When We Were Real by Daryl Gregory
Wonderfully narrated by Ari Fliakos
S&S/Saga Press, 2025; Bookshop.org⩘ ; audiobook: Simon & Schuster Audio, 2025; Libro.fm⩘ .
Tour schedule, seating chart, and other characters
It's been seven years since the Announcement that the world is a simulation, and the ensuing Freakout. Since then, the world's had seven years of weekly reminders, seven years to get used to a landscape littered with… whatever you wanted to call them: glitches, anomalies, Areas of Scientific What-the-Fuckery.
North American Impossibles Tour schedule
- Day 1: The Frozen Tornado; The Antipode (optional stop)
- Day 2: The Geyers of Mystery
- Day 3: The Hollow Flock; Four Cedars Distillery (tour and dinner)
- Day 4: The Last Exit Mall and Travel Center; The Tunnel; Introduction to the Zipper (if time permits)
- Day 5: Rafting the Zipper (alternative transportation available); Audience with the Avatar Saugat Zin
- Day 6: Ghost City
- Day 7: Group photo and goodbyes
Seating chart
- Agnes Wisniewski - The driver
- Peter Atherton - The experienced tour guide who couldn't make the trip
- Aneeta Channar - The rookie tour guide who was supposed to shadow Peter
- JP (Jean-Pierre) Laurent - The engineer (early retirement after a bout with brain cancer)
- Dulin Marks - The comic book writer
- Notes: JP and Dulin have been the best of friends for decades; JP's cancer has aggressively returned; Suzanne is JP's deceased wife of 35 years; Marion is JP's daughter, who he lost custody of
- Beth-Anne Neville - The nurse
- Lenora Neville - The proud grandmother
- Jim Mullins - The Realist, host and sole writer for his podcast, The Real Patriot, whose slogan is: "Speaking Truth to Morons"
- Christopher Mullins - The Realist's son, giant red Afro
- Josef Fischer & Marcus Egger - The honeymooners, Austrians
- Sister Janet
- Sister Pratice - The novice, Latina from Miami
- Zev Landsman - The rabbi
- Chen Xing-Xing - The reader, visa marked from Taiwan, even though that country no longer exists, nonstandard pronouns
- Lisa Marie Montello - The influencer, 35-weeks pregnant, @lady_mmm
- The Octos - The quartet of boisterous octogenarians sitting in the back of the bus
Other characters
- Gillian Masch/Dr. Margaret Schell - The professor, a Black woman who meets JP in the parking lot and talks him into helping her join the tour; her real name is Margaret Schell, a professor of computational neuroscience at Boston University
- Notes: Professor Margaret Schell's lab was attacked when she wasn't there and two of her grad students (Tommy Francis and Ajay Patel) were shot to death, and a female janitor and the heavily armed gunman were killed when he set off or accidentally triggered a bomb when the janitor entered the lab
- Adaku - Margaret's daughter
- Edowar (Edo) Eze - Margaret's husband
- Utnapishtim - bearded Black man who Margaret finds in the garage talking to Adaku; he tell's Margaret his name is "Utnapishtim", who was a legendary king of the ancient city of Shuruppak in southern Iraq, who, according to the Gilgamesh flood myth, survived the Flood by making and occupying a boat; Adaku interprets his name as "Aunty Tim")
- MPF, LLC - Margaret's company in Cambridge
- The Protagonists - incels that Margaret claims are hunting her; they think she's a bot controlled by the Simulators; they attacked her lab and claim Margaret is the chief architect of a top-secret government program to control the simulation called Project Red Clay
- Atreus - former leader of The Protagonists
- NPC - non-playable character in a video game
- Chet - from CET, the Center for External Threats
- FBI Special Agent Deb Marks - Dulin's sister
Full review: When We Were Real⩘
