Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction. Any names or situations that may overlap with real life are purely coincidental.

There was once a human called Vanya.

He had been whole, once. Before the incident, or because it was meant to be, he had been a person of flesh and blood and memories tied together seamlessly. It had been a long time since he last recognized himself.

Now the mirrors are gone, their visions fleeting. It all seems so far away. The things he knew; he no longer knows. His life fills with vast gaps, starting and stopping at random. Even the basics are impossible to retrieve. A haze. The more Vanya tries to remember, the less he realizes he can. 

Before he died –  easy enough.

Wherever it was, it was dark and cold. His hands trembled – he wasn't shivering, but sweating. His mouth was dry. It hurt to breathe. The inside of his throat, sandpaper, head pressed against the linoleum floor. The faint silhouette of an alien reflected off of it. 

Vanya presses his hands to his face. His fingers are rough – the calluses tear against his skin. 

There’s something else, too. Vanya sits up and tries to filter out the sound of the breeze. He clenches his eyelids shut. Slowly, the cool feeling of the tiles metals away. He is floating – no, swimming. The air around him warms. It’s salty. Bubbles snake up his arms and tickle his face and neck. He stretches his arms out – they hit something metallic. It thumps, but in a way that feels comforting. Like it’s hugging him and the water, reassuring him that he won’t be let go. Vanya realizes, as his hands trace the metal casing, that the tank even has a name. It comes to him so easily, easier than his own: it’s a maar. It’s his mother, his home. The realization makes him even calmer. He sinks deeper into the water.

Then he opens his eyes. Glass on the other side. Blurred shadows look in. His heart sinks. The bubbles bite at his skin, and the walls of the tank heave organically, like they’re breathing.

Vanya realizes that he can’t. The water roars at his head.

His heart pounds, echoes violently off the walls of the tank.

Unable to hold it anymore, Vanya gasps for air. Instantly the memory turns to nothing. He wakes back up at the base of the tree where he’d fallen asleep.

A frigid breeze thrashes his hair. He shivers. Vanya stares back out at the golden expanse, still immersed in the light of a perpetual sunset.

It is no dream. Despite all his best efforts, he remains trapped here - in heaven.

Heaven is almost like a movie set.

Not that it’s limiting or closed. The place is more like a backdrop, or a mural that stretches on forever – manicured, deliberate, bucolic. Each and every shade of color tastes manipulated, oversaturated in the same way you’d expect a postcard to be.

The world also seems alive. Seems is the key word here. The stones, grass and sky murmur in constant, fuzzy loop of logic, and the dirt road that cuts through the field wavers a bit when it’s looked at too long. The distant forest with waist-high trees and offset sphere bushes hum in harmony, with its smooth ground devoid of any sharp edges or rocks.

The afterlife arrives as swiftly as tomorrow. Every sense buzzes with greater gusto than when alive, acute from warmth on the knuckles of his fingers to the tickle of grass under his legs. Pushing himself up with his broad palms, Vanya has to shut his eyes and brace a hand against gleams of painful light, the sky a bluer and wider expanse than any box he’s ever lived in.

The simulated weeds are lush and ripe, cool and waxy to the touch, rustling orange with shadows cast by plump golden stalks of wheat, and there are no painted walls, secret doors, nor metal cubicles nor wire mesh to bound the premises of acceptable human trespass. Freedom rushes to his head like blood. Vanya stands too quickly, clutches his ear to check the notch in the top of the cartilage, and when he doesn’t find it, knows, belatedly, that he is dead.

His neck aches, starts throbbing so hard that he can hear it like piano keys. Common time. Something threatens to burst from his arteries, something rotten, hot, and forgotten.

Vanya tilts his chin up and stares at the sun, pixelated white filling his eyes with the big fake sky, and wonders where everyone has gone. Is he waiting for someone, or is there someone in this vast expanse waiting for him?

There is a figure within the field, parting the grass, rustling in its rush towards him.

