Exploring The Halter and Simulations
The idea of a simulation has fascinated me since I first watched The Matrix saga in a certified Latin American bootleg DVD with all 4 movies when I was little. On a small CRT TV, I watched as our world slowly revealed its imperfections, breaking down until Neo escaped his own reality, revealing that everything was a complete fabrication by machines that fed on our life energy. That was just too good not to leave a mark on me.
I loved the way the Wachowski sisters evolved the technology of the time to create their futuristic world and say something about the present. This experience might be why I really need a story for me, to make me believe in its world, as if it were my own. It’s not that I don’t enjoy a good fantasy story; The Lord of the Rings is pretty awesome, but it gets harder when a setting deviates too much from our reality. So a digital simulation built like an advanced video game is the perfect cheat code to make the impossible seem possible and still make me believe it all makes sense when it’s used to talk about some aspect of our world.
Less than a decade later, the idea of a digital simulation served as one of the main inspirations for my personal favorite video game series of all time: Assassin’s Creed. Here, we take on the role of a normal guy in the present who, over the course of many games, relives his ancestors’ memories through a machine called the Animus to find a way to save the present from a cosmic catastrophe. If The Matrix presented a world where humanity was forced into adopting the simulation technology by machines as a corrupting force, reflecting the way technology was advancing so rapidly just before the beginning of the century, Assassin’s Creed came when things like personal computers and mobile phones were very normalized, and instead presented the simulation as a tool for us to use. But what is the role of the simulation almost 30 years after the first Matrix film?
Since then, perhaps the most successful story about a simulation is Ready Player One, which depicted a devastated world where humans found some sort of escape in the digital world of The Oasis. But its attempt as commentary about our relationship with escapism and technology was butchered by the fact that the author seemed to think it was too fucking cool to be all that bad, and filled it with many references to his favorite movies and comics, so it stays in an in-between that never really commits to anything. So for a while, it seemed like we had become so used to technology being present in our everyday life that the idea of living in a digital world didn’t seem to be all that interesting to explore beyond being a cool setting for your story.
That was until February of this year, maybe inspired by recent advancements of AI, the isolation from 2020 that forced us to socialize from a screen, or maybe something that escapes me, that Darby McDevitt (Lead writer of Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag and narrative director of the upcoming Assassin’s Creed Code Name: Hexe) released his debut novel, The Halter. Set in a future where the Earth is slowly dying of climate collapse, while the wealthy are building colonies on Mars, the addiction to escapist entertainment like digital worlds that we can connect to and get lost inside, called Surrogate Realities, has become an epidemic. These cheap mass-market simulations, unlike The Matrix or The Oasis, are not part of a single network but of multiple servers with different experiences, sold by multiple companies, and they are the workplace of our protagonist, Kennedy Stark.
He is a Halter, basically a mix of a private detective and a counselor, tasked with pulling people out of Surrugate Realities when they get too lost in the fantasy. He is a good man who likes helping people, but it’s hard to live on a dying planet, and his passion for his job seems to be fading as he dreams of a better life on Mars. So when a mysterious client asks him to adopt the identity of a public auditor and find Delia Walsh, a woman he fell in love with years ago, in a complex simulation called The Forum, where she works as a developer, he quickly accepts, hoping to escape his monotonous life.
The Forum is different from the usual Surrugate Reality; it’s a physical building that you enter to connect your brain into it, where everything inside actually feels real, and houses innumerable digital experiences called Theatres, each promising to use simulation to explore different scientific theories and artistic expressions that could not be possible or ethical in real life. The book takes the premise of a Theatre and, with some dark humour, explores different philosophical debates within it, mostly asking questions about this technology, but not always answering them. Do people actually respect the intention of the creator? Should they? And do the people in charge even care about that when there’s money to be made?
Take one of the first Theatres that Kennedy visits in The Halter, “The Death of Desire”. Originally designed to modify the brain as a way for people to get rid of their worst impulses, it has become a deteriorated hospital where people can’t stop modifying their senses in completely irrational ways. Or “Your Double”, which provides the user with an exact copy of themselves that doesn’t know they were a copy, so people could have a literal talk with oneself as a therapeutic session but that has been turned into a playground for people that just want to, in the words of one of its users, “Live a little, bro. Kick your own balls”. The book is not subtle; one of Delia’s co-workers, disillusioned by the state of their theatre, talks about how she thought about technological progress: “The idea that a new technology will always regress over time to some lowest common denominator usage. Something far more vulgar than its creators intended”.
The character of Delia is not present, but is always felt in The Halter. In the short entries of her apparent journal that break every chapter, we discover an idealistic woman who, from an early age, was obsessed with simulations, and we see her attempts at artistic expression in this technology that offers seemingly endless possibilities. Her constant search for a way to make an experience that truly communicates what she is about drives her, as her own limitations and the need for profits always seem to get in the way. The simulation in The Halter is the ultimate tool for creative expression and the ultimate product to sell. The fight between artists and suits seems to be a constant struggle, and it’s impossible for me not to think about Darby McDevitt’s work when reading the novel.
He is a writer, a musician, and a game developer on one of the biggest video game franchises in the world, and the deeper you dig into The Halter, the more you start to find many passages that border on confessions. The Assassin’s Creed series that he works in is huge and never-ending, the perfect escapist entertainment possible, a series bigger than him, bigger than anyone, and I am sure that working with such a huge beast for a big corporation comes with its own frustrations. There is no way to really know if players will engage with what you propose to them, no way to be sure that they will have a healthy relationship with it, and there is no assurance that the machine that keeps this going will accept everything you want to express in your work, because at the end of the day, it is their product and you are just another employee.
I cannot absolve Darby of sin; only he can do that, but maybe he isn’t asking for it either in The Halter. The passion for the possibilities in the technology that fascinates Delia, and the love for what she creates, also seem to be present in the author, as both are unafraid of what’s to come because they are confident in their own ability to create, keep breaking the mold, and make experiences worth engaging with. Not even AI can scare a creative, because there will always be new ways to express themselves, and there will always be someone to appreciate it. Someone like Kennedy Stark, an honest guy, if a little cynical, who is open to what an experience has to offer and is not ready to exploit them for his own gain. In a way, he is the perfect audience member, the one who “gets it”, so maybe his hiring was not so random, maybe he has something others don’t, and inside the crazy world of The Forum, there is something only he can solve. Only he can find out.
I would say that The Halter sometimes explains itself a bit more than it should, and I got certain ideas and concepts two or three dialogues before they finished explaining them. It’s impossible to know whether the book would’ve worked as well without lingering on these ideas the way it did, and while it wasn’t really a bother thanks to a very dynamic use of prose that never made any moment feel slow, it was something I noticed from time to time. But it is a fun read, as thought-provoking as it is entertaining, with an ending that made me smile from ear to ear by smartly tying everything together and delivering a beautiful message.
If you’re looking for a creative new book, a look inside the mind of an artist, or you are a fan of Darby’s other work, you can’t go wrong by picking up The Halter. It is always cool to see what a creative you like can do outside the chains of IP, and it might be the perfect moment to do so, because this might not be the last time we see more of this world. I have no more words, so to finish, I will allow the main character to introduce himself with his business card: “Kennedy Stark – Surrogate Reality Deprogrammer, You might be lonely, but you’re not alone”.