An Oulipian work, it is structured around three parts, "As Black as the Sky" (Aussi noir que le ciel), "Life Is a Dream, They Say" (La vie est un songe dit-on), and "Song of Oblivion" (La chanson du néant), whose names ...
An Oulipian work, it is structured around three parts, "As Black as the Sky" (Aussi noir que le ciel), "Life Is a Dream, They Say" (La vie est un songe dit-on), and "Song of Oblivion" (La chanson du néant), whose names are taken from the poetry of Raymond Queneau. The novel asks several questions about the reality of the world and fiction.
On March 10, 2021, Air France Flight 006 from Paris is forced to fly through a cumulonimbus supercell of unprecedented size during a routine landing at John F. Kennedy International Airport. Over the following few months, the passengers from this flight go about their normal lives. Several encounter milestones, such as marriage, pregnancy, breakup, and death.
Among the passengers, Victor Miesel, a writer and translator, abruptly writes a book manuscript titled The anomaly from start to finish, then commits suicide. The posthumous publication of the manuscript garners widespread publicity, recognition, and acclaim for its deceased writer.
On June 24, 2021, an exact duplicate of Air France Flight 006 from March 10, populated by exact duplicates of all passengers and crew on board, appears in the sky over Kennedy Airport and attempts landing. This triggers the United States Department of Defense enacting Protocol 42, a highly unconventional air traffic emergency response protocol, devised by two MIT statistics researchers as an in-joke.
The two MIT alumni are unwittingly requisitioned to supervise the detention of the duplicate passenger jet and passengers by multiple U.S. security agencies, and to lead a forum of scientists to explain this impossible incident. The assembled scientists gradually gravitate towards the incident as evidence for the simulation hypothesis, even as they agonize over its unfalsifiability. Unbeknownst to the public, the Chinese government, having secretively captured a duplicate passenger jet of a different flight, has independently postulated the simulation hypothesis as well.
World governments jointly publicize the duplication of over two hundred human beings, committing substantial expense to providing protection and anonymity for the duplicated persons. The duplicates from the June flight are allowed to meet their counterparts from the March flight, arriving at mutual arrangements for co-existence. Some of these pairs find amicable ways to share the same life, while others experience painful upheavals. The living Miesel steps back into his writing career, his newfound fame giving him a second chance to meet a missed connection.
As media coverage popularizes the simulation hypothesis, apocalypticism rises in the general public. In a televised debate, a philosopher suggests that the duplicated flight was a test to the inhabitants of their simulated reality, while Miesel argues that human behavior will not change as a result. Later, in October 2021, another duplicate of Air France Flight 006 appears, and is destroyed by fighter jets under new procedures replacing Protocol 42. The narrative describes a rippling effect felt all across the world as text gradually disappears from the page, line by line.
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