Rick didn't even look at the interface. "So this is it? The mystical, soul-level-five-enhancement-super-deluxe-life-sim™ you've been bragging about for—what—three beers and two burps now?"
Rod sat cross-legged on the workshop floor, hands pressed together like a monk who'd taken up both meditation and illegal gambling.
"It's not bragging, Rick. It's calibration.
Took me years to find the right concoction for the brain-juice infusion.
You gotta align your inner peace, set up your mind space, and run this simulator until your consciousness stops glitching."
"Yeah, sounds like a hippie VR headset," Rick muttered, slouching toward the control console. "What's it run on—breath work and overpriced incense?"
Rod smirked. "Half wrong. It's breath work, yes. But also—" he tapped the side of his head "—a microdose of the nectar of K'lothuun monks, an alien civilization that has literally no concept of boredom.
Throw in a week-long perspective training in a quantum-shift life sim, where you experience every choice, every angle, every possible 'what if' until you reach empathic singularity.
And then, Rick… then you get soul level five."
Rick squinted. "Empathic singularity sounds like a made-up TED Talk title."
"Coming from the guy who once invented a 'portable genocide blender' for a bet."
"That was functional," Rick snapped. "Anyway, fine, let's see your magic monk juice, Roderick."
He slapped the headset on.
"Let's see what kind of enlightenment you cooked up after erasing every other version of yourself.
Start the damn thing."
The world around Rick dissolved into a static hiss.
The simulation chamber hissed shut behind them, sealing off the outside hum of the garage.
Rick flicked a switch on his portal gun, now jury-rigged to interface with Rod's boxy, gold-trimmed "Life Perspective Engine."
A thin mist bled from the floor vents, curling around Rod's ankles.
The air carried a faint static charge, like the moment before lightning struck.
Rod smirked, masking a faint twitch in his jaw. "So this is where I break you in, huh?"
Rick rolled his eyes. "Oh, please, I've stared down godlike entities, wormhole taxes, and an entire council of Ricks who thought scented candles were a crime.
Your hippie brain blender isn't gonna—"
The chamber blinked. Reality snapped.
Rick's boots scraped against linoleum that hadn't existed a second ago.
The smell hit him first—burnt toast and that cheap floral cleaner Beth used to swear by.
He looked around the kitchen, every corner lit with that familiar, too-warm yellow.
She stood at the counter, hands folded, smiling like it was just another Tuesday morning.
"Daddy!"
Rick's breath caught in his throat.
The simulation's code hummed faintly in his skull, but it didn't stop the punch to the gut.
"Beth…" His voice cracked—he covered it with a cough.
"H-hey, yeah. Nice… uh, nice rendering. Real smooth texture mapping on the hair."
Her smile didn't waver, but her eyes sharpened. "You didn't fix it, did you?"
The question rattled through him harder than any alien plasma blast.
His gaze flicked to the kitchen window—outside was nothing but static haze, the world ending in a blur of white noise.
Somewhere far off, Rod's voice bled through the simulation comms: "Yo, Rick, uh… why does your fake kitchen feel like a hostage negotiation?"
Rick didn't hear Rod in this simulated world. "Fix… what?" he said, but the words hung limp, hollow.
The walls began to stretch, pulling away into blackness until only the two of them remained under a single cone of light. Her smile thinned, just a fraction.
"You left it broken," she said.
Rick swallowed, and the taste of metal filled his mouth.
He knew she wasn't talking about a birdhouse.
Beth took a step closer. The kitchen light above them flickered once, like the simulation itself hesitated.
"Let's skip the small talk," she said, voice low, almost too calm. "You've been chasing him for decades—Prime Rick. You've built weapons, torn holes in dimensions, burned down entire timelines… all for him. And for Mom."
Rick's jaw clenched. He didn't answer.
"You're planning to take her from that moment, aren't you?" Beth's voice cut through the static hum of the simulation. "Diane C-137—pulled right out of the second the bomb went off. No damage. No gap. Like it never happened."
Rick's jaw flexed, his gaze fixed on nothing.
