From the distance, “Mujer? What’s wrong?” Chance was jogging toward her, his cowboy boots kicking up snow. As he reached Calliope, he knelt beside her, worry lines furrowing his face. “Is it the babies?”

She shook her head, not admitting how much her uterus strained. “I’m fine. I was explaining to Eunjoo how this is real life, not a dream.”

He breathed out, relief smoothing the creases at his eyes. He turned toward Eunjoo, then back to Calliope. Though he addressed Eunjoo, he kept his eyes on Calliope. “Oye, chica. In quantum physics there’s a hypothesis of probability that asserts we could be dreaming at any given moment. The odds aren’t as low as winning the lottery or getting struck by lightning, they’re way higher. When we do the math, turns out the odds of us being in REM dreaming is one in ten. Some scientists think we’re not conscious in dreams, but others, me included, believe consciousness just means thinking and being aware of a world. Dreamworld counts, yes? You might say if this was a dreamworld, why would it be bound by the laws of causality? Well, reality follows a strict set of rules, even if it gets a little blurry at the quantum level. Imagine if we were in someone else’s dream, qué no? A simulation made by a higher-order reality. Maybe not a dream, but a computer simulation. Maybe not computers, but gods. There are scientists who imagine a time, perhaps centuries from now, when our descendants will have the power to model fully functional human brains in computers. These simulated minds could be placed in computer-­simulated worlds, perhaps even re-creations of the past. They would never know they weren’t real. Scientists say we could be living in a rerun where some weird event in the past had been changed just to see what kind of ramifications it had. Whether it’s a simulation or dream doesn’t matter. You can still plan your life, causes will have effects, and actions will have consequences. But the reality we perceive is just a small slice of what really is. As the philosopher-king Marcus Aurelius wrote, The universe is change. Our life is what our thoughts make it.”

Calliope couldn’t decide whether she was more exasperated that he’d contradicted everything she’d told the girl, impressed that he’d conjoined Western philosophy with scientific quandaries and indigenous spirituality, or amused that he’d given a lecture at a snow-covered burial mound. She settled on amusement, but dialed her tone to chiding. “I was actually hoping you’d pinch yourself, Chance. Show her we’re all really here. Instead, you tell her we could be in a dream.”

“Children are too smart for anything but the truth, mujer.”

“Yeah, but whose truth?”

“Exactly.”