Snapshot

Snapshot by Brandon Sanderson





One





Anthony Davis—one of only two real people in a city of twenty million—caught the burrito his partner tossed to him. “Which end is the mustard on?” he asked.

“Mustard?” Chaz replied. “Who puts mustard on a burrito?”

“You. What side?”

Chaz grinned, showing perfect white teeth. They were fake. After taking that bar stool to the face two years back, he’d gotten one replaced, but had insisted that the dentist make it too perfect to match his other teeth. By this point, he’d had most of the rest replaced as well.

“Mustard is in the end on your left,” Chaz said, nodding to the burrito. “How’d you know?”

Davis just grunted, ripping off the corner of the burrito. Beans, cheese, beef. And mustard. Chaz clung to this stupid belief that someday his partner would happen upon a mustardy bite and convert. Davis shook his head and tossed the ripped-off chunk of burrito into a dumpster.

The two strolled down the street in plain clothes. The vast city of New Clipperton enveloped them, so authentic that one would never be able to tell it was a Snapshot—a re-creation of a specific day in the real city. Using methods a simple cop like Davis struggled to understand, the entire city had been reproduced.

They were actually in some vast underground complex, but it didn’t seem that way to him; he saw a sun overhead and smelled the stench of the alleyway they passed. It all felt real to him. In its way, it was real: built from raw matter you could touch, smell, hear, and—as evidenced by the bite Davis took of his burrito—taste.

Damn. He’d missed some of the mustard.

“You ever wonder,” Chaz said, talking with his mouth half-full, “how much these burritos cost? Like, for real. The energy to create them and stick them in here so we can buy them?”

“They cost tons,” Davis said, then took another bite. “And nothing at the same time.”

“Huh. Kind of like how you can say things, but have them mean nothing at the same time?”

“The Snapshot Project is a sunk cost, Chaz,” Davis said. “The suits already paid for the place, the technology to do this. Everything is already here, and the setup cost was enormous. But we didn’t really have much choice.”

When the new American government had pulled out of Clipperton, they’d decided not to remove the installation built underneath it. Davis had always assumed that the Americans wanted the place to stay around, in case they decided to return and play with their experiment some more. But they also hadn’t wanted to just give it away. So, New Clipperton—officially an independent city-state—had been granted the “opportunity” to take control of the Snapshot Project. For a very large fee.

Davis took another bite of his burrito. “This whole thing cost us a ton, but that’s done. So we might as well use it.”

“Yeah, but burritos, man. They make burritos for us. I always wondered if the bean counters would figure, ‘Burritos are too frivolous. Let’s take them out.’ ”

“Doesn’t work that way. If you’re going to use the Snapshot to re-create a day, you have to do it exactly. So our burritos, the graffiti on the wall there, the woman you’re leering at—all part of the package. Expensive, but free, all at once.”

“She is fine though, eh?” Chaz said, turning around and walking backward as he watched the woman.

“Have a little decency, Chaz.”

“Why? She’s not real. None of them are real.”

Davis took another bite of burrito. His taste buds couldn’t tell that it wasn’t real. Of course, what did it mean to be “real”? The beans and cheese had been modeled on a real burrito in the real city, and it was exact down to the molecular level. It wasn’t just some virtual simulation either. If you’d placed this burrito beside one from the real world, even an electron microscope couldn’t have detected the difference.

Chaz grunted, biting into his own burrito. “Wonder who bought these in the real city.”

It was a good question. This Snapshot had been created overnight, and was an exact replica of a day ten days back: the first of May, 2018. This entire re-creation would be deleted once Chaz and Davis left for the evening. They’d push a button, and everything in here would be reconstituted back to raw matter and energy.

Chaz and Davis were real though—from “in real life,” so to speak. Their insertion—while necessary—was also problematic. As Chaz and Davis interacted with the Snapshot, they would cause what were called Deviations: differences between the Snapshot and the way the real May first had played out.

Some things they did—though it was impossible to tell which ones ahead of time—would end up having a ripple effect throughout the Snapshot, making the re-creation happen differently from the real day. The Deviation percentage—as calculated by statisticians—would be a factor in any trials associated with evidence discovered in the Snapshot.

Chaz and Davis usually left that to the bean counters. Sometimes, they’d go the entire day doing things they were sure would ruin their cases—but in the end everything played out fine, and the Deviation percentage was determined to be small. Another time, Davis had locked himself away in a hotel saferoom, determined not to create any Deviations. Unfortunately, by slamming his door, he’d woken up a woman in an adjacent room. She had therefore made it to an interview on time, and that had sent ripples throughout the entire Snapshot, causing a 20 percent Deviation level. That had cost them an entire case.