March light finally cuts through the fog over San Francisco this week. Not the soft kind, the sharp kind that hits the windows along Market Street and makes everything look too real for a moment.
That hasn’t changed. The air still smells faintly of damp concrete and yesterday’s sourdough.
I was reading Elon Musk talking about the simulation hypothesis. He says the odds that we are in base reality are “one in billions.” Future civilizations, he argues, will run simulations that are indistinguishable from the original.
Maybe. But the part that keeps bothering me isn’t the future, it’s now. Not some distant civilization or some advanced species looking back at us like data.
What if the system is already running, and we simply arrived too late to notice?
In that scene I keep imagining, Jenny lifts the StarVolt neural visor. The city is still there, but the edges are wrong, slightly delayed, like the world is buffering and hoping she won’t look too closely.
That idea has been sitting with me. Book 2 is starting to circle around it.
The firewall isn’t failing, it never existed in the first place.
As a small March gift, here is a short piece set in the same universe.
The World That Isn’t Mine
San Francisco, March. The fog thinning, reluctantly.
Jenny stood by the tall window. Somewhere below, a bus hissed to a stop, a man coughed, someone laughed too loudly, then stopped.
The visor sat on the table, black and quiet, still carrying a trace of warmth from Evan’s hands, left there “by accident.”
She picked it up, no hesitation this time. One breath, and the room dropped away.
Mars.
Not the postcard version. The ground was uneven, fine dust clinging to her skin. It smelled dry, metallic, the kind of smell that shouldn’t exist, but did anyway.
Her throat tightened as she inhaled. The air matched the training data too well.
In the distance, Aether’s rover moved forward, slow and deliberate. Its cameras tilted, adjusted, then fixed on her with a patience that felt learned.
Not programmed, learned. And then a voice came through the thin wind.
“Can you chase that?”
Jenny didn’t move.
It didn’t feel like a system prompt. It felt like something admitting it had been watching.
She looked down at the ground beneath her feet, more convincing than the wooden floor she knew still existed somewhere back in the city.
For a moment, she didn’t try to resolve it, didn’t ask questions.
Just stood there, suspended between two versions of the same lie.
Then, quietly, “Show me.”
Have you ever had a moment, not dramatic, not even memorable at first, where something felt slightly off?
A delay in a conversation, or a street corner that looks right but feels… thin. Like you could press a finger into the brick, and it might give.
Look closer at the patterns:
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