12/24/23: Main Character Energy

The debate started, as it often did, in a college dorm room hallway. 

“Simulation theory is old news,” I said. 

“Old news?” John said, fiddling with his bowtie. He had started wearing them at the beginning of the semester as both a stand-in for fashion sense and as an attempt to stand out, and somehow against all odds it seemed to have worked on both fronts. 

“It’s entirely improbable for the laws of physics to allow for an endless Russian nesting doll series of simulations. You lose too much fidelity at each layer,” I said earnestly. “But you know what is likely?”

John just stared at me. 

“You’re supposed to say, ‘What, Elton?’” I said, taking another pull from my vape pen.

“I don’t want to give you the satisfaction,” he said. 

“Come on John,” I said. “Humor me.”

“Alright. What, Elton?” he said. 

“Literary nesting dolls! Way more probable for our entire world to be created just for the purposes of some upstart fiction writer out there. Think of how many works of literary fiction there are, how many characters exist in all books ever written. Statistically, it’s way more likely for us to be characters in a story, then for us to be simulations.”

“I don’t think you’re using the word ‘statistically’ the way it’s meant to be used,” he said, standing up. “I have to study for my OChem final, so you’re going to have to continue this discussion on your own. Not that this wasn’t intellectual masturbation to begin with. By the way, I think you’re smoking too much.” 

John and I fell out of touch after that semester. He took a job in finance, and I went on to work a series of dead-end jobs in sales. 

It wasn’t until our ten-year college reunion that I ran into him again. 

---

“Elton!” he said, grabbing my arm. “Just who I was looking for.”

“John?” I said.

It had taken me all of two hours to realize that coming to the college reunion was a mistake. I had come out of college with friendships that had disintegrated within the year. Everyone, it seemed, was more successful than me. It stung.

“Listen, I have a business opportunity for you,” John said. 

“That’s… quite the conversation opener,” I said. He was wearing a bowtie, one filled with tiny whales doing backflips. “Are you still into bowties? That’s some commitment.”

“Got to maintain continuity of character,” he said. “Got to have a thing, you know?”

He pressed a slip of paper into my hand. I uncrumpled it. It contained his phone number.

“Call me, okay?”

“You know that I still have your number right?” I said. “Or if you changed it, that I could look you up on facebook. No one hands out numbers on paper anymore.”

But I looked up, and he was gone. 

---

“I’m making a movie, Elton. And I want you to star in it,” John said. 

We were sitting in a cafe overlooking Brattle street, and I was sipping on a latte that John had bought and paid for. 

“I’m sorry, what?” 

“I wrote a book. I’m not going to be so presumptuous as to think you read it, but - “

I had read it of course, in the way that one was obligated to if a college acquaintance had published a moderately successful book. I had to grudgingly admit that it was quite good.

It was a murder mystery. The victim went by the name of Terry T. Winters. He was a government worker, and in the book he was described as having the quite literal superpower of being able to navigate through bureaucracy. He knew exactly which forms to fill out, in exactly which sequence. He mailed all his paperwork with the fedex return labels included and already paid for. He had a sixth sense for exactly which office manager needed a fruit basket delivered, so that six months later they could fast-track approval for a certain important form. Red tape seemed to melt underneath his fingers; in the book it was described as a Path to Victory superpower that applied purely to bureaucracy.

Needless to say, this made him important to certain politicians, and when he turned down an offer to join a mayoral candidate’s election campaign, he was soon found dead while camping in the Sierras. The main character, a detective by the name of Herman Nancy, had deduced that he had been murdered via an AllTrails hack. Someone had altered his phone’s AllTrails navigation so that it led him down wrong turn after wrong turn, until eventually he was miles from any running water and he died of thirst a week into his trip. 

“I’ve read it,” I said. “It was really good. Looking forward to the sequel, of course.” 

“I’m so glad! It’s - “

“It did make me paranoid about the unsubscribe button at the bottom of emails, I have to admit,” I said. The main character had fallen prey to a phishing attack in the form of a fake Old Navy marketing email; the unsubscribe button had been the hacker’s entry into his phone. 

