A Short Story, December 2024

It’s hard being a mad scientist’s friend.

Christmas was in the air and in the decorations that illuminated the streets and houses, but Vince couldn’t see it from the cold, dark front porch of the undecorated third floor apartment. He paced from the door to the dingy railing in a kind of restless annoyance and knocked on the door again. His frozen knuckles tingled on each impact with the door.

He checked his phone. No answers to the string of texts he had fired off back-to-back over the last few minutes. He pressed the button to try calling and held the phone to his ear. The screen was like holding an ice pack to the side of his face. He paced between the door and railing some more as he waited for an answer, trying to get warmer.

“You have reached the personal cellular phone of The Deletor!” said the voice over the phone. “Leave a message so I can listen to it, and then delete it!”

The message concluded with a maniacal laugh and a beep.

“Dale, where are you? I’m here outside,” said Vince, trying to keep his voice annoyed enough so that Dale might get the point, but not so annoyed that Dale would ignore him. “Did you forget about Christmas Eve? You said seven, right? Get your door, or call me if you you’re not home, ok?”

Vince hung up his phone but didn’t put it away. He knocked on the worn-out front door one more time, causing a few flakes of paint to fall away from under his fist. He turned away and slammed the nearby railing with his open palm.

His hand hurt, and he took a deep breath before he gave into the urge to hit something else. Just as he was turning to leave, his phone rang. He answered it without looking at the screen.

“Hey, Dale?”

“Dale?” said the woman’s voice from the phone. “It’s your dear sister.”

Vince looked back at the door and put his free hand in his jacket pocket to keep it warm.

“Sorry, Cara. Dale invited me over to his place for dinner and then he went AWOL.”

“You’re having Christmas eve dinner with Dale the Deletor? I didn’t know Taco Bell was open tonight.”

Vince smirked. “He doesn’t seem like the cooking type, does he?”

“More like the Funyuns-for-dinner type,” said Cara. “Anyway, Mom’s asking again if you had changed your mind and were going to show up last minute and surprise her.”

“I’d love to,” said Vince, shaking his head at the ground. “I told her that. But I have to work tomorrow, and the day after that, and the rest of the week. It’s a busy day, there are a lot of calls. But I’ll be home sometime Saturday afternoon, and I have the whole next week off, we can do whatever she wants then.”

“I know, but it’s weird not having you home for Christmas.”

“Yeah, but someone has to do it and it turned out to be me. Besides, they’re paying me double and I can get a bunch of extra hours in. That right there is more than enough to pay for all my books and things for next semester.”

“Vince!”

The loud whisper came from a crack in the front door. Vince looked over his shoulder to see Dale the Deletor poking his head through the opening in the door, looking around suspiciously.

“You’re here!” Vince said in a whisper that was probably audible two floors away. “Hurry inside, there’s no time to lose.”

Dale receded into his blindingly bright hallway, opening the door to make room for Vince.

“I’ve been here for like five minutes,” Vince said before speaking into his phone. “Gotta go, Dale’s here. Merry Christmas.”

Dale’s front hall was lined with light panels that temporarily blinded Vince as he entered. The air was warm and the smell of something cooking filled the apartment.

“Mmm, smells like-” Vince took a deep breath to try to identify the scent. He was hit by something warm and bitter. “-burnt plastic. What’s cooking?”

“What? Nothing’s cooking,” said Dale, looking down through a crack in the black curtains of hair that shrouded his face as if he were doubting whether or not he was speaking to Vince or an unintelligent imposter. “I just had a minor incident with the soldering iron.”

“What were you doing with the soldering iron?” said Vince, stretching his neck toward the source of the smell.

“It’s all part of my latest plan. It’s my greatest invention!” said Dale, his voice raising in excitement. His voice reminded Vince of a roommate he once had, who had talked with a similar maniacal excitement until three in the morning the night he announced to the apartment that he was going to be a philosophy major.

“Okay, sure. What did you invent?”

“I can’t just explain it, you have to see it!” said Dale, gesturing down the hallway toward the living room. “Come on!”

Vince followed him into the living room, the smell of burnt plastic getting stronger as he approached. Dale walked ahead of him, looking back and watching for Vince’s expression.

“What is all of this?” said Vince, stopping to look around as he entered the living room.

The walls of the room were lined with shelves full of equipment and workbenches with piles of parts. At the center of the room, towering to the peak of the vaulted ceiling, was something that vaguely resembled a Christmas tree, with twinkling green and red lights and a tangle of branches tapering off toward the top.

Dale the Deletor shook his hand out of the overly long sleeves of his white hoodie to point at the Christmas tree. It wasn’t a Christmas tree, though, it was a jumbled stack of electronic parts, interconnected by branches of wire and other parts that stuck out from the eleven-foot behemoth at odd angles. It was topped by a golden antenna in the shape of an eight-pointed star.

“This,” said Dale, still watching Vince’s reaction, “is my most brilliant new scheme. I call it-” he paused dramatically, but let the pause go on too long, turning the dramatic pause into an awkward pause “-PROJECT XMAS!”

He stared at Vince, looking for a reaction, maybe expecting a trophy or even a congratulatory handshake, but Vince looked at the tree of electronics without any reaction besides a slightly confused look.

“Sorry, what’s Project Christmas?” Vince finally asked.

“No no no, XMAS,” said Dale, in a voice that still expected a flash of recognition from Vince. He continued to gesture dramatically at the stack of electronics parts. “Because I’m deleting it. I’m X-ing it out!”

