For a moment the clock on the wall above the mantle was not the same clock she’d always seen--not her father’s peaceful glass orb with the cool colored digits that melted into each other as the time changed, but instead a flat, utilitarian affair with angry red numerals. As she tried to make sense of her eyes, a feeling of unrealness like vertigo swept over her, sending her stomach spiraling and forcing her to catch herself with palms on the table on either side of her bowl of cereal. In an instant the vision was gone, leaving the familiar clock on the familiar mantle and her mother, father and brother giving her expectant looks.

 

“Miren, did you hear me?” Her father’s eyes were hard, his fork hovered over his eggs. “You’re not going to move out, not now. You’re sixteen.”

 

“I...” Her indignant rage from moments ago was gone. Her dreams to move to Valles University on Mars to continue her studies seemed more a fact of life than something she needed to ask for. Her passion for simulated realities, and the worlds she’d built on her computer still burned, but it was more a cold, and hard passion than a fiery one. “I’ll get there whether you want me to or not,” she said.

 

She slammed the door to her room and sat at her computer. She tried to concentrate on her work--tweaking the artificial intelligences and adjusting the terrain generators--but the surreal vertigo feeling remained. Like a rock in her shoe or an itch in her eye. Something felt different, something was missing. Or maybe something was extra.

 

A soft knock at the door barely reached her ears. “Miren?” Her brother, Alex.

 

“Come in,” she sighed.

 

Alex came in like a whisper, a mop of blond hair obscuring his eyes. He always lurked around as if being looked at might cause physical pain.

 

“Dad will come around,” he said in his quiet voice.

 

“No he won’t.”

 

“He will,” Alex insisted. “He knows how much your simulations mean to you. He knows it will make a good job, too, with how good you are at it.”

 

“Alex, I...” The unreal feeling washed over her again. She saw her brother, with his ever hunched shoulders and downward gaze, as someone she should know, but didn't.  “Never mind, I just need to think for a while.”

 

“Okay. I love you sis,”

 

“Yeah.”

 

He left as quietly as he’d come, closing the door without a sound.

 

Miren rubbed her face with her palms, trying to clear the strange fog. It didn’t help, so she opened her most recent simulation project to go over the details again.

 

Her talent lied in the accuracy of her worlds. The realistic historical sites and time periods she created stunned her professors. Being able to study at the top university on Mars would give her potential to be famous system wide--but her father... she pushed the thoughts from her head with exasperation and logged into her world.

 

The neural transmitter in her brain linked up with the computer, and after several authorizing passphrases, her vision went black as the simulation took over, broadcasting its information to her mind.

 

After an instant of darkness, her senses returned like so many switches being flipped on. She stood on a green field of sweet smelling grass. With a thought she floated up into the air, surveying the land. The green spread out in all directions, grass, trees, all untamed and roadless. In the distance she saw the peaks of the Rocky Mountains shrouded in fog. Something about them looked off, so she flew toward them.

 

For this simulation she’d created a replica of the United States that was barren of all civilization, all evidence of humanity removed. There were many such simulations on the market, but hers she prided for its accuracy. Instead of just laying over cities with forest or a lake, she had researched history and geography in order to make the terrain as accurate to what it was before humanity settled there as possible.

 

As she neared the craggy peaks, the fog cleared and the mountains looked normal after all. She made a note to do another memory lock and check on the mountains with objective eyes later when she had more time. She’d been doing them quite often without her teacher’s guidance--the class was too slow for her.

 

“Alabaster exit,” she said. The program recognized the command word and her vision faded to black. Once again she sat at her desk, in her room.

 

She glanced out her window over the sprawling cityscape beneath their apartment, and it occurred to her what had been wrong with the mountains. The fog. It had cleared as she drew near meaning it was no natural fog, but generated by the program so that it didn't have to render the mountains while she was far away. Her simulation should definitely not be doing this unless there was a severe lack of memory or bandwidth.

 

She stormed from her room. “Is anyone downloading or uploading?”

