The old man winced in pain as he leant forward to pull the flimsy blanket over his calloused, gnarled feet. Even thick, thermal socks weren’t enough to keep out the icy cold depths of winter. It wouldn’t be long now, he thought. He’d coughed up more blood this morning, the most he’d ever expelled. He wasn’t sad about dying though. It was his time. He felt as sure about that as he did that he never belonged here in the first place. The world he was in wasn’t right. It wasn’t real, he reasoned clumsily. He tried to find words to explain what he meant but he couldn’t. Eloquent speech was never his strong point. If it was, he might not be in this predicament. His daughter was coming over later, and he considered trying to explain to her for the thousandth time that this wasn’t his world, that he was a stranger here, but it would do no good. She’d just assume it was dementia, or the medication he was taking, and dismiss him. It was none of those things, of course. He really was a stranger in a strange land. 

Nearly five decades ago, he’d been a young man, living in a town called Nunthorpe in Middlesbrough. He’d just completed university, passing a degree in Geography with second-class honours. His plan was to go back to stay at Mum’s house for a while, get himself a decent job, and build a nest egg. From there, he could travel, meet a girl, all that stuff people did. He’d had plans back then. Big plans, that had been stolen from him. 

He’d been playing his PlayStation. It was late at night. He’d been drinking alone. That’s about as much as he could remember from that last night in Middlesbrough. He must have fallen asleep, because when he awoke, he was laid on a rocky outcrop on the banks of a fast-flowing river. He was wet, cold, and concussed from a blow to his head. To this day, those first few days still burned fiercely in his mind. How he survived, he’ll never know. Inside a rucksack he had no memory of owning, was a hunting knife, water, some meagre rations, and other assorted survival tools. They kept him alive in those first few weeks in the wilderness. For days and days, he’d wandered. Through the forest, following the current of the river, then for miles across heath-covered hills. Eventually, he was found by hikers, rambling incoherently, dazed and confused. They’d taken him to a hospital, where he spent a couple of days recuperating, before the police and social services came and kindly helped him find somewhere to stay. From there, the rest is history, as they say. He’d built a life for himself. He’d found a job, met the girl, married her, settled down, and had a daughter. But here’s the thing. He’d never been happy. How could he be? This was not his world. In this world, his Mum didn’t exist. In this world, there was no town called Middlesbrough. No England. No UK, or any of the other countries he’d come to know so well from his studies. The global map was different. Countries had different names, different peoples, different languages, different climates. At least here, in Simuland, they still spoke English, but elsewhere nothing was what he knew. 

The other disconcerting thing about this world he’d woken up in was that he knew it wasn’t real. Reality, as far as his school science could take him, was made of atoms and forces, gravity, light, and space. Not here. Here, reality behaved like one of his computer simulations. No one here had heard of atoms or any of that stuff. This world’s basic constituent was a binary digit. A bit. He had literally woken up in a computer simulation. Not that anyone in this world would believe him. To them, this was the fundamental reality, and he didn’t possess enough scientific knowledge to be able to persuade anyone otherwise. This world’s scientists had constructed their own laws, axioms, and principles according to the behaviour of everything in the Sim. Those obscure places that you couldn’t quite get to or annoyingly got stuck in? They were called Dark Space. And those crude edges, the polygonal shapes, and vertices that didn’t properly form the shape of large objects? They were Mesh Fluctuations, and they even had mathematical formulas for predicting them. Even the fact that Space seemed to have an outer edge was normalised. ‘We are living in a Closed Universe’, they’d proudly claimed, and went about espousing all the implications that would entail. Their science was ridiculous, he knew that, but he didn’t know enough to prove it, and in any case, in this world, their science held true. 

For forty-seven years, he’d fought the system. For forty-seven years he’d raged against the machine. For forty-seven years he’d argued against their false science, their lies and their naive, idiotic misinformation. He’d read everything he could. He’d studied and studied, obsessively gathering any scrap of evidence to support his theory that he was living in a simulation. If only there were the same, obvious signs of game design he’d known from his PlayStation days, such as a health meter, point scoring or levels, he would at least have something concrete to go on. This simulation was not like that, however. There didn’t seem to be any point or purpose to the game at all. It was like he was in one of those world games, in sandpit mode, with unlimited freedom and resources. Because of this lack of game paraphernalia, he lacked the means by which to prove his case. And, although he did indeed make some progress, none of it made any difference. His family thought he was bonkers, and all the credible scientists just laughed at his paltry arguments. But, he knew. He knew. He’d been born in a different world, a real world, made of real stuff, not this computerised gibberish he’d found himself in. 

