How to Disappear Completely

"What are Ancestor Simulations, and are we living in one?"

People don’t just disappear, at least not in the real world. There’s always a witness, a fact pattern, evidence, and failing all that, there’s the imprint that the person leaves behind, on family, on the community, all the ripples from person to person that nobody sees. Those things can’t be erased, Mikaela. I was thinking a lot about your father this week. Not just because he asked me to take you down here, to show you the city, the real dangers, but I was working a case this past week, it brought a lot of things back for me. There’s a lot about me you don’t know.

Like what, Uncle Mike?

Well, like that. You know me as your uncle, and just the face that I show you and what your dad and your mom tell you about me. You know what I do now, and probably when I was a postal inspector. Do you remember what I did when you were a kid?

I remember you were a cop.

Do you ever remember seeing me in uniform?

Actually, I don’t remember seeing you much at all back then.

I was a homicide detective for eight years with the Boston Police. And when you do a job like that you tell kids very little about it, like, you know, I catch bad guys who hurt people, because that’s about all a kid should see of that side of life. And your father and mother have done a good job of keeping you shielded from all that horrible…that side of life.

It’s okay, Uncle Mike. You can swear. I’m eighteen. I know who you are, and I’ve seen enough movies to know, like violence and all that stuff in the world.

No. It’s good for me to watch my mouth. I know you’re growing up, but one of the things about being eighteen is that you think you know. I remember being your age. You think you know, but you don’t know. It’s like seeing a picture of something and thinking you’ve been there. Until you’ve been there, you haven’t been there. In the picture you see the outline, the major features, but you miss everything else, the sounds, the smells, the feel of the air, and more than anything, when it comes to the scenes I worked, there’s something missing from everyone’s conception of it unless you’ve stood there, it’s the feeling of awe. It’s almost like there’s a reverence for something unspoken. People get quieter. The energy changes. Nobody gets taught that like they do in church. It’s like it happens to them. Normal people, when they witness a murder or stumble upon the scene, there’s a reverence that comes over them. You don’t see it in the movies. It’s in the atmosphere. Bad things only happen to somebody else until you’re there. Then there’s no such thing as somebody else anymore. Somebody else becomes somebody. Right there. You see it and you feel it.

How many murders did you investigate?

Eighty-four. I mean with BPD it was eighty-four. As a private investigator, I stumbled across two, and the one I was going to tell you about, from this week, it started as a missing person’s case.

That must have been hard, all that death.

Yeah. It was. That’s why I started working for the Postal Service. It’s ironic, how everything turned out.

How so?

I shouldn’t…well, I guess that’s what this is supposed to be all about, exposing you to the parts of the world we kept hidden from you because you were a kid, and you’re not a kid anymore, maybe.

Uncle Mike, just spit it out.

I’m going to tell you something about your father he’s probably never told you, and I swear, what we discuss in this car tonight better never get back to him.

Mike?

I’m sorry. Anyway, when he was your age, your father went through a real rough time. And it was hard for me to figure out, because, you know, he was my big brother. I looked up to him. But he got really depressed. I didn’t know it at the time, but he was suicidal, started dying his hair black, started listening to just really depressing music. Did he ever tell you any of this?

No.

One of the bands he was listening to a lot was Radiohead. You ever heard of them?

I’ve heard the name, but I don’t know any of their music.

It was really depressing, at least to me anyway, but your father was into them, and they had this one song he used to listen to constantly, and the part they kept singing over and over again—

The refrain?

Yeah, yeah, the refrain. The words were: “I’m not here. This isn’t happening.” And he used to listen to that all the time, and, Mikaela, it was ironic it stuck with me, because I used to get that refrain in my head, for years, I’d work a scene, see mothers, brothers, sisters, looking at these young men gunned down, family members just taken, and they’d get this look on their faces like, “I’m not here. This isn’t happening.” And I’d hear it. The dead of night. The middle of the day. Not here. Not happening. But at the same time, they all knew that it was real. They would feel it.

What was ironic about it?

What?

You said it was ironic, Uncle Mike.

Oh, well, your father, he grew out of it, but it was his music not mine. He probably listened to that song a thousand times. And probably because of my work, it ended up sticking with me, that song. Never left me. And I was thinking about that song and your father all week because of the case I’ve been working. Song was called “How to Disappear Completely,” and since we’re talking about the world, I thought maybe I’d tell you about the case while it’s fresh in my mind, and we got some time before all the bars let out.

Sure. Is it like some true crime drama?

It’s not drama, Mikaela. It’s real, yeah, so true, I guess.

Okay, I’m listening.