 

“You’re not the only one who uses the computer, Miren.” Her mother rolled her eyes as she flipped through a magazine on her tablet. “But no, we’re not using any of your precious bandwidth.”

 

“The bus is here,” said her father from the door.

 

She brushed past him in as icy a manner as she could manage, and hurried out the door.

 

The ride to class was quiet and cleared her head a bit, giving her time to reflect calmly on the situation. Her parents did not seem to be thinking clearly. Going to Mars would virtually guarantee her a career in sims. Everyone knew she was good enough to make it except them. They couldn’t get their tiny heads past the fact that she was younger than the average person in college. What did her damned age have to do with her talent?

 

The bus arrived and she clambered out with the other students and filed into the building.

 

“Alright class,” said professor Lind as Miren took her seat. “Today we are going to use a memory lock to evaluate our projects.”

The class shared excited whispers, but Miren only rolled her eyes. She’d already figured out how to program memory locks and had been using them to improve her own simulations for months. Miren put on what she hoped was an attentive face as Lind went over the steps of constructing a basic memory lock--steps Miren had discovered on her own ages ago. The hard part was getting the courage to actually try it.

 

The memory lock had been originally designed not for the programmer, but for the consumer. The enjoyment of some simulations could be enhanced greatly if certain things were unknown to the user--particularly, that you were in a simulation. The memory lock technology allowed the user to lock away memories of his own selection upon entering the simulation, all to add to the veracity of the experience.

 

For the designers of the simulations, though, it served another purpose. The ability to look at your own simulation through the eyes of the end user was something that creators of any product would kill for.

 

Her parents, of course, didn’t understand any of it. All they cared about were the reports of personality changes, or lost memories or other mental effects that the media spewed constantly. To hear it from them you’d think that anyone who used a memory lock went instantly insane.

 

Miren waited with growing impatience for the rest of the class to get around to finishing their own memory locks. She felt a kind of resentment that they were being held by the hand through each step, when she’d had to research through trial and error. Now that they were on equal footing, she’d have to find a new way to stay ahead of the curve.

 

“Alright class,” said Lind, clapping her hands. “I think we’re all ready to go now. Let's set the timer for five minutes for a start, just to make sure nothing has gone awry.”

 

Five minutes? Miren sighed inwardly. With the time ratio she was using, that gave her barely an hour to examine her mountains for whatever off-ness she’d noticed earlier. Some simulation designers could get the mind running at hundreds of times the speed of the outside world--and the limit to how high you could go had yet to be found--but at her own paltry ten times speed, she’d be lucky if her memory-locked self even bothered to notice the mountains before she woke up.

 

But, it was better not to go so long with a memory lock in place anyway, she thought. Since she wouldn’t remember the command word to exit--or that she even could exit--she’d have to stay in there the entire time. The only way out of a simulation without the command word was to die in the simulation. And her memory-locked self would be trying to avoid that at all costs.

 

She brought up her project and set the memory lock to five minutes, waited with thinning patience as Lind counted down and the class linked up.

 

Darkness. Then,

 

Miren stood in on a hill looking over green fields dotted with trees. She’d been standing there a long time. She’d walked there from... She turned around in a circle, viewing empty wilderness in all directions. There was no sign of a road or path.

 

“Hello?” Her voice was carried away by the wind, noted only by a group of black birds that launched out of a nearby tree.

 

She looked herself over. Cardigan, short skirt, open-toed shoes. She had time to wonder why she was dressed like this in the middle of the wilderness when she heard a sound behind her. A kind of mechanical whooshing sound. She spun and stared with wide eyes at the scene before her.

 

A doorway opened on the hill in front of her, bordered by air and leading into what appeared to be a personal space craft of some kind. Two people walked past the entrance. A tall, dark haired woman and a thin, hunched blonde man. The talked, but the words escaped her.

 

“Hello?” she said again, but no answer came. The door stood yawning at her, persistently impossible. She stepped through it.

 

Her feet fell on hard metal and she stood in a short corridor lined with doors. She turned the direction the two people had walked and saw them from behind, standing inside a cramped room full of screens and blinking lights.

