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"And, click! Recorded forever!"
"Ahaha, not fair!" Shin clutched at himself, almost incapacitated from how hard he had been laughing. Any trepidation he had had over his friend suddenly disappearing for a business trip had melted away shortly into their first video call together. "I could screencap your smile, too!"
Not just their first call this trip - Their first, period.
His friend had been... less than enthused about the idea the last time Shin had brought it up. For all that he had taken so many pictures of Shin that he had his favorites framed (much to the other boy's endless embarrassment) Sou Hiyori didn't like being in photos himself. Didn't like being recorded, either. The one time Shin had tried to stealthily film him before, he found himself deleting the footage right away - Hiyori had seen right through him, politely but firmly insisting that if Shin didn't delete it then he would.
It wasn't that Sou lacked confidence. Far from it - his exuberance was part of what had drawn Shin to him all those years ago, the sun to his moon.
Yet here they were, talking face-to-face even though they must've been miles apart. The camera that he had left behind, attached to Shin's main monitor, was unimaginably high res. So, too, was the camera on Sou's end, no doubt paid for by the same company that had spared no expense in footing the bill for this apartment.
"Oh? Why don't you?" Hiyori looked genuinely surprised for a moment, before narrowing his eyes. He leaned forward in his chair bringing his face towards the camera. "If you really want my smiling face as your desktop background then I'm not there to stop you, Shin."
"It's not like that," Shin replied, averting his eyes from the boy on his screen. It was bad enough Sou gently teased him when he was the one taking pictures, but to be teased for wanting a picture of him... "I'm just surprised by the change of heart."
Sou rested his chin on both hands, elbows firmly on the desk. Well, more than a desk, Shin supposed - there were multiple monitors visible at an odd angle behind his friend, as well as some kind of elaborate control console. "Do you ever think about how it'd be if there was nobody outside those walls? If the world only existed for you and me..."
"It... wouldn't be a lot different," admitted Shin, idly scratching at his collar with one finger as he tried to formulate an answer. This wasn't the first time Hiyori had posed a strange question to him. Maybe it wasn't even the strangest. At this point it had become part of the background noise of their friendship. "I don't think I even met anyone on my way here today."
Sou just barely shook his head. "You didn't even think about talking to anyone but me." His words were half-chiding, half-amused.
"My parents yelled to wake me up," Shin said, trying not to make it sound defensive. "But other than that..."
Sou waved a hand dismissively in the air, lounging back in his seat. "Oh, I wouldn’t even count that," he said. "Suppose the world was a simulation - that could just be a recording, set to wake you up every morning, aha! No interaction at all!"
"A simulation..." Sou had been reticent on the details of his work, but enough of the programming wisdom he had passed on to Shin had been rooted in specific areas for him to hazard a guess. Not that Hiyori would ever deign to confirm those guesses. Shin gave a little smile. "What are you saying, that you're finally letting me see you on camera because you've built a perfect simulation of yourself? That I'm speaking to a fake Sou Hiyori?"
Sou laughed at that. Really laughed, like his friend had just said the funniest thing in the world.
"I always told you to reach out and grab the truth with your own hands," he said, finally responding with actual words. "If you want to convince me I'm not the real Sou Hiyori, by all means try!"
"I... don't think that's very likely," answered Shin. Something felt uncomfortable about this topic of conversation. Some gray fog obscuring his thoughts as he tried to pick away at little doubts, little pieces where the circumstances didn't quite make sense. Little doubts about whether maybe, just maybe, he'd be easier to simulate than Sou.
It was Sou who put voice to those doubts, like he was plucking them out of Shin's muddied thoughts and presenting them in glorious technicolor. Almost as if this, too, was a joke to him. "No traffic on the way here, no sounds of it now either. The soup in the kitchen's still fresh, even though I left yesterday. You don't watch the news, but if you tried you'd only make yourself worried." He shook his head, steepling his fingers as he leaned back in his swivel chair. "If one of us lives in a simulated world, anyone would think it'd be you!"
