Day 97 - Hour 21:00 - Bedroom

Lisa awoke to small, crumbling pieces falling softly down onto the bed. Concrete? No, not quite. Synthetic plastic, maybe? Almost like it was painted to look like concrete, but not carefully enough. She began to sit up slowly, unalarmed.

The day has come.

The man standing on top of the bed was holding a saw, and she watched as the ceiling continued to fall to pieces around him. Tension seeped into silence. He looked helpless for just a moment. Anyone except Lisa would have also missed the unmistakable weight of exhaustion that made his posture sag. Anyone who was watching from several very carefully hidden cameras, that is. With a blink, Lisa noticed the emotion in the man’s eyes shift.

“Were you ever going to tell me?” he finally spoke.

She noticed how the inflection of his words lacked the typical inflection of a question. It was more of a statement.

The hole that the man had sawed in the ceiling revealed a dark backdrop glittering with stars and distant planets. Frigid air poured into the once-perfect temperature room.

Caught off-guard, she trailed off, “I…”

He sighed, letting the saw drop carelessly to the floor. Lisa’s eyes lingered on the man’s face.

“It’s a shame,” Sam admitted.

Then the red lights started flashing.

*****

As an adult, Lisa has come to realize that her parents weren’t around nearly as often as she would’ve liked them to be. But children never think about that sort of thing that much until it’s too late to say anything about it.

Lisa’s dad works for some big pharmaceutical company and her mom is always leading community events and volunteering for any cause that justifies her self-identification as an “activist.” Lisa’s older brother, Paul, followed her dad’s path down into the absolutely riveting world of pharmaceuticals. 

Nothing made Lisa feel more helpless than watching as her once partner-in-crime dissolved into an even less tolerable version of her father. 

But outside of Lisa’s house the world keeps spinning. Earth is dying, and technological innovations scramble to find a promising escape from the demise of the only known home for humans. God forbid someone points out that the planet is dying because we were the ones who killed it, and says: ‘hey, maybe we shouldn’t have done that?’ But sometimes the right people don’t listen to the right things.

When Lisa got the call asking her to be part of a new top-secret experiment that involved traveling into space, she decided that this was it. Well, actually, she thought it was a poorly executed phone scam at first. If you’re trying to steal someone’s personal information, claiming you’re going to take them to space is a bit far, isn’t it? But they promptly provided her with information about the company funding the expedition and a few minutes of research validated what she heard. This was her chance to amount to something. And even though any person in a sound state of mind probably would’ve been at least slightly skeptical about impromptu space travel, Lisa wasn’t really worried about that.

“This could be major for the space travel industry!” her dad said.

“This is your chance to make a difference!” her mom said.

Her brother never returned her call.

The company was concerningly vague about the content of the experiment, but specified that Lisa would not be a subject but simply a “component,” whatever that means. They sent her a contract much too long for her virtually non-existent attention span, but that was a problem for her father’s lawyers, anyway. Lisa was assured that the company had been impressively thorough in their terms and conditions, and that her safety was guaranteed. Lisa shrugged and signed the contract in pen.

Next thing she knew, Lisa was stepping into a round, sterile capsule that would transport her to the space base the company had constructed. A thin, nervous man had tried to explain the exact mechanics of how the capsule’s transportation works. ‘Some people might need to listen to someone who knows what they’re talking about in order to trust that they’ll be okay,’ the man’s boss had said to him. Lisa was definitely not a part of ‘some people,’ and willingly stepped into the capsule before the scientist could finish his first sentence packed with hard-to-pronounce science-y words.

Quite a bit disappointingly, Lisa couldn’t even feel that she was moving at all once the transportation had begun. 

Everything felt different once she arrived at the base, yet she couldn’t put her finger on what specifically was different. They gave her some awfully bland clothes to change into and offered her food, but she politely declined.

“Where will I be staying?” Lisa asked.

The man who had introduced himself as the Director hesitated before ultimately ignoring her question. Arguably, it wasn’t the best first impression.

