May 31, 3131
4042 Bartlett Ave.
Emerald Springs, ?
“Quick! Throw your backpack in the shed,” Dr. Sorescu hissed. Alex did so without hesitation. Immediately afterward, Dr. Sorescu slapped a button on the side of the shed. The two watched as the building shimmered, as if immaterial, then sank into the ground. Then they turned and ran for the front yard.
When they got there, the scene was as expected - Dr. Sorescu’s nephew (whose name Alex still hadn’t learned) slumped on the ground as a group of either humanoid robots or heavily armored humans went through his possessions. Before either of them could react, one of the figures turned and began to fire. Alex was out cold before he hit the ground.
The room he awoke in was blindingly white with spotless walls. There was a metallic taste in the air, which seemed unnecessarily cold. Standing above him was a woman, who smiled as she recognized that he was waking up.
“Welcome to the future, Alex Kirk. We’ve been expecting you.”
Out of all of the mind-breaking things that Alex had heard, seen, or learned since his arrival in the thirty-second century, this had arguably been the mind-breaking
iest.
“...Sorry, what?”
“Alexander Everett Kirk, right? Middle infielder for World Baseball Classics 29-32, disappeared and presumed dead post-Event.”
“...How do you know any of this? Who are you?”
“My name is Annora Wu, and I am the thirty-ninth and final President of the Llamanean Baseball Association. As for how I know who you are, well, let’s just say that our technology has advanced a lot since Pre-Event Llamanea.”
“...?”
Annora sighed, and extended a hand out to help him up. “This might be easier if you get some context first.” She pulled out what appeared to be a series of memory tabs bundled together, and in one smooth motion stuck it into the back of Alex’s neck, into an orifice that Alex didn’t previously know he had.
August 31, 3128
Conference Room 2332
Rasmussen Space Center, 25 miles north of Dinschria City
“Are we sure about the implications of this experiment?” Annora asked, frowning at the live feed being projected in front of them again.
“We’ve quadruple-checked everything,” said Mikayla Hörst, the Llamanean Baseball Association’s Head of Rocketry. “Our models have been able to predict all experimental interactions with the Wall for the past fifty years. Unless our laws of physics, which have been repeatedly proven true for centuries now, somehow change, this rocket will make it through.”
“And, to be clear, if it doesn’t…”
Hörst winced. “Then we have no choice but to accept Jensen’s hypothesis, yes.”
February 9, 3068
Conference Room 3443
Rasmussen Space Center, 25 miles north of Dinschria City
Eron Jensen hadn’t had the easiest time getting into the swing of things at her new job. There’d been the incident back in September where she’d accidentally calibrated her model on a file of New Llama Wizards baseball results rather than Wall interactions, of course, and the resulting nightmare of a presentation had nearly gotten her fired. But the higher-ups had seen her potential as a data analyst, and she’d rapidly improved over the next few months.
Presently, she was cleaning out her file systems, using a projector to swipe through old data files and models that she no longer needed. Seeing the file name
cursedwizardsprojections.da, she laughed, and moved to delete it - in a way, it was sort of like an exorcism of old demons, as she settled into her new role. But something had prompted her to see how good the predictions actually were. She whipped out the play-by-play logs for the President’s Cup final, as well as the prediction files, and had her computer compare the two.
They were exactly the same.
February 9, 3076
Conference Room 3443
Rasmussen Space Center, 25 miles north of Dinschria City
It’d been eight years to the day that Eron Jensen had run that ill-fated test. Since then, she’d rapidly been promoted to the head of a new department under the RSC’s theoretical physics division, one that solely focused on predicting baseball results using “noise” generated from the data that physical interactions left after colliding with The Wall. Since then, their model had predicted with perfect accuracy the results of the 3123, 3124, and 3125 baseball seasons - not only that, but every pitch thrown, the result of every at-bat, even ejections and injuries. As a result, Eron had been instructed to present the results to a board of LBA and RSC higher-ups.
“...so the conclusion is inevitable, as you can see from the data we’ve collected. We don’t know how or why, but the results of the LBL are all predetermined.”
“Have you tried to predict anything else using this data?” That was Mikayla Hörst, one of the top physicists studying the Wall.
“We have, and nothing else has been predictable in this way. In fact, the noise data we used has no predictive properties for anything else that we’ve tried. And we’ve basically tried everything.”
“Do you know why?” now it was the LBA President Fyodor Cameron’s turn to ask questions.
“I have my own hypotheses, as do the rest of the team. But only one of them has held up to any amount of scrutiny.”
“What is it?”
Eron swallowed heavily. “The theory is that the country known to us as Super-Llamaland - at least post-Event - is a simulated construct. The only reason for our existence is apparently to produce LBL results and international WBC scores. Everything else produced by our society - the thousand years of technological progress, novels, music, culture, every non-baseball related facet of our lives - is just random noise.”
The room went quiet.
August 31, 3128
Conference Room 2332
Rasmussen Space Center, 25 miles north of Dinschria City
Annora swallowed heavily. “Go for launch,” she said. Ten seconds later, a brilliant, 150-foot rocket burst into the air on the live feed, completely melting the Dinschria snowscape around it.
The rocket majestically shrieked through the air, trailing smoke and fire behind it. Until, abruptly, it stopped, turned one hundred and eighty degrees, and was sent spiraling back down to Earth, the hopes of the entire room sinking down with the broken rocket into the abyss. It had collided with the wall. Against all known laws of aviation, the Wall had won again. The implications of what the live stream had just showed hit the conference room like the rocket itself hitting the floor.
It felt like an eternity before Annora could find the right words to say. “Now what?” In front of her, one of the LBA board members began to cry, loud, heaving sobs that tore into Annora’s heart.
June 1, 3131
???
??, ?
“...So, none of it’s real?”
“I’m sorry, Alex. It’s not easy for anyone to accept this.”
“...What did you do next?”
Annora smiled sadly. “The only thing we could do. We shut down the Llamanean Baseball League. But it wasn’t enough - people would’ve wanted it to come back. So we had to erase baseball from the memory of Super-Llamaland.”
“The Enhancement chips made it surprisingly easy. Basically every Llamanean has already had a neural implant since around the 2800s, so we just convinced the government to wipe baseball out of everyone’s memories and fill them in with anything else. A group of holdouts managed to de-Enhance themselves just in time and started smuggling baseball memories - but we managed to capture and forcibly wipe all of them. Of course, they didn't know what we know. But then again, this is all old news to you, Alex."
“I...I didn’t know about any of that. I was just-”
“Yes, I understand. We’re not going to kill you, Alex.”
“...so what do I do now?”
“Why do you think it matters what you do? None of this is real, Alex. You can do whatever you want.”
“...aren’t you worried I’ll tell anyone else?” In response now, Annora gently took Alex’s hand and guided it to the back of his neck. As he felt what almost seemed to be a USB port there, his blood ran cold.
“You’re Enhanced now, Alex. You’re not going to tell anyone else. In thirty seconds, you won’t even have anything to tell.”