Sea of Tranquility

Gaspery, a time traveler, explicitly wonders, “what makes a world real?” (206). Reality is explored in terms of the natural world and a manufactured, or simulated, world. There are several avenues of thought, such as sensory experience defining what is real. On Earth, Olive notes, “Everything that can be touched is real” (71), but she distinguishes between plant life that grows naturally and “biotech” (71) that is created by humans. The sensory experience of touch is important to her, but it is not a way to determine what is created by nature and what is created by humans. However, when Gaspery considers if his reality is a simulation, he groups human-made objects and nature-made objects together. “The desk is real [...] The wilted flowers on the desk are real [...] Zoey’s hair. My hands” (128). The desk is manufactured and the flowers could be biotech, but the human body (rather than an AI) is usually considered natural. 

Gaspery asks, “How do you investigate reality?” (130). This question is complicated by advanced technology. Both Olive and Gaspery are from a moon colony (Colony Two), where people are aware that humans create nature. To Gaspery, Colony One’s “dome lighting still looked like theater” (117). By the time he was born in Colony Two, the dome lighting broke, breaking the illusion. However, the dome lighting still worked in Colony Two when Olive lived there. During a pandemic, she is comforted by it: “A life lived under a dome, in an artificially generated atmosphere, is still a life” (194). Knowledge that nature is artificially generated for colonies in space complicates the process of distinguishing what is real, or if the entire world—including Earth—is a simulation.

Unlike Olive, Gaspery witnesses the anomaly, which is evidence that the world is a simulation. When he, through the mechanism of time travel, ends up at the same place in different times, “reality broke” (204). Gaspery understands that Colony Two’s dome lighting fails to mimic the sun’s light. This happens either late in Olive’s life (a moment not included in the novel) or after her death. On Earth, Gaspery sees moments from different places (the airship terminal and the forest) and different times bleed into one another. However, he has a similar response to Olive’s: “if definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be So what. A life lived in a simulation is still a life” (246). Just as Olive believes her life under a simulated atmosphere on the moon is meaningful, Gaspery believes his life on a simulated Earth is meaningful.