“The actors in a film aren’t dying any more than you do in this world.” My mentor, Mariano, attempted to comfort me. I had expressed fears about dying. “Look away from the screen, man,” he said. “Or look closely at the faces. Look at the flickering of the light. It’s a carefully crafted illusion.” A throb of déjà vu pressured my head. I felt I’d heard all this before. “Remember,” Mariano said, “the tricks are part of the fun.” What tricks? I thought. Was all of reality a bag of tricks? The horseplay of immature gods? My sensitivity to initial conditions made me wary of over-embracing certain metaphors and flights of fancy. “Think of your life like a movie,” Mariano said, “but interactive. That is to say, we are given a script, but we can violate it at will.” Was life computationally irreducible? I wondered. I clasped my knees and drew them up to my chest. Mariano drank from a blue plastic water bottle with a crackling cacophony that assaulted my ears and made me want to strike him. I had not been our most optimal session. “Think of it like a game,” he said, staring into the air as though he were fishing ideas from it like David Lynch. “The rendered world is just that,” he said. “We render only which we can perceive idiosyncratically. We see similar things but not exactly.” This was true. He saw things his own way, I mine. We digested the informational world with our own prejudices. When I had first encountered Mariano, at an AA meeting, he told me that I was in a state of superposition. I had no idea what he meant. He said that I was both alive and dead, until someone observed me. Indeed, it seemed that everyone in the world had stopped observing me for the last ten years. I might as well have been invisible. “The universe only renders that probability which can be observed,” Mariano had told me. He was wearing flip flops on this occasion. The man had bad toes. We were seated on a park bench. An overcast but warm day. What if I wanted to edit the film? I had asked him on one occasion. He said that I could, but that it wasn’t easy. Will you help me? I had asked. Do I look like a genii? he replied. “What are you thinking?” he currently asked me, on that park bench. “I’m thinking that in the next version I’ll play you and you play me.” Multiple realities were piling up like a car wreck.

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