So the guy’s wife came to me, and I hadn’t heard anything about the case, but I guess it’d been on the news, because he was a pretty prominent professor at BC, and apparently, he’d just vanished. And the police working the case had no idea how or why or where. This was six weeks ago. Just up and disappears. But people don’t disappear, especially not nowadays. When I was younger, it was a lot easier for people to get lost or hide. Now, I can make a phone call, and ninety-nine percent of the time, I can get your location within about five feet of wherever you are on the Earth, and if I do a little work, I can trace that back to about any point for the last few years, just because everyone’s trained now to carry their phone around with them.

But apparently this professor, he’d switched off his phone on a Tuesday, and by Thursday, nobody had seen the guy. Not at work, not at home, nowhere. And the cops out in Brookline where his wife reported him missing, they couldn’t find anything in the phone records. Nobody saw anything suspicious.

Is he dead?

We’ll get to that. Don’t get ahead of the story.

Okay, so it’s a proper murder mystery?

It’s not that mysterious. Mrs. Kay—professor’s name was Stephen Kay—so Mrs. Kay hired me to find him, because at that point, nobody knows what happened to the guy, and from everyone I talked to, he was one of the nicest guys, one of those people you would think nobody would ever want to hurt. So I say, sure, I’ll do what I can to track him down. I have some tricks not every cop knows. And to be honest, it was an interesting case, or at least it seemed that way, because it didn’t seem like I was going to find the guy hanging out off the grid in some rich widow’s vacation home. It just—he wasn’t that type of guy. So I started to talk to people—people in his department, his family, friends, neighbors, whoever. And at the same time, I’m waiting to get access to all his data. What I really wanted was his emails, because the cops had already gone over all his phone records, and professors, they all still live by email.

Anyway, I learned this professor is some kind of prominent computer scientist—I don’t know, what would you call it, philosopher? Theorist? Something like that.

He was working with some top-secret group at Los Alamos studying simulation theory. You ever hear of it?

I’m not sure.

It’s like, you ever see The Matrix?

What, like the movie?

Yeah.

No. I’ve heard of it, but I don’t really watch that many old movies.

Well, that’s kind of what this professor was studying, the idea that our world is actually a computer simulation.

I had a biology teacher who talked about that sometimes. He was into all kinds of wild theories like that.

Okay, so you know about it?

Sorta.

Well, this guy wrote a book about that. He and his group were studying the probability that we lived in a simulation, and he was working with people at Google and IBM to figure out how to design a real universe simulator on supercomputers out at Los Alamos, all kinds of crazy stuff like that. And then he just vanishes.

So when I start talking to his colleagues, I hear one or two of them make the same comment about it, like maybe he got too close or he got unplugged from the matrix, and that’s the thing, Mikaela, when I’m working a strange case like that, really more than anything, I’m just looking for something that’s off. And I hear that comment again two more times, almost like it was a dark joke about him getting wiped out from the matrix because he’d figured out the world was a simulation. There was something about it that was too coincidental, that they’d all have the same comment, and that so many of the people around him would think it was okay or somehow clever to joke about their colleague who’d gone missing. So I went back to the Brookline Police and asked the detective there if he’d heard anything like that. And it turned out that one of the guy’s graduate students had mentioned that to the cops, that she thought it was legitimately possible because of a theory he was about to publish, that because, according to her, this publication proved that we live in a simulation, and somehow he’d been disappeared before he could publish it.

Did she believe that?

Well, we’ll get to her in a minute. But the cops just thought she was quirky, and she was just throwing out the idea because nobody had any better idea.

I think she’s a suspect.

I did too, but it’s only obvious because that’s the way I’m telling you the story. You have to understand, the cops didn’t interview all the people I did, because they didn’t suspect anything really happened to the guy yet, and they’d only met this lady once, and she seemed harmless.

So was she harmless?

Well, I guess that’s next isn’t it. I was still waiting to meet with the IT people over at BC to get into his emails, and I had spoken with his colleagues, but after I heard this about Vanessa—that was the woman’s name, Vanessa Badgely—then I decided I needed to meet with her. So I call her and try to set up a meeting, and she told me she was too busy, couldn’t come to meet. So I offered to go to her, and she was really evasive for someone whose mentor just went missing. Finally, she agreed to meet me, and she sets up the meeting for a Saturday morning, and the address is right downtown. Turns out to be this fancy assisted living facility for wealthy old folks. She would go down there every now and again and play piano. Here’s the thing, though, Mikaela, if you learn one thing as a cop it’s reading people, and rule one of reading people is that they only ever show you what they want you to see, so what they choose to show you means something—the clothes people wear, the people they hang out with, the things they do, all that. So for her to choose that place and time to meet me, it was definitely strange.