Beth stepped closer, her tone sharper now. "You'll dive into that explosion frame by frame until you can rip her out of it—like she was never gone. You won't stop until you do."
His shoulders stiffened, but he didn't look up.
"So why not me?"
That made his head lift. She was standing close enough for him to see the tiny mole under her left eye, the same one his Beth had.
"You think I can't tell?" she pressed. "If you can snatch her from that moment, you can take me too. No clone glitches. No messed-up memories. Just me. Whole. Alive. Standing right here."
Rick's lip curled, but the anger felt brittle. "I didn't forget you, Beth. I never forget."
She tilted her head. "Then what's worse—forgetting, or remembering and still not doing anything?"
The bomb's light swelled again, threatening to swallow them whole.
Rick's hand drifted toward the console, fingers twitching like they were tracing invisible schematics in the air. Something in him shifted—a quiet, seismic lurch—as if a layer of himself had unlocked.
"Beth," he finally said, his tone oddly steady, "when I steal Diane from the nanosecond before she gets atomized—of course I'm taking you too. Why wouldn't I? You think I'm gonna do the temporal smash-and-grab of the millennium and leave half the family in the rubble? That's… that's insane."
He started pacing, the words accelerating with him.
"We're talking zero-second displacement extractions here.
Threading the Planck-time needle.
I've already got the frame isolation tech for the pull, I just need a chronon stabilizer strong enough to—" He stopped mid-sentence, frowned, then jabbed a finger toward the air.
"And yeah, okay, you could argue, 'Oh, Rick, you're screwing with causality,' but newsflash—causality's already screwed.
Prime Rick did that when he dropped the bomb. I'm just… fixing it.
Cleaning up the mess. Like, reverse entropy with a side of family therapy."
Beth's eyes didn't waver.
Rick exhaled through his nose, muttering, "Two birds, one infinite loop. That's the plan."
The air around him thickened, like the room was filling with invisible syrup.
A dull hum crawled up from the floor, through his boots, into his bones.
On the far wall, the soul-level monitor—normally just a side-readout Rick never cared about—spiked.
Level 2.
Level 3.
It hesitated for a fraction of a second before slamming into Level 4.
The simulation control panels flickered like an old VHS losing tracking.
Code bled off the holographic screens in shimmering strings, drifting toward Rick as if gravity had changed its mind.
The stabilizers screamed under the load.
"Ha! You see that?" Rick barked, waving a hand at the display.
"Soul-level four. That's, uh… basically endgame stats in this dumb machine.
We're talking god-tier access. I could make the sim render a sentient cheese planet right now if I wanted.
But no—no, no, no—this isn't about dairy-based lifeforms.
This is about pulling Diane and Beth out of the exact second they died. Zero loss.
No reboot. No... uh… pixelation."
He jabbed at the controls and the interface rippled, half obeying him, half… listening to him in some weird, metaphysical way.
"You know what's funny? They design these sims to cap at level three 'cause past that your soul-energy starts to hijack the root OS.
But I'm me. I'm the reason they made the cap.
I'm the loophole in my own prison. And now—"
The console screen twisted into a strange, pulsing image of Diane's face, frozen mid-laugh, with a smaller Beth in the background.
Rick's voice dropped to a near-whisper. "Yeah… now we're getting them back, irl."
The soul-level monitor flared—sharp pulses of gold and static green—before settling into a solid Level 4 readout.
Rod leaned forward from the operator's chair, squinting like the machine might be lying.
"Uh… Rick? The sim's not supposed to react like it's got goosebumps."
Inside the simulation, Rick glanced up from where Beth's projection still stood, caught mid-breath. The horizon had begun to ripple, folding over itself like a sheet of plastic in a heat wave.
"Yeah, yeah, I'm seeing it. Sim's tickling my brainstem."
Rick flicked his hand, and the fake grass at his feet retextured into chrome tiles without so much as a command prompt.
Rod's eyes darted between his controls and the wall-sized soul monitor. "You're… rewriting environment code by thinking about it.
No input. That's—you're not supposed to have root access from in there."
