Counterfeit World

First published: 1964 (published as Simulacron-3, 1964, in the United States)

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Science fiction—inner space

Time of work: 2034

Locale: A simulation of Earth

The Plot

Counterfeit World was filmed for German television in 1973 as Welt am Draht (The World on a Wire) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and released in England as a two-part film under the same title. The story opens as Doug Hall returns from a vacation at an isolated cabin, where he was recovering from seizures brought on by stress and overwork. He discovers that Horace P. Siskin has appointed him director of RIEN Reactions, an organization that samples public opinion with a new computer containing an electronically simulated population. Although the simulator will make prediction much easier, it will put poll takers out of work.

A series of strange events, including people and things disappearing and attempts on his life, convinces Hall not only that Hannon Fuller, his predecessor and inventor of the simulator, was murdered but also that his own world is counterfeit, like the one in the simulator. Hall comes to these conclusions despite the fact that his former teacher and friend, Avery Collingsworth, has diagnosed him as being paranoid. Meanwhile, Siskin has asked Hall to reprogram the simulator so that it will project Siskin as the ideal presidential candidate, and Hall has fallen in love with Fuller’s daughter, Jinx.

Hall plays along with Siskin for a time, but his plan to expose Siskin is discovered and eventually he is fired. One of the contact units from the simulator’s counterfeit world comes through the hookup and takes over the physical body of an assistant. Hall realizes that there must be a person in his own world monitoring things for the operators above. As he tries to find that contact person, he discovers that he is now wanted for the murders of both Fuller and Collingsworth. He flees. Jinx finds him and tells him that she is not Fuller’s daughter but a projection from the real world, that he is an electric analogue for the operator whom she once loved but who is now a sadist, and that the two Doug Halls are physically, but not psychologically, identical.

Because Doug now knows that his world is a simulation, he also knows that the operator will have to end it, and he determines the day on which his world probably will be erased. He wants Jinx to leave, but she will not. Hall eventually saves his electronic world, but he is fatally wounded. He later wakes up in Jinx’s world to find that she has switched the Doug Hall operator into Hall’s electronic identity in time for him to die. Hall finds that his new body is identical to his former one and that Jinx’s world is virtually identical to the one he left. Jinx says that she will help him adjust but that she will miss the operator’s romantic flair for programming exotic proper nouns, such as Pacific and Mediter-ranean.