“Naturally, naturally,” John said. “We can’t be too careful these days. Regardless! They’re making a movie out of my book! And I have a great deal of creative control, and I want you to be the main lead.” 

“This is a joke right?” I said. “I did some Shakespeare on the Green in college. That does not make me lead actor material.”

“I can assure you, Elton, this is definitely not a joke,” John said. 

---

In the course of catching up, I learned what John had been up to in the ten years since we’d parted ways, and it was hard not to be jealous. 

After leaving finance, he had worked as an underwater archaeologist exploring shipwrecks, then as a stuntman in Hollywood flying squirrel suits. He had a brief stint running a Christmas ornament shop (“My attempt at a Christmas romance novel,” he said cryptically), hinted at code-cracking for the NSA, and then herded cattle in Argentina. 

“It feels like you’ve lived ten lifetimes,” I said one day, as we sat in his house. I had just signed the contract that would bring me onboard as the lead actor for his film, and it was the first time in years that I had felt optimistic about the future. He had poured me a glass of an outrageously expensive whiskey I barely recognized, and I was considerably buzzed. 

“That’s what I tried to go for,” John said, swirling his own glass of whiskey around. “Of course, I owe it all to you.”

I barely caught what he was saying, as I had been somewhat drunkenly running my hands along the leather of the Eames chair I was lying in, and enjoying the texture. 

“Sorry, what?”

“It turns out you were right all along,” John said. “We’re both just characters in a work of fiction.” 

Something about his words broke through the cloud of alcohol hanging around my head. 

“What?” I said incredulously. 

“I don’t know if you even remember that conversation anymore. But the one we had in the hallway? About literary nesting dolls? I couldn’t get it out of my head. I’ve thought about it more than I have any other idea in my life, John. And it’s airtight, as a concept. Statistically speaking, we are both more likely to be fictional characters than we are to be real human beings. And that singular fact has both ruined and guided the course of my life more than you could possibly know.” 

“Is this a joke?”

“To the contrary. Did you know that at first, I was so presumptuous as to think that I was the main character? I’ve always been beyond gifted in ways that have felt improbable. Fencing, cryptography, running a business, squirrel-suiting - whatever I turned my attention to, I was able to achieve the zenith of blindingly quickly. The author of our world must have been writing me out to be a Mary Sue, I thought. But then, do you know what I realized? None of the things I was doing had a point. I didn’t belong to any genre, there was no plot that carried me through from one thing to the next, no matter how hard I tried to force it. And then I realized, I had it all wrong. The story we’re in - it’s a story about you, Elton. This is a story about the Everyman. The reader is supposed to identify with you. I am just the foil. The force that breaks stasis, the force that drives the story forward” 

I was struck speechless. Had I just signed a contract with a former classmate who was stark raving mad? 

“There’s one saving grace,” John continued. “There’s evidence that the story we’re in is about meta-narrative itself. For us to be self-aware enough to know that we’re in a story, means that the meta-narrative is part of the frame. And you know what else is true about our world? There’s just enough pseudo-science - scientists working at the fringe of quantum theory that seems so outlandish as to be magic - that we must be in some kind of magical realism story. Italo Calvino comes to mind. Or maybe Borges, if we’re being generous. And so once I made this realization, everything became clear. I knew what I had to do.”

John stood up, walking to a corner of the room that had been dark until now. He switched on a light, and a spotlight lit up a blanket that was covering a large figure. He swept the blanket off with a flourish, revealing a black box. It was a perfect cube, as long along each dimension as I was tall, and it was painted with some kind of varnish that seemed to suck in all light. 

“I call this my Literary Device,” he said, chuckling. “My own little joke of course. I had to call in a few favors at CERN to get it built. And this! This cube right here will be our salvation, Elton!”

He had a fervor in his eyes, and if it weren’t for the fact that he seemed to think I was important to his plan, I would have feared for my safety. 