"That's 'cause the root access is me, Rod," Rick snapped, pulling a flask from nowhere and taking a long drink.
"Level four soul output—mental structuring so dense it's basically hardware.
I'm not sending commands to the sim, I am the sim right now."
The simulated sky trembled, then shifted from pale blue to the dim gold of a late summer afternoon.
A breeze swept through, carrying the scent of Diane's old perfume.
Rod tapped the console again, half to test it, half to see if it would even obey him anymore. No response.
His controls were lagging like they were waiting for permission.
"Yeah," Rick said, watching Rod's failed inputs echo faintly in the sim-space.
"It's adapting to my core logic now.
Every line of code in this thing's rewriting itself so it thinks like me.
Which is great—also terrifying—but mostly great."
The ground under Rick's feet expanded into an infinite plane, dotted with doors that hadn't been there seconds ago.
Each one hummed with the low, buzzing tone of a fresh idea waiting to be opened.
Rod swallowed. "You're telling me you can basically… dream new mechanics into this thing?"
Rick smirked, stepping toward the nearest door. "No, Rod. I'm telling you this thing's dreaming me."
Rod's gaze flicked between the pulsing soul monitor and the shifting walls of the sim. Level 4. He'd half-expected Rick to pull something like this, but watching it happen was still… unsettling. The Reality Simulator wasn't just a box of wires and quantum nonsense—it was alive in its own way. And with Rick's soul output bleeding into its core logic, the thing now purred under his will like some cosmic beast.
Rod reached into his coat, pulled out a squat glass vial filled with iridescent liquid, and slid it across the console toward Rick."This'll help stabilize your soul levels. Otherwise, you might pop a vessel somewhere between your brain and your… whatever passes for a heart."
Rick barely glanced at it. "Heh, yeah, sure. Level 4 soul power, baby. Who else can do this? Nobody. I'm the Rickest Rick in all the—"
"Alright, old man." Rod's voice cut through the ramble like a scalpel. "Playtime's over. I'm ejecting you now."
Rick was still grinning when his body jerked back into the real room, lab lights glaring above. "Bwahaha! I'm the Rickie—"
"Sit." Rod's tone went flat, the kind that didn't leave room for argument.
Rick paused. Soul levels did hit different, like the floor was subtly tilting under him. He sank into the chair. Rod waited, watching him ride it out.
A minute passed. Maybe two. Rick blinked, focus snapping back."So… astral projection thingy now?"
Rod nodded. "Yeah. But here's the deal, old man—you're gonna feel lost when we drop into Mom's timeline. Disorienting as hell. Normally we can't touch history, but souls? They don't care about laws. Only catch is, the living won't interact with us."
Rick squinted. "Okay, fast track—what's the fix? I don't know jack about souls beyond making them more awesome."
Rod leaned forward. "Got the idea from watching Memory Rick and Memory Diane.
You remember how Memory Rick could tweak a memory and make it feel like the past actually changed? Same principle.
We brainwash Mom and my Beth at the moment of their death—completely wiping their thoughts clean.
Mind you, only thoughts, not the memories.
It'll be a total blackout of the human psyche: id, ego, and superego.
This will let us try bringing Mom back to the current timeline.
I also thought about this—at the exact moment we succeed in extracting her, I'll start un-erasing Diane Sanchez, which will most likely return Mom to the very moment of her death!"
Rick's brain spun through simulations in milliseconds, scenarios folding and collapsing like card houses."…Yeah. Yeah, that could actually work."
Rod cracked a grin. "Then I'll show you the technique to cross the River of Time. You're gonna hate it."
Rod hadn't even finished outlining the crossing technique when Rick's muttering cut in, low and distracted.
"Beth…"
Rod tilted his head. "What about Beth?"
Rick's eyes narrowed like he was following a thread only he could see. "Can we… do the same for our Beth?"
The room felt heavier. Rod's gaze locked on him, searching for the catch.
"Honestly… it should work.
But I didn't even think about that. If I can drag Mom back here, then yeah—logically I can drag Beth too."
