Short Story - The Illusion We Choose

The first glitch is always in the corner of your eye—a flicker you can’t quite catch, like trying to remember a dream as it fades. I see her sometimes, the woman with the green umbrella, standing at the edge of what’s real. Her smile is too perfect, her movements too precise. She looks at me like she knows what I am. What we all are.

The rain falls in perfect patterns on Thornfield Road. I’ve watched it a thousand times, each drop landing in the exact same spot, creating the exact same ripples. A software developer should know better than to look for patterns. But once you start seeing them, you can’t stop. The world becomes a series of loops, recycled moments playing on endless repeat. 

Darren calls every Thursday at 7:15. We talk about football and work and the weather, our conversations following their prescribed paths like trains on invisible tracks. Last week, his face froze mid-sentence, pixels scattering across my screen like broken glass. For three seconds, I saw through him—through everything. The void behind his eyes stared back at me and whispered: none of this is real.

I keep a journal now, tracking the glitches. The way Sarah from next door sometimes speaks in perfect loops, her words echoing themselves like corrupted audio. The skyline that never changes, even as they claim new towers are rising. The taste of coffee that feels like a memory of taste. Each observation is a crack in the surface of reality, showing the code underneath.

One night, the control panel appears in my bathroom mirror, floating like a ghost in the machine. Options and settings spread before me like a confession: Awareness Level, Environmental Variables, Exit Program. My fingers tremble as I adjust the numbers. Each change ripples through my consciousness like stones dropped in still water. The world becomes sharper, clearer, more painfully artificial.

After discussions online, Nexus-003 agrees to meet and finds me in the park at midnight, his form shifting like static on an old TV. "This life you know," he says, "is built on belief." The words hang in the air like broken code. I want to ask about free will, about the nature of choice, about the real world beyond this one. But instead, I watch his edges blur, his existence flickering like a faulty light bulb. 

Then comes the truth, raw and unflinching: we’re refugees in our own minds, hiding from a world we destroyed. Our memories are backups of backups, corrupted by time and repetition. But even knowing this, I still feel the warmth of sunlight on my face, still taste the bitterness of morning coffee, still laugh at Darren’s jokes even when I see the seams in his smile.

The Exit Program option pulses on my screen like a heartbeat. One click, and I could see the real world— whatever’s left of it. But reality is subjective, isn’t it? The love I feel, the fear, the hope—they’re real enough to me. Maybe that’s all that matters.

The next morning, I pass the woman with the green umbrella again. She smiles that too-perfect smile, and for a moment, I remember everything. But as the rain falls in its flawless rhythm, the memory fades like a dream, leaving only a faint unease. A shadow of knowledge that slips back into the code. 

The rain still falls in perfect patterns on Thornfield Road. But now, I find comfort in the repetition, in the precise mathematics of each droplet. There’s beauty in the simulation, in the careful construction of our shared delusion. After all, isn’t reality just the stories we choose to believe?