Shin could almost feel the color draining from his face. Had he seen even one person other than Sou today? He could justify the roads being nearly clear if it was still early in the morning, but all it'd take is looking out the window, or stepping out the front door of the building, and he'd be able to make sure... make sure this world was real.
Why did it now feel so much like it wasn't?
"I... I think I need some fresh air."
"Why don't you go outside, Shin?" Sou asked. His voice dropped to an intimate and conspiratorial whisper. "Why don't you see the world I've made for you?"
The screen turned black, leaving Shin Tsukimi staring at his own distressed face.
He could see the cracks in the facade, now that he knew what this world was - what he was. The streets were empty, that much he already knew.
He considered smashing windows, breaking down doors, rooting around in other people's empty apartments and abandoned cars for some vestige of reality, some indication that other people had lived here once, lived here still. It had taken him some time even to muster up the nerve to peer in through windows on the street he lived in, and he had lost all heart for that the moment he realized that the houses on either side were empty save for the barest of set dressing visible from the windows.
And so with days passing by, Shin had found himself accepting an endless cycle of deja vu.
Clouds passed by the window at the same time yesterday, the day before, forever. The sun rose and set like clockwork, as if the whole simulation was a model solar system gently rotating at a science fair.
Nothing in this world would ever change. Nothing. Except for...
"Hello again, Shin!" Sou beamed at him, a high-fidelity smile that looked uncomfortably real. Less like they were talking by webcam, and more like there was a Sou Hiyori reachable through a tiny window. "I hope you're not lonely without me, aha!"
It had been a week. A week since the day of that first call, the day that Shin Tsukimi discovered he was nothing but an AI simulation, running in Sou's lab.
A week with no human interaction, save for when Sou spoke to him through the screen of his computer.
Well, not that he needed to be at the computer. It just felt more natural than Hiyori's smiling face appearing in whatever window frame or mirror was conveniently nearby and looming over him, like a scientist checking in on his favorite lab mouse. He usually stuck to a schedule, and if Shin stayed in the apartment it was less jarring to sit down and pretend that he really was calling a distant friend.
Besides, it felt too uncomfortable to sleep in his own empty home, haunted by the disembodied voices of his parents as a daily reminder that he was truly alone here.
"They weren't important enough to simulate." Sou almost seemed apologetic, for once. Or at least was doing a good job faking it. "I'd have to spend as much time with them as I have with you, aha, and that just wasn't possible."
It made sense. Everything Sou said made sense. In a horrible way that pressed down all around Shin, the whole rotten structure of this fake world made sense. And that sense had led to him taking over the apartment - Sou's apartment, really - as his own.
Shin - the Shin in the real world - really was important to Hiyori. But with no way to contact him (Sou had mentioned being declared legally dead, a day or two into this endlessly looping existence) he had simply built... coded... engineered? Whatever the word was, he had created a copy of his dearest friend, just to be able to talk to him.
"It's a strange feeling, isn't it?" asked Sou. "Being the most important person in the world."
Shin chewed his lip. "Do you feel that all the time?"
Sou chuckled. "Aha! Only when I'm not with you, Shin."
Nearly a month in, it wasn't Sou who called.
The woman staring at the camera wore something like a maroon maid dress, colored to match her short hair. Her head was topped off with a hat that resembled pancakes and the viscous flow of syrup, frozen solid mid-drip. A similarly syrupy skirt and bowtie completed the ensemble.
Shin... hadn't ever had much luck with girls, to put it bluntly. He wasn't the kind of boy that got confessed to under pink cherry blossoms, nor the kind that was particularly upset to miss out on that. But there was no contesting that the girl sat in front of the camera was very pretty, almost inhumanly so - more like a cherished porcelain doll than a mere human wearing makeup.
The girl tilted her head just so. "Oh, hello!" she said sweetly.
"Wh-" Who are you? What are you doing here? Where is Sou? Shin bit back the questions, slipping into the friendliest tone of voice he could muster. "Nice to meet you. Are you one of Hiyori's co-workers?"
