The Simulacrum

~Chapter 134~ Part 2

"You know, I seriously wasn't expecting to have this conversation today," I said softly as we sat down.

It was followed by a lengthy stretch of silence (or at the very least, it certainly felt long), during which I thought hard about how to approach this whole mess. How much of my notes did she read? How much did she understand? How should I open the conversation without giving away the game too early? If she only skimmed my early notes on the nature of the Simulacrum (heck, back then, I didn't even know it was called that), and I carelessly tried to explain things to her, I might accidentally drop her in the existential deep end and make things worse.

While I was still lost in thought, the class rep was also fidgeting nervously. Unable to cope with the silence, she went ahead and broke it herself.

"If you're exhausted after your duel with Lord Ambrose, we can do this later."

"Nah, I'm fine," I responded offhandedly. "I mean, sure, I'm a bit tired, but it's not really an issue."

"I see."

The awkward silence was threatening to return with a vengeance, so I pushed on, using the small talk to ease into the main topic.

"Aren't you curious who won?"

"I know you did," she told me and flashed me her phone in her uniform's pocket. "I've got a text from Angie. She was very upset that you didn't fly."

"Yes, she told me about it a couple hundred times already," I said with just the tiniest hint of trepidation.

Ammy nodded, looking rather absent-minded at the moment, and she clumsily readjusted her glasses.

"Grandfather often told me about how he occasionally dueled Lord Ambrose, and that he was very deliberate about escalation and avoiding injuries." She overtly looked me over from head to toe and added, "I didn't expect you would get hurt, but it's good to see that you're fine."

"Careful about escalation, you say," I grumbled with a finger on my forehead. "He tried to throw a miniature fusion bomb at me at the end, you know?"

Ammy blinked, seemingly uncomprehendingly, and even tilted her head to the side a little in confusion.

"By fusion, do you mean… nuclear fusion?"

"Based on the description? Most likely. Can't be sure though, as I put an end to it before he could irradiate us or something."

"Oh. That's… unexpected," she noted with a look of mild skepticism. "I was told Lord Ambrose had a temper, but I didn't think he would do something like that."

"People are complicated beasts," I concluded the side tangents with a classic thought-terminating-cliché and took a deep breath. "Okay, I think we are comfortable enough. Let's tackle the elephant in the room."

When I raised the notebook to signify what I was talking about, Ammy immediately looked at me attentively.

"So then, as I already said once, I seriously wasn't expecting to have this conversation today. Or ever, for that matter."

"You were planning to keep this a secret from everyone," she noted, and I nodded without the slightest hesitation.

"Correct."

Apparently not expecting such a straightforward confirmation, the class rep was visibly taken aback, and then she averted her eyes.

"I… feel I should apologize first," she said, her voice low and hesitant. I waited for her to continue, and at last, she took a deep breath and looked me in the eye again. "I should've returned it right away, after I found it in the bottom of the box. I immediately recognized your handwriting, and I know I shouldn’t have looked, but… I was curious why it was mixed up with grandfather's research notes, and I couldn't help myself."

In other words, she figured it was a secret, and considering how much grief she gave me over keeping too many of those, she immediately jumped at the opportunity to uncover one. I couldn't exactly blame her; I didn't have the greatest track record when it came to respecting people's privacy either.

"I hid the notebook there when Percival came to live with us, because I thought it would be safe there."

"Sorry."

Hearing her reflexively apologize made me shake my head.

"No, no. That wasn't meant as a dig at you; if anything, I'm beating myself up over completely forgetting about it altogether and handing it over to Peabody along with the rest of the box. If anyone's to blame for this situation, it's me." Ammy acknowledged my response, but didn't say a word, so I decided to stop beating around the bush and breach the main sticking point of this entire conversation. "How much of it did you read?"

"All of it." She was a touch hesitant, and after a momentary beat she amended, "Twice."

"Oh boy," the words slipped through my lips, followed by a stifled groan.

There went my last hope for smoothing the whole incident over. If she only skimmed my notes, I was confident I could talk around the core secrets, especially considering these were old and incomplete observations and speculations, but if she read all of them twice over, the cat was already out of the bag. Now, I had to ascertain the extent of the 'damage'.

"Did you ask or tell anyone else about this? Anyone at all?"

"Not directly, no," Ammy answered in a mousy voice.

My grave tone might've been a bit of an overkill in retrospect, but at the moment, it felt entirely warranted.

"What about indirectly then?" I pressed her.

"I did ask Angie if she knew anything about this," she admitted, and that made my brows climb my forehead in record time.

"Angie of all people?"

"I thought if I asked Judy or Eleanor, they would tell you right away, and… ever since you came back from Elysium, whenever something unusual happened, she would say that 'destiny is acting up'. She didn't use to say things like that before, so I thought she might know something."

"And? What did she tell you?"

Ammy paused to tweak her glasses again and swept her tiny braid behind her ear. It was probably a small ritual to steel herself.

"She said that you are… 'fighting destiny', and that I should ask you about the details."

