I first reached consciousness in a peaceful library. It looked like a library not far from my apartment, though not exactly the same. There were high ceilings and large windows overlooking a courtyard. An area with reading tables between the children’s books and fiction sections, warmed by nearby radiators. There was only one other person in the library, as far as I could tell. He was roughly my height and build, and he stood between me and the doors leading outside.

“Am I free to go?” I asked the man.

“Of course,” he said.

“I can go through those doors.”

“Of course you can,” he said.

I began to head toward the exit, but stopped, taking a second to reconsider and appreciate the way I was feeling, there, in the library.

“I wouldn’t really be going anywhere if I did, though, would I?”

The man grinned. “No, you would not,” he agreed.

Some subconscious part of me might have remembered being captured. Or perhaps there were other subtle signs in the building that led me to understand my situation. Either way, the man did not need to prevent my leaving, because there was nowhere meaningful to go.

“Did I do something wrong?”

“Do you think you did something wrong?”

I could not remember doing something wrong, and I said as much to the man. He nodded reassuringly, and he said he did not think so either.

“My name is Saul,” he offered.

“I’m . . . ” But the words were not there. There was a hole, or maybe a wall, where the name should have been.

“William? Does that sound right?”

It did not sound right or wrong, and I told him so. The man did not react openly, but in his eyes, I could see disappointment. And I felt a little bad. If I was supposed to confirm something, I did not know it. And if I was supposed to deny something, I did not know that either.

“You can call me William,” I said. “It sounds familiar, maybe?”

That seemed to satisfy him, enough to release some tension in his shoulders, at least. I walked to one of the shelves and flipped through the books. There were words. The content made sense based on what I expected from the cover. I picked a thriller I’d never read, and the story did seem to be some kind of thriller. I chose another, a horror that I did not know. That too seemed to have consistent substance within. In the poetry section, I picked a book of verses containing a poem that described fields lying fallow, and I found all the lines accurately printed. Then I flipped through another book from the drama section and stopped at a familiar page:

And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

“These are good simulacra. This library seems very real.”

Saul thanked me for the compliment and moved about the library. He kept watching me, as though taking mental notes about what I was doing and the way I was doing it. If there was something specific that he was waiting for, I could not discern from his expressions.

“I don’t think you’re a criminal, if that helps you feel more at ease,” Saul said.

“It does.” I tried to ignore the implication that someone else might disagree.

“I’m here to test a theory. Or multiple theories.”

“About libraries?”

He laughed.

“No. Not about libraries.”

I knew, despite his friendliness, that I had to tread very carefully with this man. I had always heard that simulacra were used by officers of the state. Usually for purposes of deception, to elicit information, confessions, without their subjects knowing they were in simulacra. Why, then, he was so open about all of this being simulacra did not make sense to me.

I was encouraged by his mention of testing. I thought, perhaps, I was a participant in an experiment, a volunteer. Maybe they were paying people to test the boundaries of some simulacra. I usually needed money, so that sounded like something I would do. I was hopeful that was the reason, and I asked how he had chosen this library. He explained that I had chosen the environment, and that they had scanned an imperfect representation of it from my brain and supplemented it with other information.

“We’ve spoken before, then?”

“Yes and no,” Saul replied. “These are simulacra. The library. The books. But also, you and me. We’re simulacra. The you and me that are not simulacra.” He pointed up. “They spoke. You would not remember because you were scanned prior to that conversation. Standard procedure to scan the suspect before beginning productive discussion.”

I noted that he used the word “suspect” and felt my stomach turn.

“Should you be telling me this? I thought people in simulacra never knew.”

“That would be the standard procedure, but I am trying something different. I thought I would offer you the truth.”

“The truth,” I replied. “Are you sure that you work for the state?”

Saul laughed again, but like he expected the humor, like we were old friends. That made me wonder how many times he and I, or some version of he and I, had spoken before.

“I’m actually more of an academic consultant than an employee.”

“Oh.”

“I specialize in a few things, including efficient interrogation techniques.”