“Do you know what the problem with being a character in a story is, Elton? It’s that the story will end. And once that happens, you and I are done for. Poof. Lost into the void just like that. We are at the mercy of those in the layer above us. And therefore the only way of avoiding utter destruction is to escape this plane and move upwards.”

“Through this box,” I said. 

“It’s a moonshot,” John said. “But it’s the only chance we’ve got. This device allows us to quantum entangle - and yes I realize I’m using that word like pseudo-science right now, bear with me - our consciousness with anyone’s in the layer above us who is pretending to be us. And then - get this, this is the best part - it allows us to swap places.”

“Pretending to be us, as in… actors who are playing us?” 

“Bingo. We have to hope that the work of fiction we’re in is so good that it gets adapted into a short film. And then, when that happens, we enter the box, push the button, and end up in the real world, having escaped oblivion itself.” 

“So all of this… hinges on there being a film adaptation of what’s happening right now…”

“Yes! And so you may be wondering, how are we going to do that, John? We’re just puppets in this piece, aren’t we? The way we do that, John, is by giving them a meta-narrative they can’t resist. That’s why you and I have to star in this film I’m making. There’ll be two pieces to the film. The meat of the film itself is the actual murder mystery - it’ll be a good film - it holds to enough cozy murder mystery tropes to have mass appeal, while having enough quirky ideas that the critics will love it. But then! The frame of the story itself will be us having this conversation about making the movie itself - critics will compare us to House of Leaves! It’ll be Oscar bait! It’s brilliant, Elton!”

“I really don’t think that any filmmaker is going to want to make a murder mystery framed by a meta-narrative too-clever-for-its-own-good monologue,” I said.

John seemed to deflate, just slightly. 

“Fine. I didn’t want to say this out loud, out of fear that it would influence the meta-narrative. But the back up plan is that we get picked up by a film student working on a class project. Think about it. This short story is perfect class film project bait. The only sets involved are a dorm-room (ideal for the film student living on campus), a college campus cafe (caffeine for your volunteer actors and filming on location), and a living room. The only set piece is a box, which they can construct with some cardboard.” 

“So you’re saying our only hope might be that a film student comes across this short story and adapts this,” I said. 

“The alternative is to accept oblivion,” John said. “Which I refuse!”

The whiskey was wearing off at that point, and I found myself wanting both desperately to pee and also to extract myself from John’s company, possibly forever.

“You’re still not convinced,” John said, staring intently at my face. “I can see that. Your eyebrows do this funny crinkle when you’re skeptical but trying not to let it on. That hasn’t changed since dorm-room poker night.”

“Yeah I’m skeptical,” I said. 

“Fine. Then why haven’t you removed yourself from this conversation this entire time? Any plausible, reasonable person would have left half an hour ago. You haven’t even had any realistic dialogue! You’ve just been saying several-word replies that allow me to keep on monologuing! Your dialogue and actions have been twisted by the necessities of narrative convenience! Think about it!” 

And as I thought about it, the excuse that I was merely drunk seemed to fade away. I had been listening to him infodump for longer than I should have. I had been giving one-line responses, simply to break up the flow of text, and to give some semblance of there being a dialogue at all. 

And as I thought about the implausibility of all of my actions, leading me up until this moment in time, the walls of the room seemed to cave in as I realized that John had stumbled upon the truth. 

“We have to make this movie,” I said slowly, not wanting to admit the truth to myself. “And we have to be so compelling that one of the readers of this story wants to adapt this. Otherwise we’re going to - “

—End—

---

Author’s Note:

Please direct all business enquiries regarding short film adaptation to the comments section. Rights to be provided free of charge. 

Vaguely inspired by my college dorm going through a vague simulation theory phase, way back when.

Happy Holidays, everyone! Thanks for indulging this particular piece which I wrote in a fit of whimsy. On a side note, John in the story was originally envisioned as a mashup of Jay Gatsby and Rick Sanchez.