten

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"I don't want to do this," Joseph said, sat behind the driver's wheel of his friendly hybrid outside of his eco-habitation.

"Don't want to do what?" Dulcie asked.

All the way back from Dewsmonk town centre Dulcie had been wittering away. She had enthused about the bespoke craftsmanship on everything from Joseph's car to the road signage. She had waxed lyrical about the indigenous flowers growing from banks at the roadside. She had even managed to coo appreciatively about the roundabout that lead into the estate.

What had begun as a mild irritant had developed into a panic-inducing catalogue. A list of all the ways Joseph's world had been crafted as a trap to keep him in an artificial reality cage. Whoever had done... Whatever it was they had done to him, hadn't just cobbled together a few bits of scenery. Plonked Joseph down in the old west with centaurs or in medieval Europe with clockwork robots wouldn't suffice. Dewsmonk, it transpired, was something of a labour of love. Someone had built a close facsimile of a small English town and then imprisoned Joseph within it.

"Don't you understand?" Joseph asked. "It was one thing, you shouting at me that everything was fake and that I was living in a dream. Now you want me to roll up my sleeves and set about dismantling it myself. Excuse me if I don't relish the prospect."

"Oh, Joseph," Dulcie said. "I'm not expecting you to be happy about it. It's kind of inevitable though, now you know. The illusion is going to fall apart whether you want it to or not."

"I just don't understand how I never noticed," Joseph said. "I mean, I suppose I'm not the sociable type. I didn't have many friends in work. It was my little bubble: Eva and I. She must be real. She must be, surely. How can I have been living with software and thinking it was a human being?"

"Well, we had better find out, one way or another," Dulcie said.

"I suppose so," Joseph said, feeling like he had a stomach full of lead. He pulled the catch on his door and it swung open. Joseph placed his feet on the ground of the driveway outside his house. He had never felt this ground to be so treacherous. It had always felt like bedrock in the past.

He opened up the front door with his key. He walked through the entrance hall, past the stairs and then headed left into the kitchen. He found himself standing in the last place he had truly believed that all of this was one hundred per cent real.

He hadn't had the words to express the feelings he had experienced in his office. He had not been able to place the emotions that stirred upon seeing the design on the wall. Now he understood why he had stepped into the tunnel behind the department store.

Somewhere, deep down, he had already known that something was wrong. The pins and needles yesterday morning. Eva's odd behaviour. The white column of light by his office chair. The black outs.

He had never convinced himself he was unwell. His brain couldn't make the leap into this madness without more help. So he had walked into the tunnel, now here he was.

"This is a remarkable house," Dulcie said, entering the kitchen behind him.

"More faithful reproduction design of the English rural setting?" Joseph asked. He absent-mindedly flicked the switch on the kettle. Reality be damned he was having a cup of tea.

"No," Dulcie said. "Not in the slightest. I'm not sure if houses like this exist. I've never seen one anywhere. I'm pretty sure they aren't a popular feature of the English countryside. What's interesting about this is that it's not just plex engineering for aesthetics. This is like design prototyping. Whoever built this may have done so in partnership with an architect, like, a meatspace architect, to test a new design for a house."