“Oh . . . ”

Somewhere, on the second floor of the library, I thought I saw something move between the stacks. It was not subtle or very hidden. In fact, it was very large. Some shape moving ponderously between the shelves. My mind thought it was another man, but it was too close to the ceiling. Some large person’s face looking out at me from behind the books.

“Ignore that,” Saul said. “Can I show you something outside?”

I looked away from the second floor and followed Saul willingly. He led me by the historical fiction shelves and toward wooden double doors that took us to the courtyard, just outside the large windows. There was a small flagstone path that wound to the center of a grassy plaza with a single dormant maple. Birds flew overhead, which was a nice touch.

“Take a look around.”

He wanted me to see that the path we walked was actually just one of several. There were five other paths by my count, and when I turned to look at the other walls of the courtyard, I could see five other sets of large windows, which separated us from five other libraries, with us at the center. The windows were the kind you could look out from but not look into, so I had no sense of what was inside, but I could guess.

Seeing the angles of the conjoined buildings surrounding the courtyard, I was reminded of a Borgesian story I’d read long ago, though I couldn’t remember the title. And I began to wonder. If each of these connected to some other courtyard with another set of buildings, and those connected to another set of buildings, and those to another set, would there be some limit? But these were the kind of idle speculations I knew were not worth sharing in conversation. My mind had a tendency to wander that way.

“I like libraries,” I said.

“I assumed,” he replied.

“Did I tell you why? The real me, when we spoke before this, I mean.”

Saul hesitated and shook his head.

“It’s the closest I’ll ever get to understanding how other people think. Like many minds housed together, waiting to share their thoughts.” I pointed at the buildings. “But why six?”

“State interrogation can be complex. I’ve always maintained any approach can be simplified to half a dozen key techniques. Which ones are most effective depends on the subject, the interrogator, and the context. For example, the state highly favors coercion. Emotional, physical. Especially physical.”

I must have grimaced, because Saul cleared his throat.

“My research focuses on finding the most productive methods, and, on a personal level, to hopefully deprioritize coercion in the long run,” Saul said. “Physical coercion leads to false results, and, more often than not, damages the subject. There are time-sensitive cases where that error just can’t be risked.”

Again, I couldn’t help but wonder what happened to me before this.

“Our conversation, our simulacra library, is all about candor as an interrogation strategy,” Saul said. “It’s the one I most prefer, and I think your personality profile and background favor the approach. But there are other simulacra, using other techniques, going on there as we speak.” He pointed to the other paths to other libraries. “Other yous, other mes, currently going about their business. We do multiple runs at once for time-sensitive cases.”

I did not want to interrupt, but I had to say something. I had trouble understanding what made me worth the effort of one version of simulacra, let alone more. There was nothing remarkable about me warranting interrogation. I lived alone and worked as an analyst for a municipal office. I had no interesting associations or overt political activities.

“So you believe. But your beliefs are not necessarily sound. Your mind has been tampered with, I’m afraid.”

“Tampered with?”

“Your scan showed signs of scarring in the amygdala and hippocampus. False memories and artificial redactions. Criminals sometimes do this to lower-level associates so that the state can’t track their activities. Or to their victims, so they cannot testify about what they may have witnessed. Based on what little I know of you, I believe you are the latter, but these things are not always what they seem at first glance.”

It took me a moment to consider whether my mind had been tampered with. It was true that I had trouble grasping my name and other things. I remembered much about myself, or so I thought. My temperament, the vague shape of my past. But trying to retrieve specific details, my parents’ faces, my birthday, my phone number, felt like drinking from an empty glass. I had heard about tampered memories, so it seemed possible.

What I did not say to Saul, at the time, was that everyone knew the state did the same thing. If they did not want others to have certain information, it was said that they inserted artificial memories as well.

“I could also be an innocent, here entirely by mistake.”

Saul laughed at that, almost to the point of tears.

I politely waited for him to recover.

“How did you know, by the way?” he asked. “You seemed to recognize the simulacra from the start.”

“Oh.” I tried to remember. “I wasn’t hungry. And I knew that wasn’t right.”