 

“...ready to meet him, it’s been long enough,” the woman was saying.

 

“Miren, I just don’t know if we should trust him this soon.”

 

Miren gasped at the sound of her own name, then covered her mouth, but the two didn’t seem to hear. She crept closer.

 

“He’s an admirer of my work, so of course you wouldn’t trust him,” the woman said with a snide grin. “Just give him a chance. I want to look at what he’s got to offer.”

 

Miren reached the doorway and peered in, still unnoticed. The man had shaggy blond hair and perpetually hunched shoulders. He leaned over an array of computer screens, typing and swiping away. The woman folded her arms and looked up at a blue wall clock.

“It’s time, don’t ruin this for me.”

 

They both stalked out of the room, passing through Miren like ghosts. She hardly noticed. Her eyes were glued on the wall clock. It shimmered and shifted into a flat shape with red numbers that seemed important for some reason. She had seen that clock when-- when-- when--

 

Miren opened her eyes to Professor Lind’s dour face.

 

“Are you well, my dear?” The woman patted her cheeks.

 

“I’m fine, I... I’m fine.” Her surroundings sank in and her face burned. The entire class was staring at her.

 

“I think your memory lock might not have been such a good seal, you were giving quite a shake!”

 

Her classmates chuckled. She clawed for composure. “I... I made it on the fly, it’s just--”

 

“Having some hallucinations perhaps? Nightmare like experiences? Or cross contamination from locked experiences? Lucid dreaming?” She paused to raise an eyebrow. “Erotic imaginings?”

 

“No!” Miren stood up from her seat, her face red with a volatile combination of embarrassment and rage. “If you’d taught this damn thing weeks ago I wouldn’t have had to learn it in my spare time without guidance! I’m going home.”

 

“Ohh, Miren, do calm down. It happens to all of us at some point.”

 

Miren wasn’t listening. She was out the door and calling for a public car.

 

Her mind spun on the ride home. What was it she’d seen? It hadn’t felt like a hallucination. The blond haired man seemed familiar, and he’d called the woman Miren, though he pronounced it as ‘me wren’ instead of ‘mur in’. And the clock--it had changed into the same red numbered clock she’d imagined during breakfast. On the ship the time had read 8:24, the same time she’d remembered seeing in the kitchen. What did it mean? Did it mean anything?

 

At home she opened the door to her father’s cold glare and folded arms. “Mrs Lind called,” he said. “You could have died from this memory nonsense! I don’t want you in that class anymore.”

 

“Dad!” She gaped at him in disbelief. “You can’t die from being in a memory lock, they are completely safe. And I know for a fact you’ve used one in your ‘adult’ sims.”

 

His face reddened. “That wasn’t one designed by you. You’re a child, you’re going to screw something up and give yourself brain damage.”

 

“He’s right.” Her mother appeared over his shoulder. “It’s not safe. I don’t want you in that class anymore either, honey.”

 

She stared at them, stunned. “You want me to drop out of school? Because what? I made one mistake?”

 

“Don’t be dramatic,” her father scoffed. “Just pick another field of interest. This simulation stuff is not for young girls.”

 

She stormed past them and into her room, slamming the door. She turned on the TV to max volume, and fell to her bed in tears. Who did they think they were? This was so out of the blue and stupid she could hardly believe it. Why did they want so desperately to hold her back, why did they want her to fail? Didn’t they love her?  

 

Swirling thoughts of anger, sorrow, fear and confusion sent her between bouts of wailing and pillow punching and quiet contemplation that an observer might have taken for attacks of schizophrenia.

 

The sound of the television finally seeped into her psyche. “I assure you it’s very safe,” said a slimy voice.

 

“It better be, or you won’t get a good review from this Sims Expert.”

 

The second voice was familiar. Miren sat up and looked at the tv with wet eyes. A sneering man with dark, greasy hair who was clearly a villain of some kind said “Good, good. I can’t wait to see what you think of it.”

 

Then the camera cut to a tall, dark haired woman and a hunched shouldered blond man.