It’s calling his name when it trips and rolls down the hill, and next to Vanya’s feet its back hits the tree with a small thump. Vanya looks down. Another human, with hair so yellow it could pass as white, the hue shifting in impossible directions. The texture spreads over his narrow nape as freely as the long plump ends of grass around them. Upside down, the boy peeks through the top of his shirt fallen over his face and smiles.

“Torr,” Vanya says quietly.

“I saw you lying on the hill so I ran over as fast as I could. Look! Isn’t the sunset pretty?”

“What happened?”

“Nothing much.” Torr is still watching the artificial sunset, reds spreading into oranges that spread into greens so translucent they look like lizard skin as it melds into the deepest, darkest blue of a graphic designer’s boundless sorrow. “You’re here, and I’m here. It’s been a while.”

Something is missing in the blurred edges of Vanya’s memory, someone muttering and insistent. But Vanya brushes its whispers aside for modernity’s sunset, wishing there was a maar, missing the bottomless, deep depths of the tank he was raised in. The tank he hated; water, he loved. There was nothing quite like the warm sensory deprivation of floating in saltwater for stretches of time between performances, his fingers twitching as he pounded his palms against the glass, begging for leniency, unable to breathe for the full sentences he served. Every time they punished him for his mistakes, for pressing his fingers against the wrong notes, one, two, he choked on the water like clockwork.

Close to the edge of the map, there is a lake. Vanya and Torr walk to it one day, half out of boredom and half out of curiosity. Torr suggests they go fishing. Vanya asks how – they don’t have fishing rods, and the perfect forest wasn’t generated including sticks or branches. What good would a lake and its fish be if they couldn’t catch or spear or use it for anything?

“We can just use our hands,” Torr says and smiles. It almost disarms Vanya how earnest he is, so Vanya decides not to question him too much. Besides, what else do they have to do with eternity? Vanya can set aside a day to paddle around in a lake, fish or no fish.

It doesn’t take too long to reach the lake – though perhaps it does and Vanya doesn’t notice it. For all he knows, everything here takes either a second or a year, and whether it’s one or the other holds little significance. Time flows unevenly here, like a dream. It isn’t useful to think about things how you would if you were alive. And perhaps that’s a good thing. Experiencing every moment of eternity would drive you positively insane.

In any case, whether it’s an hour or ten months or ten million years, Torr and Vanya reach the edge of the lake. The sky beyond them appears hazy, but still present. Even here, at the edge of the known universe, the illusion of continuity remains. Their reflection glimmers off the lapping waves. Vanya doesn’t know why, but his eyes get misty for a split second.

Sure enough, there are dark shadows snaking beneath the surface. They plunge their hands and feet into the water. Torr giggles as the shadows writhe and disperse. He runs further in.

The surface of the maar pit-patterns with soft swallows. Torr kicks up its waves to utter delight.Vanya shrugs and shuffles into the water beside him. Their pale, thin hands comb through the green water. The pond glitters, layers of colors rippling away in a constant sinusoidal pattern. Very mathematical and precise, almost unsettlingly so. The colors transfix Vanya for who knows how long. Not because they’re strange, or even pretty, but because they’re unbelievable. This isn’t water. Not real water, anyway. This isn’t like any maar he’s been in – even if it’s more vivid, pushes and pulls against his skin more forcefully, feels stronger and more insistent, it can’t fool him. The realer it seems, the more he can’t ignore that it’s fake.

A cold splash of water snaps him out of his trance. Torr pushes him harshly to get his attention, a fat salmon squirming in his hands.

“See?” He shouts. “I told you we could catch one!”

“I guess,” Vanya says, frowning. He tries to smile back and fails. It’s too hard to reciprocate the levity Torr has in spades. He wonders why and how Torr can act this way. When they were alive, he was never this happy, not even close.

“Look at the scales,” Torr gasps, holding up the fish to the sky with both hands. “All the colors.” He smiles even wider, his teeth showing.