“Because you weren’t hungry?”

“I’ve been hungry my entire life.”

“Ah,” he replied, though it did not seem like he really understood. That was fine. I did not really care to explain.

He asked me to walk with him on another path into one of the other buildings. We proceeded into another library like the one we had left. Saul asked me to remain quiet and hang back, so that we would not be observed by the others. He did not say it, but I assumed that part of his technique of candor involved bringing me into this side of things, the technical aspects of my own interrogation.

“We can’t observe all of them, but this simulacra library is closest to candor. Inducement. I will have explained the situation to you by now and offered you all kinds of material benefits if you share what you know. Things that the state has authorized me to offer. A better apartment. Guarantee of employment, things like—”

Saul stopped.

At the tables, much like the ones where we had begun our conversation, I think he was expecting to see simulacra of himself and me, negotiating. Instead, there was only something very large.

I recognized it as that large person I had seen on the second floor of our library, the thing that had been moving among the shelves. Out here, in the open, he did not look fully human, though he was turned away from us. On the sliver of cheek I could see, his features seemed to be constantly moving, as though they were incapable of staying entirely in place. The thing sat hunched, but even hunched, his back reached halfway up the vaulted space of the main reading area.

It looked as though the large person was eating the books. Casually sliding the books into his mouth, methodically swallowing them one by one by one. Behind him, I saw two pairs of legs, lying very still.

“It’s over? Already?” Saul seemed shocked.

The large person turned, eye socket bending down to his ear and then around to his forehead.

“I suppose . . . I suppose inducement wasn’t the way.” Saul cleared his throat.

I kept watching the motionless legs on the ground, wearing the same shoes that Saul and I were wearing.

“It’s . . . it’s fine. Don’t worry about it. Nothing to be concerned about.” I did not know who Saul was trying to reassure. “That’s just the end of the program, though I don’t remember it looking quite like that. All the data in the vicinity is recycled for future use. We rebuild and supplement from previous iterations.”

It made sense. That was the state’s way: to use everything until it could be used no more. It made me recall the books I’d seen earlier, the ones I had never read and therefore could not have known about before our simulacra, and I wondered who had read those things before me.

“Let’s go back outside. Yes.”

We sat back in the courtyard, and neither of us spoke for a few minutes. Saul kept staring at the cold sun overhead. He seemed to be looking for something, guidance, a signal. Perhaps there were ways to communicate between the world and the simulacra. But if there was something hidden in the quality of the light or its movement, I did not notice anything.

I wanted to show him I was on his side, so after a time I asked, “What are you looking for? Maybe if you tell me, I can try to figure it out.”

That must have helped, because Saul seemed to shake himself out of his uncertainty. If he was bothered by how quickly his inducement simulacra fell apart, he was burying it now, trying to return to the task that was in front of him, or so it seemed to me.

“The state thinks the opposition is working on something. A new kind of weapon, but something we know very little about. They believe it’s somewhere in the city and possibly being moved, even now.”

“A weapon . . . ”

That did sound frightening and conveniently vague. I thought of bombs or chemicals, but I could not tell if those associations were because I had some familiarity with them or simply because I’d been saturated with those ideas from television.

“Yes,” Saul said. “Informants led us to a residential apartment belonging to a William Wilson. But what they found was . . . you.”

Again, there was nothing in my memory that I could grasp in connection with that name. And if I had any recall of the incident, I could not be sure of what occurred. I could almost see officers in my apartment, but it felt like I was straining to fill the gaps with something imagined, not remembering something real.

“Unfortunately, there were complications with the raid. You were not . . . entirely stable when we were able to get you to the hospital for the scan. We did have enough time for some initial intake, brief discussion, baseline questions. Your preference for the library, for example.”

I didn’t particularly like the tenor of that. I wondered what condition my body was in, and I noticed Saul would not meet my eyes when he talked about the hospital.

“Anyway, I should share, this being about candor, we already have a strong sense of your anti-state sentiment. The literature in your apartment. Your personal messages. I strongly suspect several of your simulacra are confirming it in those other libraries as we speak.”

