At the center of Simulation – 1988 is a simple but brutal condition: every day, people wake up in a new body, in a reality they know is simulated, trapped in a loop they cannot escape. The glitch that throws them from 2057 back to 1988 again and again is more than a plot device. It is a metaphor for emotional and existential disconnection.
The loop strips away:
– continuity
– ownership of the self
– long-term stability
– the illusion of control
What remains is memory. The only through-line is what the characters remember and who they care about. Everything else can reset.
The daily body shift raises an ongoing question:
What is left of you when your physical form changes every day?
Ben and Ella’s relationship becomes a way to explore identity beyond appearance. Their love is not tied to:
– gender
– age
– body type
– surface-level attraction
In that sense, identity becomes:
– memory
– intention
– emotional history
– shared experience
Ben and Ella’s commitment to finding each other every day is the emotional core of the story. Their designated meeting spots, scattered across this 1988 world, become proof that love can be deliberate.
They have to:
– plan for chaos
– accept separation as routine
– risk danger just to share a few hours
– trust that the other is still trying
In a world where nothing stays the same, their choice to keep looking for each other is a form of resistance. It says:
“If the world will not stay stable, we will be.”
If Ben and Ella represent connection, Keith represents disintegration.
He responds to the same conditions—daily displacement, instability, grief—in the opposite way. Instead of clinging to connection, he leans into destruction. Each new body becomes an opportunity to end a life, as if ending the vessel might end his pain.
Keith embodies:
– the corrosive impact of prolonged instability
– the way trauma repeats until it changes form
– the belief that if the world is meaningless, everything is disposable
Where Ben and Ella use memory to build something, Keith uses memory as proof that nothing matters.
John sits uneasily between worlds: he is inside the simulation but tethered to those controlling it. His “patched in” status gives him partial access and partial power, but not full control.
John represents:
– the cracks in the system
– the guilt of complicity
– the loneliness of partial understanding
He becomes a way for the story to talk about the architecture of the simulation without turning into a technical manual. His perspective hints at the scale of what’s been done to these people without fully explaining who is behind it or why.
The choice of 1988 is not random. It is loaded with:
– nostalgia
– analog limits (no smartphones, no internet everywhere)
– smaller, more physical worlds
– specific places tied to personal memory
By dropping the characters into 1988, the story emphasizes physical places, motels, attractions, hometowns as emotional anchors. The Corn Palace, Rockport, and other locations become symbols of the characters’ attempts to carve out meaning in a world that refuses to stay still.
Glitches in the simulation point to two things at once:
– the technical failure of the system
– the emotional fractures inside the people trapped within it
Each glitch can be read as:
– a bug
– a symptom of strain
– a sign that something is breaking down, either in the code or in the characters
They’re not just there to add sci-fi flavor; they underline the idea that nothing designed to control people lasts forever without consequences.
Throughout the story, the characters are constantly pushed into situations where their choices seem small compared to the structure trapping them. But their decisions of where to go, who to trust, whether to keep looking for each other still matter.
The book suggests that:
– the system can limit the field of choices
– it cannot completely erase agency
– even within a rigged world, intention matters
That tension between control and choice runs beneath every scene.
Beneath the glitch, the loop, the body hopping, and the mystery of who is running the system, Simulation – 1988 keeps circling a few questions:
– What defines you when your body doesn’t?
– Is love still real if reality is synthetic?
– How long can people endure instability before they fracture?
– If someone else is writing the rules, what does resistance look like?
The book doesn’t offer clean answers. Instead, it uses the loop and the simulation as a way to explore how people cling to meaning when everything else resets.
At its core, the story isn’t just about whether the characters can escape the simulation. It’s about whether they can hold on to themselves—and each other—while they’re still inside it.
