From multiple award-winning author Daryl Gregory comes a madcap adventure following two friends on a cross-country bus tour through the mind-boggling glitches in their simulated world as they grapple with love, family, secrets, and the very nature of reality in a simulation.
JP and Dulin have been the best of friends for decades. When JP finds out his cancer has aggressively returned, Dulin decides itтАЩs the perfect time for one last adventure: a week-long bus tour of North AmericaтАЩs Impossibles, the physics-defying glitches and geographic miracles that started cropping up seven years earlierтАФright after the Announcement that revealed our world to be merely a digital simulacrum. The outing, courtesy of Canterbury Trails Tours, promises the trip of a (not completely real) lifetime in a (not completely deluxe) coach.
Their fellow passengers are 21st-century pilgrims, each of them on the tour for their own reasons. ThereтАЩs a nun hunting for an absent God, a pregnant influencer determined to make her child too famous to be deleted, a crew of horny octogenarians living each day like itтАЩs their last, and a professor on the run from leather-clad sociopaths who take The Matrix as scripture. Each stop on this trip is stranger than the lastтАФa Tunnel outside of time, a zero gravity Geyser, the compound of motivational-speaking avatarтАФwith everyone barreling toward the tourтАЩs iconic final stop Ghost City, where unbeknownst to our travelers the answer to who is running the simulation may await.
When We Were Real is тАЬan addictive thriller packed with winning characters and big, brilliant ideasтАЭ (Lev Grossman, New York Times bestselling author of The Bright Sword and The Magicians trilogy) and an exploration of what really matters, even in an artificial world.
Sciencefiction en fantasy