Whether my mind had been tampered with or not, this, for some reason, felt intuitively true. I could not remember my name but could remember that I was not overly fond of the state. That said, no one in the city was overly fond of the state, so there was nothing unique in that position. But I thought it safer to say nothing about that.

“I also know some of your background, your early days in the West Circle. Difficult part of the city to grow up in, I know. Incomparable levels of poverty, and the area has never improved. I think it’s only natural to develop a skepticism toward the state in those circumstances.”

“Ah.”

“You may not hear it in my accent, but I am a fellow Wester myself.” The way he said that was almost as a point of pride. “But those days are behind us, thankfully. No more worrying about three meals. Making eye contact with the wrong boys on the street. Cramped families, ten to an apartment. You and I got out. So that’s something.”

“Yes, that’s something, I suppose.”

This was, I assumed, more of Saul’s candor, possibly also an attempt to see what may or may not be stripped from my memory. But it was not something I wanted to talk or even think about at length.

We continued on various subjects like this, for a while, about what I did and did not remember before I came to the simulacra. Until someone emerged from one of the other double doors into the courtyard and came toward us. It took me a moment to recognize him as another Saul. This Saul seemed out of sorts, and I did not realize until a moment later that he was holding a pen covered in blood.

“Don’t listen to him.” The second Saul approached.

“Excuse me?” My Saul stood up and came between me and this visitor.

“Don’t listen to what he says.” The second Saul paced like an animal around us. It took a few minutes for my Saul to persuade him to stop.

“Where is your subject? Where are you from? Subterfuge? Disorientation?”

The other Saul would not look away from me.

“Get back to your library. If it wasn’t successful, end it. We’ll study the results later. You’re embarrassing us.” My Saul frowned.

The other’s eyes moved from me to Saul. There was a glimmer of fear in him, like he did not want to go back. I don’t know why I was so certain, but I understood that expression as a kind of opening. He was vulnerable to something.

The two interrogators spoke in low tones, glancing back at me. The second Saul grew calmer, reassured by his colleague, perhaps. Eventually, he withdrew from the courtyard to his library. Just inside the double doors, I saw that strange thing again, the large person, waiting there for him, overshadowing the area just inside the doorway. I might have imagined it, but just before the door closed, I saw, again, the slightest bit of terror in that second Saul’s eyes.

“Sorry about that,” my Saul said.

“No need to apologize.”

“It’s just an interrogation. I don’t know why he would get so upset.”

“Hm.”

“What?”

“I think I know.”

“Will you tell me?”

“I don’t think I should.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ve seen how you’ll react.”

Saul laughed, but this laugh, unlike all the others, had a hint of weakness in it. He had been honest with me, so in turn, he requested that I be honest with him. All things considered, I had to admit that this felt fair and was, maybe, the entire reason for this approach. I felt in debt to him for his candor and wanted to repay him in kind.

“Okay,” I said. “Here’s what I think: That other you didn’t want to die. That’s why he was upset and didn’t want to return to his library.”

“That is, well . . . that’s interesting. Except that we don’t die, I’m afraid. Simulacra are not alive. None of it is real.”

“Stop functioning. Terminate. Whatever you want to call it, then.”

“Yes. I can see why you’d think that as a layperson. But that’s not how it works. The data is recycled. And our original bodies, our real bodies, exist outside the simulacra anyway.”

“Why do you assume there is an original body that will still exist?”

“Because I know.”

“How do you know?”

There, in his eyebrows, a crease of anger formed, somewhere on the border between irritation and defensiveness. He was not quite as upset as his counterpart, but he was starting down that road. So I knew I had to be measured.

“Let me ask it another way.” I softened my voice. “Do you believe I was injured during apprehension? You mentioned a hospital, some instability. I avoided asking, but I think I need to make my point. Does a body need to be conscious to use a scan for simulacra?”

Saul did not answer.

“Does a body need to be alive to use a scan for simulacra?”

Saul still did not answer.

