Our Simulated Selves is the debut novel from American author Nikki Null, a fantastic meta-narrative on epistemology, self-actualization, and what reads to me as a very direct condemnation of the egg prime directive. It’s going to be hard to talk too much about without spoilers, what with the whole meta-narrative part but I’ll do my best. The first of the new books I’ve read for the semi-finals of the Self-Published Science Fiction Competition (not counting the two from my group that we advanced to the semis ourselves) and an immediate front-runner not only for this contest, but for the best book of the year for me to date. Absolutely buy and read this book.
Jeanne said she wouldn’t date Ren if he were the last man on Earth.
Unfortunately, he had the technology to test her claim.
Dejected programmer Ren “Zero” takes notes after uploading his brain into a supercomputer, using his memory to recreate his past. He sets the world in motion and watches his simulated self go through many steps he has taken in his reality,
– Buying a stolen brainscanner from punkish technologist Jeanne in exchange for getting her hired;
– Getting dragged to a queer café to play tabletop RPGs with Jeanne’s trans friends;
– Having the best time of his life playing a female character there, for unknown and mysterious reasons;
– Asking Jeanne out in a storm of confused signals and emotions.
That’s when Zero deletes everyone from the simulation except Ren and Jeanne.
Now wandering together through the empty city, Ren and Jeanne must work together to find the truths behind their baffling reality, while Zero subtly manipulates their world to achieve his desired ends. In order to defy the controller’s plans, Ren must outsmart his real-world counterpart by finally confronting the fundamental truths that even the all-powerful Controller could not compute…
As unlikely as it seems given the last several reviews I’ve written, it’s possible some number of readers saw ‘egg prime directive’ and had no idea what I’m talking about. Simply put, it’s the idea that, like the prime directive of Star Trek, if you are a trans person and you believe somebody is trans who hasn’t realized it yet, you are not to try and bring it to their attention, and leave them to figure it out for themselves. Despite being a concept that putatively originates within the trans community, the vast majority of trans people I know or have seen talk about this think that is a terrible idea, and wish for themselves that somebody had pushed them to confront those feelings sooner. This is very much an underlying thesis of Our Simulated Selves.
The narrative flips back and forth between “Ren Zero” being the original protagonist of the story, and Ren One (or just ‘Ren’) being the version of himself that he is simulating. His original desire to create this simulation of himself was basically to try and self-diagnose what he perceived as a number of mental illnesses: brain fog, disassociation, his inability to get a girlfriend and the lingering trauma of a childhood of abuse over not being properly masculine like his brother. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
But after he meets Jeanne, is warned not to make it weird by trying to ask her out, makes it weird by trying to ask her out, and gets thoroughly rejected, he decides a better use of the incredibly powerful quantum supercomputer he has access to is to just run a simulation where, at the moment of her rejection of him, every other person on the planet disappears forcing them to have to stay together for survival to try and figure out how he could make her date him after all.
As the two stories progress, we see a little more of the aftermath of Ren Zero’s rejection by Jeanne out in the real world: He just slides deeply into terrifying incel manosphere toxic misogyny while trying to smush the simulated Ren and Jeanne dolls together saying ‘now kiss’. One of the great tragedies of this novel is that Null does such a perfect job portraying this exact kind of toxic misogynist and transphobe, that it is very clear that she (like so many trans women) have had to have FAR too many dealings with this kind of guy, and indeed, another one of the underlying theses of this novel is that it is dangerously easy for both cis men and trans women who haven’t yet made the jump to understanding their transness to become this kind of guy. This is where the term ‘rotten egg’ comes from.
So being able to see the divergent journeys, Ren Zero who nobody tried to save, and Ren, who slowly, painfully, starts to claw “his” way out of there while being subject to the egg prime directive, all the while seeing how “he” acts around Jeanne, how “he” thinks internally and wanting to reach through the page to just shake her and tell her to get her shit together and admit what she already knows was one hell of a trip. There’s a lot of talk about survivorship bias in trans circles. You don’t get to see the stories of the trans people who didn’t make it, they aren’t around to tell them. Being able to watch these multiple slow-motion car wrecks in parallel is a powerful experience. And even more so due to some things that happen later in the story that I won’t spoil.
When I first finished reading the novel, I posted “That might have been the single most ‘will absolutely crack your egg if there is an egg to be cracked’ story I’ve ever read.” I still very much stand by that. There are a lot of very lovely and powerful and empowering stories of trans triumph, there are a lot of very real and traumatic and heart-wrenching stories of trans tragedy, but to have so deftly interwoven both stories at the same time, and to be willing and able to spend so much time in the mind of both hyper-closeted Ren Zero, and see the slow, painful, anxiety inducing journey of Ren, just truly incredible stuff.
At the time of this writing, there’s a Bluesky post making the discourse rounds on the topic of trans people describing the ways that they -didn’t- just “always know” and how it sometimes took so many years of suffering and misery and depression to get to where they needed to be, almost entirely because the state of their culture, society, upbringing, family, whatever, kept the knowledge from them that the ways they thought and felt were not just normal things all cis people think and feel. Kept the knowledge from them that transness was even a thing, that there was more to it than just either knowing since you were 4 years old that you were not how people said you were, or being cis and that’s the two options.
I don’t want to take a position like “We need more trans fiction that focuses on the incredibly traumatic and depressing life stages of those who transition later in life having to haul themselves out of the closet.” But it is very much an important and valuable thing to have such a sincere and unflinching portrayal of the process for those who have to painstakingly work their way around to understand what has been real the whole time. Even if what that means is to tell a story where a man will literally steal incredibly secret proprietary brain scanning technology to perfectly replicate his own brain to run a simulation on the world’s most powerful quantum supercomputer, rather than go to therapy. She gets there in the end, one way or another.
Dan received a copy of this book in his role as a reader/judge for Self-Published Science Fiction Contest 5, in the semi-final round.