She was a really good pianist, like I don’t know classical music all that good, but she sounded professional, not an amateur at all, and I like to try and watch people to see them before they know they’re being seen. And my first impression was that she was interested in the music, not the people in the room—very much in her own mind.

I watch her for a while, and then eventually I go up and talk to her. And she doesn’t get up, just sits there at the keyboard as I lean in and talk to her over the piano—and that’s a cue, keeping that big familiar object between us, almost like a barrier. The other thing was that she talked funny, not a speech impediment or nothing or even like an accent, ‘cuz God knows we Bostonians are one to talk, right? But she put on this manner, almost from some kind of old timey movie, like Fred Astaire or Clark Gable was about to walk up to the piano and ask her to dance. I thought she was joking at first. And she had the nerve to make a crack about the stupid hat I wear when I’m doing PI work.

Why do you wear it if you think it’s stupid, Uncle Mike?

It’s a signifier, same as the way a cop wears a uniform to let you know who they are. It’s sounds stupid, but people take you more seriously when you tell them you’re a PI if you’re wearing a fedora or something. It’s ridiculous, but it’s true.

What did she sound like?

Oh, God, I can’t do the accent. Pretentious. Like, “How do you do, darling.” Like she was talking how she thought you should talk if you were talking to the queen or something. And, just so you know, that’s another red flag. Anybody who has to put on airs like that, who isn’t comfortable with their authentic self to the point they adopt a mannerism like that unironically, they’re hiding something they don’t like about themselves. And it could be something harmless, like she grew up poor and hated being poor, so she adopted the fanciest accent she could manage, but she didn’t do a good job of it. Came off as very artificial. So I get this vibe off her, and I start probing. And I like to poke people in ways they won’t expect and don’t know how to react to.

So I say to her, “Hey that’s Beethoven, right? I’m pretty sure I recognize that song.”

And I knew it would get a reaction out of her, because I know it probably isn’t Beethoven and I know that classical music people don’t like it when you call their music songs. “We call them pieces, you see,” she starts telling me.

“Oh, oh,” I say. “Sure. Sure.”

“You aren’t even in the correct century, inspector,” she says. “This is a sonata from a modern composer, from the TV show Battlestar Galactica.”

And I swear, Mikaela, to hear that woman say that collection of words in that put-on accent, I almost couldn’t keep a straight face with her, and I think she could tell, because she got real flustered, and we hadn’t even started talking about the professor yet.

So I toss her the topic of the professor as a lifeline, to get her comfortable again, and I tell her, “Look, Miss Badgely, the reason I wanted to talk to you is about this simulation theory. I know you’re an expert and I’m not. I wanted to ask your advice on who to talk to about it, but I can’t ask you, given as you’re so close to Professor Kay’s work. So who should I talk to about this? Because I can tell you the cops aren’t taking the idea seriously at all, but I’d like to at least give the idea a fair hearing.”

So she starts talking about it, and gives me a breakdown of the whole theory, which I already know, because it’s my job to be prepared. But she keeps going on and on about it, and I’m acting like this is all new information, all, “Oh, wow, this stuff is blowing my mind.”

And she talked for probably forty minutes before she says, “I can see you’re really taking this seriously, inspector.”

And again, I have to repress the urge to laugh and just say, “Please, call me Mike. And yes, it’s a real possibility, Miss Badgely, I think. Because people don’t just disappear, and nobody’s ever prepared if they get murdered, so all of his data on his phone and all the other patterns of life would look just like a normal day, but his phone disappeared with him. So until I get into his emails, it looks like it’s entirely possible he disappeared.”

And when I said the word emails, she turns white, like that was the one loose end she forgot. And let me tell you, Mikaela, with smart people, a lot of them think that criminals are dumb, so they assume crime must be easy, or maybe there’s an arrogance about it. Dumb people don’t usually get away with crimes, but a lot of smart people do, just not the type of smart people like her. She, and anyone else for that matter, stood about as much chance of getting away with a crime as you would if you never knew nothing about plumbing and decided you were going to repair your own pipes over the weekend. Like no smart people ever tried to solve a crime before. It’s perplexing that someone could be smart enough to write computer code for the theory of a simulated universe and also think that cops would know nothing about metadata.

Is that how you caught her?

You’re so certain it’s her, are you?

I think so.

So what would you have done next, Inspector Mikaela?

Can you read his emails yet?

No, not yet.

Can you track her phone?

Um, not closely enough to get answers, but that’s not a bad play. We’ll get there eventually, but not yet.