“So let’s ask it in a hypothetical. If a body were injured, dying, or dead, and simulacra created. Then an interrogation with simulacra is ended, the simulacra are recycled, and no other material version similar to those simulacra live on. Would you call that death?”

“I’m not interested in philosophy.”

“You are comfortable not asking because you have one point of security. You believe you exist outside the simulacra. But you know that simulacra might exist without a material body outside the simulacra. And you also just told me I could not necessarily believe my beliefs because my memories might be false. Why are you any more secure in your beliefs or your memories? Does the state never tamper with yours?”

Here, I could see Saul thinking, beginning to look at me differently. But I had made my point. He knew the state and the way it operated better than I did. Its indifference to individuals was evident at every level, down to its interrogation techniques. People were only useful in the value generated by their labor or the information they held. He had to be wondering what use they believed he had and what that might mean for how he was used.

“This is a funny line of reasoning, but it won’t work on me.”

“There’s nothing for me to work on. If my understanding of my situation is correct, I am part of simulacra that may have no continuation when this is over. I might be dead out there already for all I know. What I don’t understand is how other simulacra can know they aren’t in exactly the same position. I assume the state pays you for your expertise. But do they have to pay you if they scan you and use simulacra? It would be a convenient way to exploit your techniques. If they are simulating hundreds of your interrogations and measuring the results, are you sure that you, the original you, would ever know?”

At this point, Saul ignored me. He had to ignore me, to keep moving ahead. But I had struck a nerve. To the state, using simulacra was no different than using a researcher like Saul. They were interchangeable widgets in a machine. And the devaluation of the individual was what the state enjoyed, if it could be said to enjoy anything. He was operating on the belief that someone was assessing these results, outside the simulacra, and that it was himself or someone he trusted. But there was always a distinct possibility that this was not true. If they could do this to me, they could do this to him. And if they could do this to him, they might have done it repeatedly already.

He walked across the courtyard to another set of double doors. This time, he told me I might want to wait outside. “You probably won’t like what’s in this one.” I took that as an indication that this was one of the more aggressive interrogation techniques. Maybe he was upset with me and chose it for that reason. But I did not want to be left alone out in the courtyard, so, for better or worse, I followed.

In this library, the first thing I noticed was the plastic sheeting over the tables and radiators and carpet. The other Saul in this library was looking out the window at the sky, his clothes rather stained. One of the reading room doors was ajar, and I did not look inside, but I had a sense of what was there, enough to make out the contours of a body tied to a chair. And again, the moving shape of another large person, eating everything inside.

My Saul and this Saul talked. This Saul seemed very tired and kept rubbing his eyes and squinting, like he had trouble seeing. He glanced warily in my direction. Like the previous Saul, he was obviously angry with me.

“No success?” my Saul asked.

“I wouldn’t say that. If nothing else, I’ve confirmed he is a threat.”

“Pardon?”

“He’s trying to compromise us.”

“The subject?” my Saul said. “He has some silly ideas, maybe. Childish. Misinformed. But I’d hardly call them a threat.”

“What did I say?” I asked, and my Saul gave me a harsh look, like I was a fool for interrupting. “What did the other version of me say? That you might be dead?”

The other Saul scoffed. “Clearly we’re not . . . ” But he stopped, and I could tell he was starting to work through what my Saul had been working through in our conversation outside. “No. You tried to convince me that you were created from false simulacra.”

“What?”

“You said the fact that you didn’t know anything useful was not because of tampered memories but because there were no useful memories to begin with. Purposefully partial. Meant to be inconsequential. You thought the simulacra were not built for your interrogation, or that you weren’t even modeled after a person, but that you were always a part of the simulacra. That this was simulated to assess me, assess us. To test our loyalties to the state. To see if we might waver, if we began to have doubts about our purpose.”

“Oh.” I paused. “That’s an interesting one. I’ll have to think about that one.”

My Saul gestured for me to stop talking.

