Welcome to Litsy!

From multiple award-winning author Daryl Gregory comes a madcap adventure following two friends on a cross-country bus tour through the mind-boggling glitches in their simulated world as they grapple with love, family, secrets, and the very nature of reality in a simulation. JP and Dulin have been the best of friends for decades. When JP finds out his cancer has aggressively returned, Dulin decides it�s the perfect time for one last adventure: a week-long bus tour of North America�s Impossibles, the physics-defying glitches and geographic miracles that started cropping up seven years earlier�right after the Announcement that revealed our world to be merely a digital simulacrum. The outing, courtesy of Canterbury Trails Tours, promises the trip of a (not completely real) lifetime in a (not completely deluxe) coach. Their fellow passengers are 21st-century pilgrims, each of them on the tour for their own reasons. There�s a nun hunting for an absent God, a pregnant influencer determined to make her child too famous to be deleted, a crew of horny octogenarians living each day like it�s their last, and a professor on the run from leather-clad sociopaths who take The Matrix as scripture. Each stop on this trip is stranger than the last�a Tunnel outside of time, a zero gravity Geyser, the compound of motivational-speaking avatar�with everyone barreling toward the tour�s iconic final stop Ghost City, where unbeknownst to our travelers the answer to who is running the simulation may await. When We Were Real is a tour-de-force and exploration of what really matters, even in an artificial world.