I guess, I think I would try to figure out what their relationship was like. Why would she want him to disappear?

That is a good question to ask, but I actually went a different direction. I talked to the two professors she asked me to talk to.

What could they tell you?

I wanted to know the value of his work. And I wanted to know what she could benefit by finishing it and taking credit after he was dead. And I also wanted to know what their perspective would be as the universe programmer, like what motive would you have for disappearing a person in your simulation, just really to see how these people tick, what they think about when they think about the simulation theory.

But you don’t actually believe it’s real, though?

No, but you don’t have to believe what a person believes to catch them out in inconsistencies in their own way of thinking. Like if you caught a priest down here in one of these bars after hours, and then you could say, “Hey, Father, I saw you down the Cask ‘n Flagon the other night, but you have to know the way they’re supposed to act to know that you’re catching them out. Something like that.

I see. So did they say anything interesting?

A lot of interesting things. It’s really fascinating. The Swiss guy said they were years behind the Los Alamos group, but said the New Mexico team was only a couple decades or so from a realistic, and I mean real-life quality simulation of a universe every bit as complex as ours. So, in all probability, he said that Vanessa and Professor Kay were probably right about the idea that we do live in a simulation. And I asked them both what they knew about Kay and Vanessa.

Wouldn’t she get pretty famous if she proved his theory, Uncle Mike? I would think that’s an important motive, maybe.

Yeah. Exactly. Especially in that field, she would instantly become the superstar of that specialized little world. She could get any job she wanted. Good salary, plenty of accolades. All that.

You think that’s a good enough motive for a murder, though?

I’ve seen people get murdered over a cab fare, Mikaela. The question isn’t usually whether the motive is enough, but whether it’s enough for that particular suspect to do it.

I think so.

Why?

Because of her accent, maybe. She wants to be someone important.

That’s one possible reason. Or maybe she’s in love with the guy and he doesn’t love her back. Maybe something else. All that really matters is whether the guy is actually dead, whether she had something to do with making him dead, and most importantly, can the DA prove it. And at this point, none of those things are a certain yes.

What next then, Uncle Mike?

I go to BC to meet with their head IT guy. And this is just amazing. So I had spoken with them right off the bat, and I made sure that they’d archived his account back to before he disappeared. And I had them leave the account live, so if Professor Kay shows up, it’ll record his log in and we can trace him through that computer, or if someone else tries to log in to his account, I’ve got a backup of his account to compare against any emails or documents they try to delete, as well as a record of that login, so if they’re dumb enough to not hide their computer, we can figure out who they are and go see who they are and why they’re in the professor’s account.

So did she?

Oh, yeah. And as smart as this woman must be, she was smart enough to realize, maybe I shouldn’t log in on my own computer, but she went to a university library, never realizing the library had video surveillance. And she’s not thinking about getting caught altering his account, because she probably thinks I’m just going to look at his emails, when all I really care about is the metadata.

Wow.

People do really stupid stuff when they feel like they’re cornered. So now she’s on video trying to alter the guy’s email account, and because I had them archive his entire account, all we had to do was compare the before and after, and we got a list of all the communications and documents she deleted. We didn’t even have to look.

So you got her?

More or less, but she doesn’t know it yet. So I wanted to talk to her again—see if I can get her to say something she shouldn’t, maybe even crack altogether.

Did she agree to talk to you?

I showed up. Parking lot of the Stop & Shop in Chestnut Hill, just met her there at the trunk of her car.

What’d she say to that?

“Oh, inspector, this is highly irregular. Highly irregular, my goodness. Have you been following me? How did you know where to find me?”

And it’s like, hello! Private investigator. That is exactly my job, lady. Literally. And she’s all flustered. But then, you know it’s like before, you do something to poke them a little and then you try to set them at ease, get them talking. So the first thing I tell her is that I just really had a question about what those simulation experts were telling me, because the emails were a dead-end. Scoured his account for hours and hours and there was nothing useful at all.

That’s clever.

So I tell her I have this question I can’t figure out about simulation theory, and it goes like this: if a programmer of this simulation was bothered enough by a single professor finding out the secret to the simulation, and they’re powerful enough to make the professor disappear completely, why wouldn’t they just make all trace of him vanish, like It’s a Wonderful Life and he’d never been born. How much more difficult could it be to do that?

And what did she say?

She froze, like a deer in the headlights, for three solid seconds with her mouth hanging open, in shock. And then she starts in, “Oh, well the degree of difficulty would be orders of magnitude higher—many orders of magnitude higher, all the connections, all the memories, the physical interactions that Professor Kay played a part in.” Mind you, I’m recording this the whole time. And she keeps talking and talking for, I don’t know, maybe twenty minutes trying to explain away that simple point, which wasn’t even the real question I wanted to ask her.

