Our Simulated Selves – Nikki Null

A mind-bending quantum thriller about simulated realities, brainscanners, a digital apocalypse, estrogen, and tabletop gaming at a cozy queer café.

A depressed supercomputer technician scanned his brain to test his coworker’s claim that she wouldn’t date him if he were “the last man on Earth.” The Controller takes notes while his simulated self follows in his footsteps. Inside the simulation, Ren Cartner is desperate for a brainscanner. That could tell him the reason for his lifelong struggles with depersonalization, brain fog, and strange feelings about gender he doesn’t know how to confront. The punk transfemme technologist Jeanne Joy is willing to steal one for him, just as long as he can get her a job maintaining the supercomputer. But before long she has pulled him into her queer social circle, and Ren has never felt more alive. The only thing is, he can’t quite figure out if he wants to be with her or be like her. But when Ren asks Jeanne out, and she tells him the same thing she told the Controller, everyone else is abruptly deleted from their world. Wandering through an empty city, Ren and Jeanne must work together to survive and to unravel the truths behind their baffling reality. But in order to defy the Controller’s plans for them, Ren must outsmart his real world counterpart by finally confronting those fundamental truths that even the all-powerful Controller could not compute.