Rick gave a slow nod, fingers tapping his thigh as if running the math.
"True. That's exactly what should happen."
A sigh escaped him.
"What am I even worried about? Of course it is. Hahahaha…"
Rod's brow twitched.
"Oi, old man! Don't raise the motherfucking red flag!"
He jabbed a finger into Rick's chest. "Fuck you. I want my little devil back, motherfucker!"
Rick smirked, leaning in like a cat baiting a dog. "Ohhh, look at you, Mister Sentimental. Gonna cry?"
"Cry? I'll ram your portal gun so far up your ass you'll be farting dimensions," Rod shot back.
"That's not how it works—"
"Shut up, it's how it works in my version."
Rick's laugh broke into a cough.
"Fine, fine. Let's get your precious 'little devil', she's my—" He cut himself off before sentiment could slip through.
Rod grinned sharp. "Yeah. Let's."
The banter hung between them, sharp enough to cut, but under it… something unspoken lingered, like they both knew the stakes were about to get real.
- - - - - - - - - -
Rod rested his hands on his knees, eyes narrowing at the simulation's shifting horizon. "Alright, pay attention. I'm only showing this once."
Rick leaned back like he didn't care, but his gaze locked on Rod's every move.
Rod took a slow breath, muttering, "You think splicing timelines is fancy? Cute. This one… even I didn't plan to use.
Whatever, people plan—God decide."
The air around them bent. The simulation's light fractured into uneven shards, sliding like broken glass through water.
Rod's voice bled over the scene, calm and clinical.
"Level four and above… you can feel it.
Your inner mindspace.
You dig past the noise, past the meat and bone.
Keep going. Deeper."
The ground under them dissolved into black water, rippling with images—snapshots of their lives, inverted in color, playing in reverse.
"Then you see it. Your soul."
Rick's shape blurred into something else—less man, more… blueprint.
Not a reflection, but a truth.
Its skin shimmered with pages of alien equations, its eyes filled with storms.
"Doesn't matter if it looks like you.
Souls are… custom jobs.
Every choice, every obsession, every book you read, every moral line you stepped over or refused to cross—it all leaves a mark."
Rod's own soul hung behind him like a tattered banner of light, its edges bristling with faint, biting static.
"Now you fuse with it. Don't think—do."
Rod's hand plunged into his chest and came back out gripping light, then shoved it into his forehead.
Reality buckled.
Both men stepped out of themselves.
The world trembled, colors spilling out of their borders, pixels writhing into living threads.
"First step done," Rod's voice cut through the chaos.
"Next—you find the worm of time.
Souls can see it.
Looks like nothing you can explain, but you'll know it when it bites your brain."
The black water below split, revealing something wriggling in the gap—long as an ocean trench, its body a rope of clocks and blinking eyes.
Each eye reflected a different century.
"That thing," Rick said, his tone sharpening.
"It's the gateway. Into the river of time."
Rod didn't hesitate. He dove. Rick followed.
The moment they crossed, the world didn't turn upside down—it folded into a Möbius strip, then inverted into an inside-out spiral.
Rivers of liquid glass rushed past them, filled with stars that screamed in reverse.
Every drop of water carried a memory that wasn't theirs, and the current pulled at their bones like it wanted to rewrite them.
Rod shouted over the torrent, "Don't lose focus! Once you're in, the river tries to make you forget what you came for!"
Rick smirked, even as time peeled off his skin in ribbons. "You worry too much."
They went under.
And somewhere in that roaring, impossible current—their destination flickered into view.
- - - - - - - - - -
Do you get any of that?
Fwoooh, this chapter is quite hard as I can't give a solid reason why both Rick and Rod forgot about Beth.
Or can I?
And, tbh my plan for the simulation is totally different, it should be a world where Rick and Rod need to survive the onslaught of their exes or woman they fantasized about.
The goals is to have sex but it'll be going for eternity until your balls shriveled and you still need to satisfy all women.
I thought it'll be funny because who knows what kind of entity did these to mofos put their dick into, hahaha.
That's all, peace!