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The Real WorldHe pulls the ITDT off the other side of the portal and looks at it. There are three main buttons and anon-off switch: the two arrow-marked buttons scrolled through names; the large central button took youto them. Other tinier buttons could program additional coordinates in once the user figured out how theyworked. Presumably there was a manual for the thing out there somewhere, but Dem had not seen fit toprovide them with one.The portal shimmers into nothing.Not-Tim pockets the ITDT and goes over to his bike. He pulls his blazer back on, and looks out at thecrowds still clamouring outside the building, unaware of what was going on inside, desperate for aglimpse of another world, other worlds, through the people who lived in them; people now gone – orsoon to be gone – as though they had never been.Not-Tim wonders what it was all for.But answers... Answers can come at another time.He climbs onto his bike, starts up the engine and rides off home, missing the weight of Neo behind him.Through the gate, alone this time.Porch.Door.His footsteps make the only sounds.The television set is on, blaring at an empty couch. Unwashed cutlery dumped in the sink. Stuffarranged haphazardly on a shelf. Puddles of water by the side of the pool.A sudden empty loneliness descends on him.His scripts have names, dialogue, descriptions; monospaced serif text typed out on paper. The filmshave faces and voices and snippets of lives; him but not-him, clashing and combining with memories ofthe same embodied in flesh by his side, breathing and thinking and speaking and being; independent ofhis control.It could have been a dream.Fleeting scenes pass through his mind as he dumps the keys and moves through the rooms, going tothe sink to wash up. Half-forgotten conversations already dimming in memory: Neo looking for thecomputer, Ludlow grabbing for his throat, Griffin handcuffed to his wrist, Alex listening in the quiet of thenight.The memories threaten to flatten and collapse; reduce into half-psychotic extensions of himself,imagination running wild, thought experiments that went too far, back-stories that took on lives too bigfor them.But the ITDT is still in his pocket. He holds it, closes his fingers over it, feels the weight of other livesjust out of reach but still extant, feels the physical assurance of fiction turned reality, and he hopes, withsudden desperation, that it was not a dream.