“Come with me,” he said curtly and motioned for her to follow the only hall in sight.

Moments later, Lisa stood in a room with paneled walls, but every panel was a TV screen. Strangely, the TV footage almost looked like live camera footage. She peered closely at a nearby panel, watching as a man sat on a couch and seemed to be simply staring at a wall. 

Lisa didn’t take her eyes off the screen closest to her, “what’s he doing?”

Annoyingly consistent, the Director ignored her question, “this is Sam.”

Lisa heard the click of a button and camera footage all around her froze. 

“Lisa, I’m sure you’re aware that you signed a contract to be here,” the Director continued, “and so you have been sworn to secrecy. Not a single person outside of this base is to know anything about our…experiment here.”

“What about after it’s over?” Lisa asked.

The Director locked eyes with her.

“The experiment has no end date.”

Lisa stiffened.

The Director continued sternly, “Sam here has been in a coma for the past five years. Brain scans and various testing has yielded results showing complete memory loss. We have created a simulation of life here that’s…less technologically advanced than the current state of Earth.”

Lisa peered at the image of a frozen man on the TV screens, wondering what could possibly be going through his head at that given moment.

She implored, “Is the plan to keep him here for the rest of his life?”

“For as long as possible, yes.”

“And what’s my role?”

“You, Lisa, are the companion.”

*****

At first, Lisa wasn’t quite sure how to be just a companion. It wasn’t easy to befriend Sam while simultaneously lying to him about everything that he thought he knew about his surroundings. On Day 4, Lisa and Sam went to a restaurant where the kitchen staff waited to make their food to simulate a busy establishment. But every day it became a little easier for Lisa to let herself fall under the impression that this new world was real, or at least, that her relationship with Sam was real. All she had to do was avoid saying anything along the lines of, “Hey, don’t you think it’s awfully coincidental that we happened to come across five dollars laying on the sidewalk while walking down the street and then two minutes later we stumbled across a random ice cream cart selling two ice cream cones for that exact amount of money?” And it wasn’t as if Lisa truly knew Sam, because nobody truly knew Sam, not after his coma, not even Sam. And it’s easier to lie to a stranger than a loved one or someone that trusts us, because you don’t have to feel guilty. Because it’s just a stranger, right?

*****

Day 63 - Hour 14:00 - Outdoor Park Enclosure

Lisa laid on the grass and peered up into the clouds. Beside her, Sam did the same. The sound of leaves rustling in the wind traveled from a nearby tree, but the tree was perfectly still as far as Lisa could tell.

“What a unique bird,” Sam pointed off to the left of Lisa’s gaze to an artificially bright red cardinal.

Distracted by the subtle repetitive motions of the bird flapping its wings, Lisa didn’t respond. She watched as the bird appeared to continue its monotonous pattern of flight, a loop with iterations only about ten seconds each. 

She noticed then that the grass underneath her fingertips was much too soft. She longed for the slight rigidity of the grass she was used to only 64 days ago, with its faintly bitter smell.

She hadn’t noticed that Sam was sitting up now, scanning their immediate surroundings until he locked his eyes on the small pond partially lined with smooth, flat stones. 

He tugged gently on Lisa’s hand, “Come with me.”

Lisa followed Sam apprehensively towards the pond, unfamiliar with his sudden initiative. He knelt down on a sandy bank and reached for a stone, tossing it gracefully across the surface of the overly-blue-colored pond water. Lisa watched as it skipped five or six times, leaving delicate rings of water moving outwards from each point of contact. 

“Where did you learn to do that?” Lisa implored.

“I don’t know,” Sam responded, watching the spot where the stone presumably sank to the shallow bottom of the pond. 

The water stilled.

“Teach me.”

The two took turns skipping rocks across the water, trying to see who could get the most amount of skips out of one throw. Sam always won, but Lisa did put up a fight. After a while the sky started to dim as if someone was gradually pulling a slider button all the way down.

Lisa turned to Sam, “This was fun.”