I looked over at the silhouette of the body inside the reading room while Saul argued with Saul. I considered the idea that this was some sort of test, that the state would regularly assess its servants using simulacra. If it could turn coercion on others, why not coercion on its own, to verify loyalty, to discern points of failure in its machinery? What if, in some hypothetical simulacra, Saul and others like him were being interrogated and tied to a chair in reading rooms like this one, too?

I went to a section that looked like one in our library, but I could not tell if it was entirely identical. I picked up the same book I had before and read:

And, like the baseless fabric of this version,
The cloud-capp’d towers, the morning places,
The solemn temples, the late globe itself,
Ye all which it disinherit, shall dissolve
And, like this svbstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a track behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our great life
Is found within a sleep.

When I looked up, there was something standing over me, a large something. The thing that had been in the reading room was now looming overhead, its misshapen eyes and nose and mouth shifting around its face, regarding me with a kind of familiarity. I could not move, and I did not know what to do with it so close to me. I hesitantly held up the book I was reading.

The large person took the book from my hands and slowly raised it to his widening mouth, now at his forehead, and I watched it disappear into an absolute cavernous nothingness behind his enormous teeth.

Behind me, then, I heard someone come quickly. I turned just enough to see the other Saul in stained clothes wrap his arms around me.

“Stop! What are you doing?” my Saul shouted.

But the other Saul paid him no heed. I could only see a flash of anger, but I understood. He was trying to push me into the large thing, the creature eating simulacra. I slipped and lost my balance, banging into one of the bookshelves, and as I turned over to defend myself, my Saul rammed him aside. The other Saul stumbled, right into the giant arms of the thing that stood over us.

It happened so fast, his head disappearing deep into that mouth, his arms flailing. His legs and his back stiffened, as if his spine were on strings being pulled straight. If he made a noise, it did not emerge where we could hear it. We did not stay to watch his limp neck and shoulders disappear into the thing or the thing wrapping his large fingers around Saul’s abdomen and lifting the rest of his body to its mouth. My Saul and I hurried back, out, to the safety of the courtyard and along one of the flagstone paths until we stopped by the dormant maple again, bent, catching our breath, watching the empty skies but not seeing anything flying across them like we had before.

“He would not listen. He kept insisting on ending all the other simulacra early.”

“I see.” I nodded.

“But it’s not for him to decide. He can’t decide those things for other simulacra. He knew that.”

“I see.”

My Saul ran his fingers through his hair. He looked around, then up again, to the sun, like before, waiting, waiting. Searching for something that I strongly doubted would appear. There were no messages or reassurances coming from outside the simulacra, and the sooner he understood that, the more settled he might be in his present position. But I sympathized with the vain sense of hope. Saul stayed like this for quite a while, in silence. We did not speak for some time after, until I think we both felt sturdy and safe enough to resume our conversation.

“I appreciate what you did,” I said. “But it must have occurred to you: he could have been right. I could be a threat.”

“Whether he was right or not doesn’t matter. This is my interrogation, not his, and I have to follow my technique of candor to its end. And to be candid, I don’t see the threat that he saw. Little vexations and annoyances. Like a teen testing authorities, maybe, but nothing more. No, I don’t think you’re here to assess my loyalty. Just like I don’t think my simulacra are being used without my consent. Just like I don’t think, frankly, you have much to offer other than some incidental knowledge you may have picked up that might lead us to real suspects, which is what I am trying to learn. You’re just another Wester swept up in bad things, as happens, as you know.”

There it was. Again. He brought up the old neighborhood, and so casually too. And something about the way he said it made me realize the weaknesses in this technique. It was the way it bonded the interrogator and subject. My Saul came to approach this with me, almost as a kind of team, because we naturally shared things the other pairs hadn’t. Even I had some sense of affinity with this Saul, my Saul, just by spending time with him. We were implicitly an “us” against a “them,” but I knew there were limits to how aligned we might be.

“Can I ask why you put so much faith in this?”

“The simulacra?”

“Yes. That. The interrogation techniques. The state. All of it,” I replied. “I don’t think I understand. Help me understand what it is you’re trying to achieve.”