Vanya just stares, quietly hoping Torr lowers the fish back down into the pond and lets it go. Instead, he hugs it close to his chest. The salmon continues wriggling wildly in his arms, but he won’t let go.

“It looks so… so…” Torr’s voice trails off. The wide smile across his face melts into an intense stare. Vanya shudders. The ripples in the pond freeze in place.

In a split second, Torr bites into the fish. Blood spurts out over his teeth. The salmon jerks. Torr tears off a hunk of flesh and bone with his teeth and greedily swallows it whole, no chewing. 

Vanya’s abdomen seizes up in white hot agony. He almost screams.

Torr, unfazed, takes another bite of the fish. The pain soars. Beads of sweat drip down Vanya’s face. His ears roar with the sound of waves crashing, the sound of applause. The air quivers.

A sharp, stabbing pain stitches Vanya’s side and he trips, falling back-flat into the water.

“Do you remember anything yet?” Torr asks him through the mouthful of meat.

“Does it even matter?” Vanya groans, propping himself up on his palms. “Do you?”

Torr’s hands twitch underwater. “Why would I want to?” He sniffs. It sounds like a lie.

“I think I was shot in the neck,” Vanya says distantly, the memory dragging its way out of the mud. “They took me out back and shot me in the neck, then the heart when I didn’t go down immediately, because I… I was… what was it for…”

Torr doesn’t know what to say to that. When Vanya turns back, his friend looks disturbed. It’s an odd look, brows pinched in deep consideration. Why was it so strange to believe?

“Why are you here?” Vanya asks, stepping closer, and Torr backs off with each foothold. His shoulders are hunched, pupils small pricks of white. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

“Me too,” Torr stops. “You’ve changed.”

When he blinks, Torr’s hair has grown, long past his chin, fluttering against his clavicles. He looks older. They both are, suddenly, limbs skinny under suits for supper before the start of the show. When he looks down, his fingers are knobby, broken bones that had never healed correctly, while Torr’s hands are sheathed in buttery black gloves. It was a year before he died. The performance hall is massive and wide, amazing to hide in, easy to clean.

“Everything here is so detailed,” Vanya observes, dragging his fingers along the long table covered in red cloth. His nails, ripped and cracked and removed only to be sewn on again, feel tender against the surface. “Where’s your violin?”

“I should be asking you that,” Torr picks up the pace and obstructs Vanya’s path. “You can’t go this way, you know.” Vanya doesn’t know, but he doesn’t care. “If you walk all the way to the end, it’ll just bring you back to the starting point. It’s considered a restricted zone.”

“Tell me more,” Vanya says with disinterest and, for the sake of it, pulls Torr’s hair. He yelps, slaps him off, but recovers to find Vanya running into the light at the end of the auditorium.

“I’m serious!” His voice echoes.

The light dims to a narrow point, and a feeling like the static of a television screen tingles over Vanya’s scalp as he forces himself through it, tugging and grasping at the thread of air that hits his cheek, cheap and synthetic. When he can see again the wide open space of a series of shelves greets him with a rainbow of lights blinking like stars in the darkness. Computers, he realizes with a pang. They fill the room in an eerie stillness. The only sounds Vanya can hear are the hum of electricity and the scream of fans, constantly turning, and as he walks past them, the diodes on the servers go green then yellow, red, blue, and back to green again.

“There was a chance that you weren’t the one who would make it here.” The voice rings from right behind him. Vanya jerks around on instinct but Torr skirts around him, instead punching one of the large servers. It shivers with a red cascade of lights before calming down and running back to green and blue. “I mean, not the you I knew. There’s always a fifty-fifty chance that when they upload you, your consciousness gets split, and one of you gets to go while the other one stays behind. I guess we’ll never know which one you are. Both, maybe?”

“Are you real?” Vanya asks him. Torr smirks.

“That’s the million dollar question,” he says. He stretches the backs of his hands. “I think I am.”