Not that any of it mattered now. He was dying. Whatever the laws of this simulation were, they dictated that people would live the same lifespan and be subject to the same fragile health conditions such as viruses and diseases. In this world, a virus carried the same, chilling overtone of dread that cancer carried in his old world. He pulled his quilt around him some more, and cursed that his flask of tea was empty. He looked at the clock. There were still three hours until Victoria’s visit. Damn, he’d have to get up and make a drink himself. He dragged his weary carcass from his chair, moaning and groaning as he did so, throwing the quilt across the floor. The doorbell rang, which shattered his negative preoccupations. Who could that be? It’s too early for Victoria, and anyway, she had a key. Bloody door-to-door sales people, probably. Or Bible bashers. His scrawny right hand grasped the door handle, while his left turned the lock. A woman was standing at the door. Holding a clipboard and a pen. Oh god no, not canvassers.

 ‘I don’t want anything. Go away.’ 

‘Mr Price? Stephen Price?’

‘Who are you?’

‘Anita Arkanj. From Nunthorpe?’

‘What? Where did you say you were from?’

‘Nunthorpe. Middlesbrough? You remember that, don’t you?’

‘Oh God. Yes, yes, I do. Of course I remember. Come in, please, come in.’

Moments later, they were sat in Stephen’s living room, with Stephen staring incredulously at this beautiful, angelic-looking girl before him. 

‘Please, tell me what you know. About where I’m from, what this world is, why I’m here…’

She looked at the paper on her clipboard. ‘Forty-seven years you’ve been here, Stephen. That’s quite a time you’ve been given.’

‘Yes, yes. It’s been a nightmare. I woke up in this bizarre place. I was concussed, I don’t know how I got here. I’ve spent decades trying to figure out what the point of this world is. Please tell me.’

‘Bizarre place? It’s a paradise. It’s beautiful here.’

‘Well, yes, it is, but it’s not my place. I don’t belong here. What is the purpose of my being here?’

‘What’s the purpose of anything? What is the purpose of a crab, or a bucket, or a tree?’

‘Where is this place? Where am I?’

‘You’re in Simuland, Mr Price. You know that.’

‘But it’s not my world. I’ve wasted my whole life here. I’ve spent decades desperately striving to make sense of it. WHY AM I HERE?’

‘Please calm down, Stephen. There’s no need to shout. You are correct, of course. You were indeed transported to Simuland, from Middlesbrough, forty-seven years ago. You were one of a few lucky people, specially selected to be given this unique opportunity.’

‘Simuland is as close to a paradise as we could make it Stephen. We gave you all the resources you’d need to achieve anything your heart desired. You could have lived any life story you’d wanted. You could have lived as a survivalist in a tough, extreme environment, where danger lurks at every corner. You could have been an explorer, travelling the globe in search of new lands and new experiences. Or how about an unrequited love affair that spanned the decades, only to end in a loving embrace at a dying moment? My personal favourite is the tycoon scenario; the rags-to-riches story of a young man who built an empire from nothing. Or maybe a noble cause, a wrong you’d devoted your whole life to rectifying. Some choose to pursue the advancement of scientific knowledge, or to invent something life-changing. There are many scenarios, of course. Many ‘games’ you could have played, Stephen, many stories you could have told, and you were given unlimited resources to play them. 

‘A unique opportunity? What are you saying?’

‘In Simuland, you weren’t expected to achieve a set number of points to advance to the next level; there weren’t any gems or tokens you needed to collect; you didn’t have a health bar that would diminish if you didn’t find health packs to replenish it; you weren’t locked out of some areas until you’d paid money or bought tokens. You could have been anything. You wrote the script. And what did you do with it? What did you make of your time here? From what I can see, you were angry most of the time. You thought yourself a victim, a prisoner, an intruder who didn’t fit in, who didn’t belong. You knew this was a simulation, you knew what it was, and yet you didn’t see it as an opportunity, you saw it as a limitation. You have wasted forty-seven years trying to reason with something that couldn’t be reasoned with. And while the grand purpose of the game cannot be known, you are completely free to find and make any purpose you wish. Yet you squandered it, you….’

Anita’s rhetoric was shattered by the grey, ashen face of Stephen Price, his jaw agape, his body contorted into a jaunty, necrotic angle. He was dead. She calmly stood up, walked across the room to the door, and got her phone from her bag. As she left the house, she dialled a number and waited for a response. 

‘Trish? Hiya. Are you going to Nick’s culmination party later? What are you wearing? Fancy coming to town to help me find something? I’m looking for a long white gown…’