Finally, I ask her a very simple, very specifically worded question: “So Professor Kay disappeared on a Tuesday, as far as anyone can tell. Can you tell me, Vanessa, what’s the average Tuesday look like for him?”

Why’s that important?

It’s not. It’s how she answers that’s important. I get her talking about when he usually gets to work, when she interacted with him, when he had his classes, and I ask follow-up questions without leading her in the verb tense, so instead of asking, “Did Professor Kay meet with students after class?” You leave them open like, “And after class? And that Tuesday? Lunch?” And about halfway through that conversation, she started referring to him in the past tense and never caught herself out on it. At that point it’s pretty clear. Best part of all, was that after all that, as flustered as she got, and she got flustered—couldn’t get out of that parking lot fast enough—the moment she turns on her car, I see her car’s a hotspot, and I had already got make, year, model, license plate, VIN number, and now I got the name of her little hotspot network. So I put a call in to the homicide detective in Brookline and gave her all the email data, my notes, recordings, and all the info they’d need to subpoena her phone and car’s transponder data. Pretty sure there’ll be a nice little itinerary for her on the night he went missing that leads right to Professor Kay’s body. And the other ironic thing is that she’ll be the one who disappears completely—off to Framingham for thirty to life.

So how did she kill him?

I still don’t know. The coroner will figure that all out when they find the body or the crime scene or both. Probably poison would be my guess, or shot him—something like that.

That’s an interesting story and all, Uncle Mike, but…

But what?

Well, what’s the point?

Yeah, you’re full of good questions, I guess. I don’t know. I’m not sure I can remember anymore why I started telling you all this.

You were talking about Radiohead and disappearing completely, something like that.

Oh, your father. Look, Mikaela, I think all I’m trying to say is that your mother and father they can only live in their perspective, just like you’re not going to see theirs when you decide whether you want to come out like this, and as much of a total cluster it is watching these bars let out, all these drunk ass kids running around, I think he wanted me to come down here show you the danger, give you a lecture about safety or something so that you never come out here. But let’s be realistic. I was eighteen. You probably already have a fake ID, maybe even been down here on a Friday or Saturday. Whatever. Thing is, I think I told you about the professor because no matter how hard you try to take yourself out of bad situations, which on balance is a good thing to do, you’ll never be able to opt out of risk altogether. That poor bastard was statistically about the least likely person to get murdered you could ever find, and he gets offed by his whack job of a student.

So the moral of the story is that I should have a good time and what mom and dad don’t know about, they don’t need to know about?

Don’t be a smart ass, Mikaela. You know what I’m saying.

I don’t, Uncle Mike, I’m sorry.

I don’t know. Don’t be like me, I guess. You look at these kids down here and I see stupid, stupid things, and I think lucky, I hope she gets lucky. That dumbass kid’ll be lucky if he don’t get knocked out tonight for mouthing off to the wrong guy. And statistically, they’re all going to wake up tomorrow, Mikaela. The odds of things going wrong in the ultimate sense are just so astronomically small. I don’t care what your mom and dad want me to say. Don’t live your life in fear. It’s okay to be a kid, you know, just don’t be a stupid one if you can help it. You know, don’t you?

I know, Uncle Mike.

You’re a good kid.

I know. And you’re a good man. I know you can’t see it. It’s the one thing you can’t see. You can see everyone else but yourself, but I wish you could. I wish you could see yourself the way I do, the way other people do, even with the stupid detective hat on, maybe even especially with the hat on.

What are you trying to do to me, kid?

I’m trying to help you.

Gawd, kiddo, when did you grow up right in front of my eyes?

I haven’t, I’m just, you know, figuring things out.

Let’s get you home. You’re not going to learn anything down here you’ve never seen before. I think you already know this, but if you ever get into trouble, and I mean real trouble, don’t call your mother or father, call me. Right away. Don’t ever hesitate.

I will. And, Uncle Mike…

Yeah?

It’s not true, the simulation. I don’t care what any of those professors say. Even if they could prove it, what would that really prove, that it’s not real? That Professor Kay wasn’t real? That you’re not real, all the cases you’ve worked, all the days we’ve lived? Nothing would feel any less real to anyone. I’ve thought about it and it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter, because we matter. We are here. It is happening.

You’re right, Mikaela. Yes. That’s what I was trying to say. All this is happening. Don’t be afraid of it. Be in it. Be here.