 

“Alright, link me in,” said the woman. It was the same voice she’d heard in her hallucination. The same woman too, Miren was sure of it. The woman and blond man both gave blank expressions to show they’d entered the simulation, then the villain cackled in a cliche manner and the TV screen faded to black.

 

“The Adventures of Mia Wren will return after this!” Shouted an announcer, and a commercial for blazing hot potato chips cut in.

 

Miren muted the TV and tried to collect her thoughts. It seemed the characters she’d hallucinated were from an adventure show that she had no recollection of ever seeing. It was possible that it had been on at some point when she wasn’t paying attention--the characters did seem eerily familiar. But they seemed familiar in a more personal way, the blond reminded her of her brother, and the woman... Miren shook her head. It was too strange.

 

She waited for the show to return after the commercial, but instead of The Adventures of Mia Wren, she got Last Chance, some kind of singing competition for elderly people. She let out a sigh of frustration and typed at her tablet.

 

She sent a message to her brother, Hey Alex, ever seen Adventures of Mia Wren?

 

No, what’s that?

 

She scowled at his reply. He watched enough adventure shows that he should have heard of it.

 

Never mind, check it out if you ever see it on.

 

She tossed her tablet onto the bed and paced, her thoughts returning to the problem of her parents. Would they really make her drop out? Were they that awful and selfish and stupid? Miren decided that they might be, and if they were, she needed a plan.

 

That night she stayed up late, reading and studying about different variations of memory locks and time adjustments.

 

In the morning she sat down to breakfast as if nothing had happened. They ate in somber silence, until the bus came and her father sat down his fork with a clack and spoke.

 

“You will drop out of that class today. If I don’t get a concerned phone call from Mrs Lind asking why, I will call her and drop you out myself.”

 

Miren kept her rage inside, and got on the bus without a word. She’d expected it, and had  prepared a little something she’d downloaded into her school tablet the night before.

 

She sat down in class and Professor Lind began her lecture. They were going to work on their  memory locks again, but Miren had other plans. She’d built her own enhanced time multiplier. The one in the class was a mere tenner, turning five minutes into 50. Hers, if it worked right, would turn five minutes into five hundred, giving her 8 full hours to study. If it worked, she could continue her education on her own, five minutes each day, without her parents ever knowing.

 

“Alright class, let’s test out those memory locks again. Are we ready?”

 

Miren felt ready. Instead of her class project, she uploaded a library sim she’d brought from home.

 

“And in you go!” said Lind.

 

Miren’s vision darkened, and she opened her eyes inside a sprawling library, empty of anyone but her. A brief moment of panic enveloped her when she realized she hadn’t looked up the exit word for this particular program. But no matter, a quick glance around yielded plenty of ways she could kill herself--windows to break and leap out of, or use the glass to cut her wrists, electrical cords she could hang herself with--if she had to get out of the simulation for some reason, she could. Miren smiled and sat down at one of the learning terminals. If everything went right, she’d have eight uninterrupted hours of study.

 

It was dangerous, of course. There was a reason why not everyone learned this way. Packing eight hours of life into a mere five minutes put a lot of strain on ones mind, and some hypothesized that it could cause breaks or ‘stretches’ in memory, where the victim lost track of when things had happened. Miren knew her mind was young and strong though, and what other choice did she have? If she couldn’t study at school, she’d find other ways.

 

She read and watched lectures and read some more, plowing through textbooks and lessons, contemplating theories she shouldn’t be reaching by normal schooling for years to come.

 

Five hours in, she heard the sound again. The mechanical whoosh of a door opening. She spun in her seat and saw the portal before her, cutting through a chair and desk, opening into the interior of the ship.

 

Mia Wren and her blond companion strode past the doorway, and Miren followed them. They walked silently through the ship until they reached a thick, sealed door that must have been an airlock. The blond man pressed some buttons and it opened with a hiss. They stepped inside and Miren followed. A second door opened, leading into a new hallway that was clearly part of a second ship. The walls were darker, and full of red blinking lights.

 

“At least do a five minute test run, first,” said the man. “You don’t know what’s in there.”