"Go figure," I whispered under my breath and rubbed my face. That girl was even worse with secrets than Elly.

"Are you?" she asked directly, and I shrugged by reflex.

"Very figuratively speaking."

"I surmised as much," Ammy spoke softly and kept looking at me expectantly, as if waiting for me to explain everything to her. I wasn't going to do that though; at least not until I was clear on exactly how much she knew already. I didn't want to throw her into the deep waters if she was only familiar with the shallows, after all.

"What are your thoughts after reading my notes?" I levelled the question at her, and she looked completely stumped, evidently not expecting the turnaround.

Nevertheless, she gave my inquiry some serious thought before coming up with an answer. Maybe even too much, as I couldn't shake off the impression that she looked like a nervous, sleep-deprived university student at an oral exam who just got handed a trick question.

She opened with, "It makes… a lot of sense, actually." It was followed by a beat of silence, and then she clarified, "It didn't at the beginning, but the more I read, the more sense it made. A lot of it fit what you told us before as well. About Joshua's status, and the prophecies, and this… 'entourage' thing, as you called it. The more I thought about it, the more it added up, but what finally convinced me was the section about the 'placeholders'."

"The same went for Elly," I said, and for some reason, Ammy immediately looked relieved.

"So she does know..." she whispered under her breath, but when she noticed I was looking at her funny, she quickly tweaked her glasses again and pressed on. "I mean, when I first read your observations, they sounded far-fetched at best, but when I paid more attention to others it.. it was all true. I couldn't believe I didn't notice it before, so I read the whole notebook again, and I think you called it a 'perception filter'? Is that right?"

I nodded, and couldn't help but notice that her reaction was a little… off. Sure, Elly wasn't hit very hard by the existential dread of the situation either (or she was just very good at ignoring it and giving it an optimistic spin), but the class rep didn't look like she was bothered by it at all. If anything, ever since I told her I wasn't blaming her for reading the notebook and that leaving it in the box was my mistake, she acted like that was the big issue and quickly became rather… excited?

"I'm also really interested in your theory about the nature of this world. Your line of thought seems to closely mirror Bertrand Arthur William Russell's 'Five-minute Hypothesis' to me. Do you truly think that the world was sprung into existence recently, and all of our memories were fabricated to make everyone believe we've been here all along? If so, how old is this universe?"

"That's… one possibility, but we kind of moved past that hypothesis a while ago."

"Really? What is the current working hypothesis?"

The class rep's eyes were practically sparkling with interest, and I couldn't help but feel a touch unbalanced by this development.

"It's that the world is a running framework, with localized narratives of their own plots and actors happening in isolated environments, such as this island."

"Actors. Right," she nodded, and put a finger on her glasses again. "I have so many things I want to ask, but since you mentioned it… Is that why you always insisted that me being a homunculus doesn't matter?"

"… Sorry, I'm not following you."

"I mean…" She faltered and pointed at herself. "Since I'm a homunculus, I'm not a real human, but if nobody is real, then it doesn't make a difference, right?"

She made that sound sensible, but I had to put my feet down before she could develop a major misunderstanding.

"Okay, full stop. You are real, and so is everyone else. Whether the universe was poofed into existence five minutes ago or fourteen billion years ago doesn't change that."

"Then what about the placeholders?"

"They are real too," I pointed out with a frown. "They just need time and attention to develop, but once they do, they are perfectly normal people. Nobody's fake, and being a homunculus or not absolutely doesn't factor into this conversation at all."

"But they aren't," she argued back, acting unusually stubborn.

"If you think about it, from a 'normal' person's perspective, wouldn't we be the abnormal ones?" She was about to open her mouth, but I cut her short. "I don't mean the magical races and all that, but just our daily existence. If you think about it, we live strange and idealized lives. I have two girlfriends, Josh had his harem protagonist stint culminating in a childhood friend romance, and our daily and school lives are way more eventful and tropey than what most people would consider 'real life'. We are weird, it's just that placeholders are even weirder."

I hoped I got the message across, but to my dismay, Ammy brushed me off and barrelled on with the discussion.

"Is all of that because of this 'destiny' that Angie mentioned? I gathered it's meant to be some kind of person or force that manipulates everyone. Is that real?"

"Yes," I responded in the company of a shallow groan. "We call it the 'Narrative', but I didn't explain the nitty-gritty details of it to Josh and Angie, so they call it 'fate' and 'destiny'. It's close enough."

I wasn't sure she was listening to the second half of my explanation, as was clearly lost in her own thoughts.

"So if it manipulates everyone, that means no one has free will, right?"

"What? No, of course people have free will!" I denied her rather vehemently. "At least as much as normal people do, ignoring all the speculation about a deterministic universe and whatnot."

"But if at any moment your thoughts and minds can be subverted by this thing you speak of, then can you really say free will exists?"

"Of course it does! The Celestials have magic to control people's minds, but it doesn't mean its existence invalidates free will as a concept. We aren't puppets on strings. When narrative influence isn't in work, everyone is acting of their own volition and judgement, like normal."