“What even is this place, anyway?” Vanya scans his surroundings. Torr points lazily at the cameras. The two can only see the room from their angles, hopping on some IP or the other in all probability - the faint echo of computer lessons multiplies in Vanya’s brain, like reading a story and realizing it’s about you only at the end. 

“I can’t be here,” Vanya turns. Technological singularity, a teacher whispers. “How do I get out?”

“Nobody ‘gets out’ of the simulation, dumbass,” Torr scoffs. “That would defeat the point of getting in. Where would you go, anyway? Nowhere, that’s where. There’s nothing out there. You feel it too, right? If you try to look at the edge of your vision, the colors are out of focus, right? Just stay here with me and let’s talk. I really wanted to ask you about-” he pauses. Vanya walks halfway across the map, brushing against the bounds of the world. Space is malleable here. Torr grits his teeth and chases after him. “Dude, don’t fuck off! Stay still for a second!”

“There has to be a way to leave,” Vanya murmurs.

“I forgot you were like this. Why are you always so obsessed with leaving what’s good for you?” Torr trails him begrudgingly. Vanya wonders if Torr is bored of the sights of heaven yet or if there really is nobody else in this server. It must have been a lonely existence before Vanya was uploaded here - at Torr’s instruction, Vanya thinks.

It must have been really lonely if he asked for Vanya, of all people, to be transferred here. Vanya, who cannot remember more than two good memories in Torr’s contradictory, uppity musical presence. They had argued far less in the days leading up to their final performance together. Blurred by time and memory’s touch, preserved in the heat of anger Vanya had turned away from the sullen set to Torr’s jaw after yet another tantrum. He wondered if Torr ever felt sorry, sitting alone in the tall grass in the endless silence that followed the shot on stage.

He had a front-row seat to the murder, but he had seen nearly nothing of perpetrator or victim. Vanya had been so focused on finishing his piece that he paid no heed to the end of the violinist’s segment until it did not pick back up when he got to the ultimate movement. Then he looked to his side, and all he saw was a rapidly spreading splatter of blood.

He hadn’t had the chance to apologize for breaking Torr’s rosin the night before.

It was a senseless tragedy.

“Did you ever get to see the world outside the time you spent on your violin?” Vanya attempts to explain why, like any human, he does not want to stay in what amounts to purgatory forever and would rather face an atheist’s hell or reincarnation than prolong his vegetative state.

“I mean, what was the point? I didn’t have any money for that, and my house was demolished, so it’s not like there was anywhere I would want to go,” Torr says, crossing his arms.

“If I knew that was why you were such a prick I would’ve gone easy on you out of pity.”

“Alright, you sack of shit. What about you, huh? Were you bred and born in a lab for the sole purpose of making the sexiest top ten pianists alive or something?”

Do not smile patronizingly, Vanya orders himself. He shrugs in the black space. “I mean, yeah.”

“That’s tough,” Torr says awkwardly.

“I think this place is pretty boring,” Vanya says. “It’s everything I’ve seen before. Maybe you find it comfortable and familiar, but I don’t think I can take it here with just us alone. Don’t you think it’s strange, anyway? It’s not painful, but you can’t feel much else.”

“I guess…”

“Don’t you have people you want to see more than me?” Vanya continues. “Your parents, your sister, your friends? I’m sure once we get out there’s something beyond this wall. There’s nobody here. It’s a little weird, I guess, since all these places should have people in them, right, but then there’s nobody. There’s too little stimulation. There’s nothing to eat, either.”

“Sure,” Torr concedes. “Sometimes, I thought it was just what it was supposed to be like…”

Vanya turns. Looks at him.

“I just think there are better things out there than staying alive for nothing but the people that want to reuse our skills,” he says with a strong undercurrent of determination. “It’s like playing the same thing over and over again endlessly. They need to make their own new compositions.”

“Symphonies should be celebrated for how good they sound, though. There’s not an infinite amount of rearrangements you can make when the same few chords sell well.”

“Not my problem,” Vanya says disdainfully, the paragon of apathy.

He pulls the plug.