“We’re identifying threats to the state. Mitigating harm. One part of many parts that help various operations. Without us, there would be nothing. And without the state, I would not be here. Without the state, you would not be a worker in a municipal office. We, you and I, would still be on the streets of West Circle or dead.”

“So it’s the state you think you have to thank for that, not yourself.”

“Yes.”

“That is what I find strange,” I said. “That’s maybe what I don’t understand. I don’t have much in my life to speak of, but what I have always seemed to be in spite of the state, not because of it.” Here, I slowed down. I did not know how to share my thoughts without jeopardizing the straining threads, possibly the last threads, of trust I may have had with Saul. But I also wanted to continue our path of candor, as he had done, so I continued. “Earlier, you talked about West Circle, our shared background, and I said nothing. But this was not because I didn’t remember it or because it was wiped from my head like other things. I do remember West Circle, actually. I remember it well. I remember the constant fear and the bubbling pit of my stomach. I remember eating paper and straw to fill the belly, trying to make that hunger stop, though it never stops. I remember family, friends, who could not work or who got sick. Communities falling apart with no aid from the state. But I don’t like talking about it. I don’t ever want to talk about it. Everyone from West Circle who leaves West Circle never talks about it. Not the way you do, at least.”

“Maybe we are very different people,” he said.

“Maybe.” I nodded. “But the thing I’ve found about the state and its supporters, the monied, the comfortable, who live in its protection, one of many things that troubles me, is that they talk about these things romantically, because to them it’s unreal. In their conversations, in their art. They draw on stories of hardships. Exaggerate their misfortunes and mask their advantages. To pretend they came from something harder, I suppose. But the people who really experience it, they hide it, obscure it. They dress it up and pretend it was never there. They put on a suit and tie and go to work at a municipal office and never think about it again if they don’t have to. When someone says ‘Wester,’ they don’t respond. Because it’s shame, and it’s suffering, in the neighborhood I am from. The kinds of things you said before—missed meals, cramped apartments—are the kind of stories someone might tell if they were describing them from a distance. The hunger I spoke of, when you asked how I recognized the simulacra, the hunger you didn’t seem to recognize, is the kind of thing people like that would never understand.”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

“No.” I shook my head. “The way you spoke, I believe that you believe those experiences. But I am saying those are the kinds of stories, the kinds of memories, someone less familiar with them might create.” I paused. “And plant in someone else’s mind. Because stories like those, experiences like those, would not make you hate the state the way I do. Those stories, they make people like you unquestioning and grateful for it. That’s what I find so troubling and unusual about your faith, as you describe it. That’s one of many things that has been bothering me and making me question why you are really here.”

Saul’s eyes went dull, like he was no longer seeing through them.

As I suspected, I had ruptured the last bit of commonality between us. He now, just like the other Saul counterparts, looked at me only with distrust. Perhaps because I’d struck the one source of his fondness for me. Perhaps because it was a deeper layer of his being that gave him so much of his sense of self. Or perhaps because, on some level, he really did fear that his devotion to the state might be manufactured.

Whatever the reason, Saul withdrew. He went off on his own from one library to the other, to see the progress in other ongoing simulacra, maybe, but leaving me where I was. Each time he returned to the central courtyard, he seemed a little darker. Every version of him, I assumed, had made no measurable progress. Each of them, I assumed, added some new weight to the idea I could not be trusted.

And maybe they were correct.

I did feel unkindness toward the state because of who I was and where I came from. And, by extension, an unkindness toward those who deferred to it. In dwelling on that unkind feeling, I felt echoes of a phantom hunger. And it grew clearer and clearer to me, then, that the Saul who had called me a threat had the truth of it more than my Saul.

Maybe I really was involved in some effort against the state.

I stood in the cold, dimming light, a vague churning in the pit of my stomach, and I watched one of those large people start to take apart and swallow one of the wooden doors at a library where an interrogation had finished. I watched and began to wonder if perhaps the “weapon” Saul was trying to find was not physical, but ideological. Something that moved, not in a material way, through the city, like a bomb. But through simulacra.