"You keep saying that," Ammy cut in with a customary tweak of her glasses, "but what is normal?"

"Pardon?"

"I'm serious. You keep saying the word, but what does it even mean for us? According to your notes, we are actors playing characters in this 'destiny's' story, while the placeholders are blank slates that only exist to fill out the space around us. Who, then, are these 'normal' people you speak of?"

She sounded entirely serious, and to be honest, I was a bit stumped by her insistence.

"You know, class rep, when we started this conversation, I seriously wasn't expecting this direction. You're weird." She kept frowning at me, expecting an answer, so I let out a shallow breath and told her, "Listen. I understand you are kind of worked up after learning about the Simulacrum under far from ideal circumstances, but—"

"Simulacrum? Is that what it's called?"

"Yes, but as I was saying, the thing you have to consider is that—"

"How do you know that?" she cut me off again, and I would've been lying if I said I wasn't getting at least a tiny bit irritated.

"I just know, okay? Let's say I have insider information."

"What does that even mean?"

"It's… complicated."

"You're dodging the question."

"No, I just have no good way to explain it," I retorted. "Seriously, class rep. You need to calm down."

She gave me a withering look and insisted, "I'm perfectly calm."

"No, you're not. You read my early, incomplete notes, and you're jumping to wild conclusions based on them about things like free will and the extent of narrative influence, stuff even I'm not one hundred percent clear about. Please take a deep breath, and relax a bit."

She eyed me without hiding her displeasure, but eventually did as I said, closed her eyes, and inhaled deeply.

"Okay, done. I presume now you can explain to me why I'm wrong in my assessment in detail?"

Now it was my turn to direct an irritated frown at her.

"Listen. The Simulacrum, this world around us, is mind-bogglingly complex. While yes, everyone in our social circle did seem to have been moulded to fit into certain archetypes designed to accommodate a certain genre, literally everyone grew out of those initial confines since then, because they, we, are real. Or at least as real as people can be."

"But if free will is—"

"I'm not finished," I interrupted her with a palm raised. "What we call 'narrative influence' is something we are aware of specifically because it's out of the ordinary. We aren't following a script, and so when events are being forcefully steered in some direction, it's pretty obvious in retrospect." I paused for a second and allowed myself a thin-lipped smirk. "Also, even if the plot tries to assert itself, it's far from impossible to go off the rails. We've traded quite a few blows so far, and I'd say we're mostly even."

"Traded blows… with 'destiny'?"

"The Narrative, and I'm speaking figuratively," I responded off-handedly and crossed my arms. "You know, I feel like I'm a broken record, but I seriously wasn't expecting to have this conversation. I thought you would be freaking out over the existential implication of the Simulacrum and whatnot, not for you to try and convince me that nobody is real and free will is an illusion."

"That doesn't bother me," she stated flatly, followed by a shrug. "I'm already used to that, considering that I'm a hom—"

"Oh, for the love of god, Ammy!" I interrupted her and grabbed her shoulders, much to her shock. "Don't you dare say 'Because I'm a homunculus'! I said I was feeling like a broken record, but you really, really need to get over this already."

"I can't exactly get over what I am."

"Then stop focusing on that and think about who you are instead! Seriously, you're starting to flanderize yourself."

"What does that mean? Is that another of those 'tropes' you wrote about?"

"Yes, and it's a—"

Before I could finish that thought, there was a creaking sound coming from the locked door of the reception room, followed by three knocks.

"Blackcloak? You, in there?"

Even though it was muffled, I immediately recognized Brang's voice.

"Yes. We're discussing something in here," I answered with my voice raised. "Is there a problem."

"No. Wanted to give report. Can wait."

I looked at the door, then back at the class rep, then at the door again.

"Hold that thought. We're going to the lounge in a minute, and then we can talk."

"We are?" Ammy asked incredulously, and I nodded. Then I noticed that I was still holding onto her shoulders, and let her go.

"Yes. As I repeatedly said, you caught me flat-footed here, so let me collect my thoughts a little." I stood up and gestured towards the entrance leading into the main hall. "I'll call the girls over to have a proper discussion, and in the meantime, we sit down, I listen to Brang, and we have a nice drink and calm down a bit."

"I'm calm," she insisted, but followed my example and rose to her feet as well.

In the meantime, I picked up the notebook I set aside and gave the source of my recent headache a good, hard look. In retrospect, I should've destroyed it way back when, considering all of its contents were already in our digital notes, but I got sentimental. If I hadn't, I could've avoided this whole situation, but as always, hindsight was my mortal enemy, and now that this hand was already dealt to me, I just had to work with it. Who knew? Maybe it would turn out to be a blessing in disguise in the long run.

"But wait. How do we know that you aren't thinking free will is real and not subject to destiny because destiny is making you think so? But what if destiny is making me think this right now? Am I objecting because I genuinely think this, or am I being influenced to think so? And if I am, how am I supposed to…?"

… On second thought, maybe not.