Gentle green eyes and a genuine smile peered back at Shin. "We're much more than co-workers, I hope." She closed her eyes, giving a cute little giggle.
His eyes widened, the words striking him like he had been cut down by a blade. "What?!?"
It felt like... it felt like Sou was betraying him, like this woman was trying to steal Shin's one link to the outside world. What was she even doing in Sou's lab?!?
"I'm the one he's going to fall for!" she explained, which didn't exactly reassure Shin. She idly twisted strands of her brown hair around a well-manicured finger. "But... even though I like him, Hiyori doesn't like me yet."
Shin breathed a sigh of relief, before feeling more than a little uneasy about how it had been a relief.
The stranger blinked, her eyes turning a deep blue. "It's... you he always talks to, isn't it?" She sighed forlornly, gazing upwards as she placed a hand on her heart. "Even more than me..."
When she blinked next, those eyes were red. Worse, they were visibly artificial, all pretense at humanity abandoned as she scowled at Shin. She grabbed at the side of the camera - the monitor itself? - and shook it.
The world around Shin shook, too.
"Why does he care more about you?!?" she demanded, voice cracking in frustration. "I'm the one here for him, the one who already loves him! Why doesn't he give me that same love back?!?"
Shin was at a loss for an answer, not least of all because it felt like he was at the epicenter of an earthquake. The framed photos of himself that Sou prized so highly fell off the shelf, the sound of glass shattering almost unnoticed in the cacophony created by this girl's outburst. The toys on the same shelf followed suit, a gunpla breaking into less than its original pieces.
"I'm... I'm sorry!" shouted Shin, holding onto the desk "I don't know why... why he keeps me here!"
"Oh!" The girl blinked, once, twice, thrice, settling back on those kind green eyes. She pulled her hands away from the screen, folding them neatly on her lap. "I'm sorry! When I think about anyone getting between me and Hiyori... It's just too much!"
"I'm not going to..." started Shin, still nearly breathless from panic as he crawled back into the comfortingly familiar chair. "I mean, I'm not exactly able to get between you two. I'm not... real..."
"I'm about as real as you are, and I can't... leave, either," she admitted, with some mild distress on her face. "I'm only a doll. I was only ever meant to live here, in the facility." She closed her eyes, smiling once more as she clasped her hands together. "But it's okay. Because being here with Hiyori means I have more chances to win over his heart."
"His heart..." Shin felt his own beating in his chest, only now slowing down to somewhere near a normal level. Simulation or not, it had felt like the world was ending. He made a mental note to avoid angering this girl, whoever she was.
"I was configured to love him," she said. "Were you?"
"I..." Something lurched unpleasantly in the pit of Shin's stomach. He didn't think he had been... He still thought of Sou as a friend, even after... even after...
Even after Sou had created a copy of him for himself.
"That girl who was here earlier..."
"Girl?" Sou looked thoughtful for a second. "Oh, you mean Maple, ahaha! I'll be more careful about letting her in here, she caused a real mess."
A mess Sou had cleaned up with only a few keypresses, resetting the world damaged by Maple's fury. Shin was left feeling something between relief at how easily the damage was undone and a mild unease that maybe Sou could reset him with a few console commands.
"You shouldn't worry about that, aha - you're not a normal simulation." Sou's smile was as reassuring as it was possible for one to be when it was coming from someone who could rearrange Shin's whole world in an instant. "You're special to me, after all!"
"So you didn't..." Shin tried not to glance out the window at the fabricated world. "You didn't change me to like you?"
Sou raised an eyebrow, looking momentarily perplexed. "Why would I be interested in that?" he asked. "The whole point is you're still the Shin Tsukimi I spent all that time with! Aha, I'd be lousy at making simulations if I let my own desires get in the way of accuracy!"
In his own way, that was the closest Sou could ever come to apologizing to Shin for letting him think that. That was enough to calm Shin down, to put the thought that his own perception was being changed out of his mind. Which did leave the somewhat more worrying thought that, even now, he still thought of Sou as his closest friend.
But in a world that only existed for the two of them, was there really any other choice?