She actually meant it.

Then he kissed her.

*****

It was that day, Day 63, that Lisa realized she had fallen in love with Sam. That was a frightening realization. Even more frightening was the fact that she didn’t know what the end goal of the experiment was. They wouldn’t tell her. Every week she met with the Director to talk about Sam and how he was managing without most of the life-changing technology that the majority of Earth’s population was accustomed to. He was doing just fine, how else would someone be without an element of their life that they never knew they had in the first place? 

Aside from the weekly chats with the Director, Sam was pretty much the only other real person that Lisa felt she interacted with. She was all too aware that the shopkeepers and pedestrians and construction workers were just actors, well, the construction workers were probably actual construction workers, just especially non-talkative ones. Her only other contact with people outside the simulation was voicemails that she was allowed to leave for her immediate family. The ones that she left for her parents were consistently optimistic. It was the voicemails that Lisa left for her brother that showed how she was really feeling. At first, she left short messages, full of hope and some nervousness in the beginning. Some days the messages were mundane, there wasn’t much activity to talk about. But in every other message, there were hints, hints that Lisa didn’t even know she had been leaving. Hints about her growing frustration with the Director and his concealed motives, about falling in love with Sam, and about wanting to leave the simulation and return to her home on Earth. Lisa desperately used her voicemails to her brother as her time to think out loud about how she could possibly transport both her and Sam out of this experiment, so she didn’t have to pretend anymore. It wasn’t like her brother was going to listen to the voicemails anyway, she thought to herself, she might as well be entirely truthful in just those moments when she pressed the recording button. As per the contract Lisa signed, the voicemails were only a one-way method of communication, anyway.

Lisa liked to believe that at this point she had figured out everything that was fake in the simulation. She knew that it always rains on the third day of every month, that the little bakery that she and Sam liked to visit only had a few real items in every display case, that the books on the higher shelves of the library were cardboard shells with no pages. The only thing Lisa didn’t know was what the Director’s ultimate goal really was. Oh, and the fact that Sam was starting to realize all these things too.

*****

Day 97 - Hour 22:00 - Main Street

Hand in hand, Lisa and Sam ran faster than either of them knew they could. Lisa led the way, tugging Sam along as she pounded on store fronts and pulled on doors.

“There has to be a way out,” Lisa muttered as the piercing alarms continued to sound all around them.

“Where are we?” Sam panted, completely disoriented.

Not too dissimilar from the mannerisms of the Director, Lisa ignored his question. 

They kept running past doors that led nowhere, staircases that only climbed to walls, as Lisa strained to remember how she had even gotten into this ridiculous simulation in the first place. Footsteps echoed all around them, voices in the distance and people yelling “Make it daytime!” In some stroke of luck, the darkness from the pre-programmed night cycle was majorly contributing to Lisa and Sam evading the Director and whoever he had employed to stop the two from escaping the simulation. Ironically, in a world where literally everything had been controlled by human hands for the past 97 days, they couldn’t seem to produce the typical artificial sunlight amidst the emergency lights. 

Lisa and Sam raced down a train tunnel, cloaked in darkness, as they had apparently forgotten to install any emergency lights or alarms in the tunnel, of all places. Lisa desperately squinted her eyes, hoping to see that the tunnel led to an area that had some sort of real exit. Behind them, the footsteps were growing louder.

“Put your arms out in front of you, in case there’s a wall,” she instructed Sam, who immediately obliged.

The two began to slow their run down to a jog, as their endurance was giving out in this seemingly infinite tunnel. Lisa’s hands hit a smooth, concrete wall. Beside her, Sam found the same. The footsteps closed in, but neither Lisa nor Sam could seem to move. Defeated, Lisa took hold of Sam’s hand and the two turned around to face the lights of whoever had been chasing them. 

A crowd had surrounded the pair. Lisa’s eyes met those of a man she almost forgot how to recognize.

“Lisa, is that you?” her brother asked.

“Paul…you’re here.”