The table fell silent. I looked away and sipped his drink, avoiding eye contact. Vanzz's jaw tightened, hostility radiating off him.
Vanzz: (leaning back) I don't know about you two, but I'm not dying for this nonsense. And I won't let others die because of a couple of psychopaths chasing fantasies.
Joel pulled out a cigarette, lit it slowly, and exhaled a cloud of smoke, his smirk sharp in the dim light. He placed a hand on James's chair, leaning close.
Joel: Look around, Vanzz. These people? They're probably just AI constructs. Complex programming. And us? Maybe we're the only real ones here. So I'll ask you, James, Ducce, are you really afraid of dying? Or are you afraid of wasting your life in this miserable loop? If you had the chance to change it, to reach the truth… would you take it? Or would you keep suffering like everyone else?
Vanzz: (turning away) Let's go, James. I told you, we should never have come here.
James's hands shook slightly. His voice faltered as he tried to respond.
James: I… I don't know. But is it really better to keep living powerless? Even in a world that's fake?
I glanced at him, startled. Joel leaned back, satisfied, letting the silence confirm what words could not.
Vanzz: (cold, without turning around) So be it, James. I'm leaving. Trust me, this is the wrong choice. I'll stay three more days in Leazing. If you change your mind, call me. I know you're better than this.
He stood, his chair scraping against the floor, and walked away. James reached out instinctively, his hand half-raised, but no words came. By the time he found his voice, Vanzz had disappeared into the night.
The ride back with me and Joel was suffocating for James. None of us spoke. Each was consumed by our own storm of thoughts. James stared out the window, regret gnawing at him, but pride stopping him from turning back now. He felt the trap closing in, yet still refused to run.
We rented an apartment for the mission, with the city lights of Leazing bleeding through the windows. The mood was taut in a way that felt different from the grief and fury that had followed us into town; this was a purposeful tension now, purposeful and hungry. I moved around the small living room with the quiet energy of someone who already had the next three moves mapped out.
I set my glass down, turned to the group, and spoke with the sort of calm conviction that made people lean forward without realizing it.
Me: We don't need chaos next. Not blunt-force disruption. We need precision. A carefully measured shock to the system, enough to rattle the simulation without turning everything to ash.
Joel flicked ash into an ashtray and watched Ducce with a half-smile. "Go on."
I paced a step, choosing words as if he were composing a proof.
Me: Gather the city's intellectual class. Those who think they know what thinking is. Give them a coherent argument that this world is not base reality, present the case for consciousness-as-fundamental, show them the anomalies, the 'glitches,' then push them to question everything. Make self-aware nodes multiply. If consciousness isn't an emergent property of meat and electricity, but something more basic that's being simulated to replicate conscious-like behaviour, then making people more "conscious" will strain the system. It won't need a bomb. It'll need human attention turned to the wrong thing.
James folded his fingers together, still raw but curious.
James: So… the plan is to get academics, philosophers, scientists, people who already care about the hard problem (the hard problem of consciousness being how does subjective experience really arises?), and persuade them publicly? Force a cultural cognitive dissonance?
Me: Exactly.
My eyes sparkled a little. "We throw an invitation-only symposium. Frame it as a high-level, off-the-record conference for intellectuals, Lensa members, university lecturers, tech philosophers, neuroscientists, people who can understand the idea. Get them drunk on argument and novelty, get their guards down with food and art and wine, then hit them with a concept that rewires their priors in public. If even a few of them go from skeptic to disturbed, that's enough. They question. They publish. They debate. There'll be feedback loops. Curiosity becomes obsession, obsession becomes destabilization."
Joel tapped his cigarette against the rim of his glass. "We might see sensory anomalies if we can get enough people updating their priors at once. If our hypothesis holds, making the conscious representation more unstable will produce glitches. People seeing things they shouldn't, memory slips, déjà vu on a mass scale. Consciousness feeds back into whatever's running the game."
James (still raw) asked the practical question.
James: How do we get them here? How do we convince a hundred smart, skeptic people to spend an evening on our pet theory?
I smiled.
Me: We have money. We have networks. Lensa, the society for high-IQ people, is a perfect target. I've got a modest membership there. We advertise as an exclusive salon: 'The Nature of Experience: New Frontiers.' We buy targeted ads, we pay for travel stipends, dinners, and a handsome honorarium for distinguished guests. You handle the digital invite and the ads, James. Joel handles the event staging and mood. I'll leverage my contacts in Lensa and prepare my speech.
Joel nodded, eyes gleaming.
Joel: I'll build a program that makes the night feel inevitable. Speakers sequenced to erode certainty, lighting that loosens inhibition, food and drink to smooth the edges. We'll make vulnerability probable.
We set to work. James produced a crisp invitation, elegant typography, a few hints of academic prestige, a line that promised novelty, insights and entertainment. Joel arranged music, seating, and a program that read like a philosophical probe. I worked the contacts quietly, calling board members, whispering an invitation that sounded both flattering and irrefutable. Paid ads targeted university forums and private intellectual networks; a courier sent luxury invites to select professors and public intellectuals.
Two days later, they filled a room. Two hundred fifty people, sharp suits, soft sweaters, mild eccentrics wearing the badge of scholarship, arrived curious, irritated, hungry for novelty. The symposium opened with predictable civility: small talk about previous papers, a circulated program, the clink of glasses. Lensa members debated quietly in corners about the ethics of an organization being used as an experimental platform.