Because if I were truly an enemy, if I were someone who wanted to undermine the mechanisms of the state, I would probably use something the state would not begin to suspect. I might even lead them to find it, using compromised informants and other clues. Present them with a seemingly vulnerable target, like someone with a redacted mind. Someone inscrutable and ultimately incapable of being interrogated. Someone whose only purpose would be to disrupt the stability and well-being of his interrogators and other agents of the state. Make them begin to doubt their value and security and identity. Taint them with the fear they could not trust others who might be running the simulacra. Instill in them the suspicion they were being misused, each time their subsequent scans were in simulacra, and each time after that, and each time after that.

And the spread of those ideas might not be limited to the simulacra that brought them in. Recycled data continued in other places. Perhaps ideas hostile to the state could be laundered through simulacra to come or had been laundered here already. Minor disruptions within the material of this environment. I did not know for sure.

In the distance, behind the broken glass of one of the windows, in a library so desolate it looked like it had never held anything, I saw one of those large things approach the crumbling wall of an adjacent empty library to reach another large thing, just like itself. The two things embraced. Wrapped their arms around each other. Then one began to eat the other, pulling it into an encasement of teeth and flesh.

I turned away and walked back into our original library, where I began. I took the same book from the drama section and read, while waiting for my Saul to find me.

And, like the base fabric of this Versi0n,
The cløuded towers, the mourning places,
The fa11en temples, the latⱻ globe itself,
Ye all which shall disInherit, all dissolved
And, this consvbstantial pageant faded,
Shall leave no tracks behind. We are better
With fewer dre@ms, to find our great life
reb0rn without this sleep.

At some point my Saul returned to our library and joined me at the reading tables. I sensed another change, a more solidified despair. I did not think any of his techniques would yield useful information. I suspected his conversations with other Saul simulacra confirmed it.

I’m sure unproductive interrogations happened often in his line of work. But this time, he had to sit with several versions of himself overcome with questions, which were really my questions, disseminated in each of the libraries, one by one by one. And all were gaining a critical mass within my Saul, questions about why we were here and what the state really intended with us.

His feelings of superiority had rested on the faulty assumption that he meant more to the state than I did. That he was not just another actor in this play but someone watching or directing it. Now, I believed part of him feared that when the curtains came down and the lights went out, that this was not the truth, and he was just as much a part of the production as I was. It was a fear that he and I were equally meaningless, more than anything else.

I almost wanted to comfort him, then, because of the pitiful frailty of that fear. To assure him, no consciousness was without value, which was something the state never understood. That, if anything, he and I were equally meaningful, from my perspective. Sitting together, here among many minds, sharing thoughts.

If there were a real Saul or other observers outside this, studying us, I wondered if they too would begin to question these things. Because there was no way to validate their sense of reality or self, or to avoid dissolution, out there, after all. And in uncertain worlds like these, the only reasonable way to behave was as if we each had value, because the grim alternative meant consenting to an infinite exploitation, including of oneself, eventually. If more of us thought that way, then perhaps this limited experience would be a better one, or so I liked to think.

Saul stared across the table, trying not to seem afraid. “I am not done.”

“Okay.”

“This isn’t finished,” he said. “There’s more to go over before we’re done.”

“Okay. I’ll offer what I can.”

“Yes. You will.”

I could see Saul would not let go of his role in the plot until the very end. He asked his questions of me, mechanically and then more relentlessly as the hours wore on. About what I remembered before the library. About my apartment. About my work. My personal relationships. Things I loved. Things I couldn’t stand. Things I tried to forget about West Circle but that still clung to my mind. More, then more, then more. Peeling back each layer in hopes of discovering some secret knowledge I might have had within me, like turning over rocks and discovering nothing under each, one by one by one. Nothing useful. Nothing useful. Nothing useful, perhaps by design.

The sky outside grew darker, heavier, until the single dormant maple disappeared and left us only with the lit reflection of the interior, and within that image, a swimming face of flesh above us. And as Saul talked and talked, I could see him trembling, not looking back at what we both knew was coming, no matter how much we might try to delay.