 

“Fine, Lex. You are so paranoid.”

 

Lex, and Alex. Mia Wren, and Miren. It was too similar to be coincidence. Her heart pounded, what could this mean? Was she seeing her future somehow?

 

The trio rounded a corner and a man stepped out to greet them. “Ah, the great Mia Wren. It is an honor.”

 

Miren stared. It was the man from the TV show, but up close and in person, he looked eerily like her father. He stood beside a blinking contraption covered in buttons and dials and radiating a red glow.

 

“I promise,” continued the man. “What I’ve created is like nothing you’ve ever seen.”

 

“We’ll see about that,” said Mia. “Put me in for five minutes first, so I can make sure I’m not wasting my time.”

 

“Certainly,” said the man. He held his fingers over a number pad. “At ten times?”

 

“Sure,” said Miren. “Hook me in.” She folded her arms and waited.

 

The man typed in a one and a zero, and Mia closed her eyes. In a flash, the man typed something else, two buttons so quickly that Miren only noticed because she was focused on how the machine would work. The screen changed, and a little nine was added to the end of the one and zero.

 

Ten to the ninth, she thought. What did that mean? Ten to the ninth was one billion. Surely it was impossible to go at one billion times speed?

 

The men helped a simmed-out Mia into a chair. A moment later Lex noticed the screen with the extra digit on it.

 

“What did you do?”

 

The man gave a wry grin. “It’s too late, decades have already passed for her. Are passing even as we speak.”

 

“No! Why?”

 

“She will forget herself. She will wake as a person of my creation.”

 

Rage flashed across Lex’s face. “Link me in,” he shouted.

 

The man laughed. “You will forget yourself too, be my guest.”

 

Lex fell still as he entered the simulation. Miren’s vision grew dim. She had time to notice the clock above the man’s contraption--a flat metallic clock with red letters. It read 8:24.

 

She screamed.

 

“Stop, stop! You’re ok!”

 

Professor Lind looked down on her, sweat glistening on her brow.

 

“I... what happened?”

 

“Oh thank god, you’re awake. I feared we’d lost you.”

 

“Lost me?”

 

“You tried to do one hundred times? Are you mad? That’s so advanced it’s cutting edge for professional designers! You could have scrambled your brains into mush!”

 

Miren seethed. Even her teacher was getting over protective. “I’m fine, let me go!” Why would no one let her study? She glanced at the clock wondering how long she’d actually made it, and for a split moment she saw the red clock from her vision again. 8:24.

 

A chill snaked up her spine. One billion times. Some quick math made that almost two thousand years per minute. Someone could forget who they were in a few seconds. In five minutes their previous self would be buried beneath thousands of years of experiences.  

 

Professor Lind was still talking. Miren heard the words ‘doctor’ and ‘head injury’ and stood bolt upright. “I’m going home. Now.”

 

Her head was fine. She was perfectly fine, it was everyone else who was crazy. It was all starting to make sense now. The way her parents treated her. The way it felt like the whole world was trying to hold her back.

 

At home she was met by her mother’s stern gaze, hands on hips. “Your father heard what happened at school. He’s taken your computer from your room.”

 

Of course he had.

 

“I’m supposed to confiscate your school tablet,” her mother continued. “No more sims for you until we make sure you’re ok.”

 

Miren handed her bag over calmly. “It’s ok, I think I understand now.”

 

Her mother sighed with relief. “It’s going to be ok baby, you’ll see.”

 

Miren studied her for a moment with cold, hard eyes. Then she left without a word and went to Alex’s room.

 

Her brother opened the door after two knocks. “Hey,” he said with a consoling grin. “I’m sorry about, well, everything that’s happened.”

 

“It’s ok, can I come in?”

 

He hesitated for a moment.
 

“Don’t worry, I won’t ask to use your computer.”

 

Alex looked sheepishly at the ground then stepped aside. Miren sat down on his unmade bed, regarding him with curiosity. She couldn’t see anything unusual in his behavior, but he always made it so hard to look in his eyes.

