Part 4 — Chapter 3

Summary

• The protagonist is working a boring job at a hotel where they walk the halls and pay attention to the mainly uneventful actions of the guests.
• The protagonist lives in a bland apartment near the edge of Colony One and only occasionally sees Talia, their coworker.
• The protagonist's sister, Zoey, is a physicist at a university, studying quantum blockchain technology.
• Zoey asks the protagonist to come to her office on her birthday; once there, Zoey presents the protagonist with a three-hundred-year-old music video and a passage from Marienbad, their mother's favorite novel.
• The protagonist notices a connection between the video and the passage: in each, a person in a forest sees a flash of darkness and experiences the sensation of being elsewhere and then coming back to the forest.
• Zoey shows the protagonist an old letter, in which the writer describes a similar experience.
• Zoey believes these may be indications of some sort of corruption, akin to a bug in a software's operating system that causes moments from different centuries to bleed into one another.
• She raises this point as a possible support for their mother's theory that they are living in a simulation, although acknowledging that her thinking may be clouded.