Anka wants to know more about Ulysses, asking cryptically: “Did you suspect him from the very beginning?”. Sophie changes subject, attempting to convince Anka that she is interrogating her not only to know her story, but to understand how stories in general work. Sophie is willing to play along, but only if she is willing to take the central meaning of her story together with the tools to understand it. “Husk and the kernel. All or nothing.” she says, “I’ll make you eat the fucking kernel of my story, whether you like it or not.”
Still obsessed with her lost love, Sophie uses a Hedron to gaze into Lisa’s future, and sees the crime she’ll be accused of in the future: Doron’s body mangled in a snowy mountain road, a car with open doors, the radio playing her favorite song, You Don’t Own Me, by Leslie Gore. In panic, she unplugs from the Hedron only to find Doron safe in his bed. She hugs him while masking her tears.
In the next day, Sophie comes across a telltale sign that image of Doron’s death she has seen may have been a false prediction, leading her to conjecture why. Suddenly it hits her: there is no simulation within the simulation, sim-within-a-sim, so the two realities are not essentially analogous. “Imagine Norman Rockwell painting himself. Given infinite resolution, he would need not only to paint the painting within the painting, but also the painting within the painting within the painting, and so on… An endless recursion.” She sets out to create such recursion, in hopes of finally gazing into hers and Lisa’s destiny.
Sophie enlists Ulysses help to create the sim-within-the-sim, and when they do both simulations become interlocked, THEODORE refusing to accept any changes in the parameters for the simulation, one exactly mirroring the other. Still obsessed with finding the reason behind Lisa’s disappearance, Sophie goes inside the simulation as Lisa, against Ulysses warnings that she may be locked in there forever.