 

“Alex...” she searched for the words. What she wanted to say sounded so crazy. “Do you ever think we might be living in a simulation?”

 

“I...I’ve thought about it,” he said quietly. “But everyone has those thoughts. That maybe they’re someone different. Someone better. That maybe their lives aren’t really this hard. But, you know, you can’t go into a simulation while in a simulation. You’d notice something was up. And you go into simulations all the time. So I wouldn’t worry about it.”

 

Miren’s eyes widened. Of course. It all made sense now. She put her hand on Alex’s arm. “Thank you.”

 

She returned to her room and opened her dresser drawer. Of course, trying to enter a simulation created within a simulation always showed flaws. Whatever computer had created the first simulation would not have enough processing power to keep the second one going while still producing the outside world of the first sim. It was just a fact of the technology.

 

Miren thought back to yesterday, when her mountains had looked odd, foggy like they weren’t loading. She’d thought it had been a bandwidth issue, but now she knew the truth.

 

She slammed the drawer and jerked open another, digging through it, tossing clothes and notebooks and papers aside.

 

She was Mia Wren, Simulations Expert. The TV show must be her old memories leaking through. And she was trapped in this world, living this dull and stupid life for thousands of years until all memories of her old self were destroyed. And the villain who’d trapped her in here... he looked suspiciously like her father.

 

It made sense now why her father had always been so opposed to her learning sims, and even more opposed to her taking the class and building them herself. He knew it could lead to her discovering the truth. He’d taken away her computers to stop her from figuring it out, but it was too late. She knew how to wake up.

 

Finally she found something solid enough. A plaque she’d gotten two years ago for excellence in computer science. Her father hadn’t even congratulated her. She threw it with all her might at her bedroom window. The glass burst, clattering to the ground.

 

She picked up a large, curved piece and held it to her wrist. To die was the only way to escape. The simulation would shut down if it couldn’t maintain reality. Just like a dream, she would wake up if she died.

 

“Miren? What...” Alex stood in her door, his face pale. “Miren, no, stop!”

 

Alex, poor Alex. She couldn’t leave him here. He’d come in to save her. “It’s not real,” she said. “And, it’s thanks to you that I know. It must have been some of your memories that came through to warn me, somehow.”

 

“Miren, put it down, please it’s ok, everything will be-”

 

She plunged the shard of glass into his belly and squeezed him in a final hug. “I’ll see you soon when we wake, Lex.” The glass slashed her fingers as she twisted it, mingling their blood together as it spattered on the carpet.

Alex slumped at her feet.

 

Her mother charged into the room. “Miren what have you done? What have you-”

 

She was silenced by the big, red, burbling grin that appeared on her neck. Mother joined son in a heap at Miren’s feet.

 

“Daddy, where are you?” Blood leaked from her fingers, leaving an abstract trail behind her as she walked the hall toward the kitchen.

 

Her father stood staring at her, his face pale, his briefcase fell from weak fingers. “I knew it,” he said. “It broke you. I never should have-”

 

“You never should have trapped me in here you asshole!”

 

She leaped at him and he threw his arms up, deflecting her blows as blood flew from them both.

 

“I’m Mia Wren!” She screeched. “I’m a simulations expert, you thought you could fool me?”

 

“Miren, no--”

 

She plunged the shard into his neck and it stuck, grinding against the bone of his spine. He fell to his knees, slippery hands scrabbling at the glass. Then he toppled onto his face, dead.

 

Miren stood panting over the body. “I’m Mia, you can’t make me forget.” She looked at her lacerated hands. White bone shined like teeth from smiles all over her palms and fingers. The blood loss would be enough, she knew, to end her soon.

 

She sat down and waited to wake up.

 

On the TV, Lex and Mia Wren fired laser pistols at their enemies, then turned dramatically to each other. “We have to wake up!” said Mia, and they pointed the guns at themselves.

 

Miren smiled, imagining what life she would awake to. One without a stifling father and a boring suburban life. One with meaning.

The stream of blood from her shredded hands slowed to a trickle, and she slumped to the floor.