“Wait a minute,” said Vince trying to remember something he had heard or read online about this a few years ago. “I think the X in the abbreviation Xmas is the Greek letter that used to abbreviate Christ. Chai or Ki or something. So it’s actually-”

“No, not chi, the Greek letter. X, the Latin letter. It represents the first algebraic variable. The horizontal axis, the axis we use to represent time. The variable that we use as the argument of the function. The programming of the universe. That’s what I’m X-ing out.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Vince, let me tell you something that you might not have figured out for yourself yet,” said Dale. He finally lowered his hand, which shrunk back into the white folds of the sleeve of his hoodie, and stepped back to sit in one of the old-fashioned office chairs that were jumbled around the room.

“Vince, you do know that the world is a simulation, like a video game, right?”

“I – uh -” said Vince awkwardly. Even while sitting, Dale was able to look down on people at a weird angle. Ever since he had first met Dale, when he had glommed onto him during a general humanities class for reasons that still eluded Vince, Dale had constantly displayed a unique ability to talk down to people, both literally and figuratively.

“As you should know, everything that happens is the result of programming. Our perception is an illusion, and memories are just save data. It’s all in a big complicated computer.”

“Uh – I still don’t know about that,” if we are in the Matrix or whatever, where’s the proof?”

“First of all,” said Dale, rolling his chair backward, “it’s not like the Matrix. In the Matrix the people are all real people with physical bodies that are just tricked into thinking they exist in a virtual world. You and me and everyone we’ve met – we only exist in the virtual world. We don’t have outside bodies, we are only lines of code. We’re made of ones and zeros, not anything that exists in physical reality.”

Vince looked around the room for somewhere to sit.

“Fine, not the Matrix. But still, where’s the proof that we’re living in a simulation?”

“Where’s the proof that we’re not?”

Vince sat down on a brown leather stool on wheels next to an old-fashioned drafting table. This argument was starting to retread over familiar ground.

“That’s the problem with saying that something is an illusion or a simulation or a conspiracy or whatever,” said Vince. “Any proof that we’re not in a simulation can be explained as part of the simulation. There’s no way to prove you’re wrong.”

“But I’m not wrong,” said Dale, putting his hands together so that the sleeves of his hoodie interconnected. “There’s a hidden world beyond our senses. And there’s plenty of evidence.”

“Like what?” challenged Vince, instantly regretting it.

“How about the fact that the universe exists? For the big bang to have occurred, the universe had to first be in an incredibly hot, dense state, concentrated together impossibly tight. How did that happen? The only good answer is that was the initial state where the simulation was programmed to begin.”

“I don’t know physics that well, but I don’t think that’s a totally accurate picture of-”

“There’s more,” continued Dale, talking over Vince. “The quantum duality of particles and waves. Looks a lot like a programming shortcut in the universe’s code. The observer effect; looks a lot like how in video games things render and simulate differently or not at all depending on whether the player is watching them. There are glitches in the hidden world.”

Vince spoke quicky as well to try to keep up.

“Once again, that’s a problem for physicists, who have alternative explanations for-”

“Hubble tension – the expansion of the universe is at a rate that doesn’t make mathematical sense if it’s driven by underlying gravitational factors. It makes perfect sense if the universe is programmed to expand that rate in its code and not determined by physical conditions.”

“That assumes our measurements of the universe are accurate.”

Dale stood up from his seat and took his hands out of his sleeves.

“Look, Vincent,” said Dale, using the second syllable of his name, probably just to annoy him. “I can throw all the evidence of the simulation at you or anyone else and they still won’t listen. I know, I need proof.”

“Exactly,” said Vince. “These theories of yours need proof.”

“Right, and that’s the point of Project Xmas! Proof!”

Dale gestured again to the giant electronic tree.

Vince stood up to get a closer look at where Dale was gesturing. It looked like some kind of server part.

“I don’t get it.”

Dale stood even taller, putting one hand on the pile of equipment. This was what he must have been waiting to say all evening. “I’m going to hack into the programming of the universe and delete Christmas! Then I’ll have proof!”

Vince gestured to a device in the stack of electronics that he thought he recognized as an oscilloscope. It had a round green screen with a series of wavy lines moving across it.

“So that’s what this is supposed to be? A Christmas deleting device?”

“Exactly!”

“And how is that supposed to work?”

“Have you ever heard of code injection?”

Vince looked closer that the electronics tree, as though he understood the logic of what he was seeing.

“Is that a programming thing?”

“Sort of,” said Dale the Deletor, looking closely at the tree himself with a look of smug admiration. “It’s mainly a hacking thing. It means getting a program to run unintended code from inside itself.”

“Getting- huh?

“There’s lots of videos of people doing it online in video games. One guy got Super Mario World to run Flappy Bird from inside it on an old Super NES. He found a glitch that allowed him stand and jump at the precise places at the precise times that corresponded with the ones and zeros of the Flappy Bird code.”

“So?”

“So? Come on! Code can be injected into the programming of a video game. The universe is a video game. That means I can inject my code into the universe’s program! Is that enough proof for you?”

Vince backed up to lean against one of the worktables that was piled high with old parts. He rested in a half-sitting position on the edge of the metal surface.

“So you’re going to hack the universe,” said Vince, maintaining his voice at a level of sarcasm he didn’t think Dale the Deletor could detect. “Because you think that the world is actually just a computer simulation. And you’re going to prove it works by deleting Christmas.”

“Yes,” said Dale with a condescending sigh, as if he had been struggling with Vince’s inability to understand simple English all night.

“Why would you want to do that? You hate Christmas?”

“I don’t hate Christmas. At most, I’m apathetic about it. I’m just using it as a test case to prove my device works.”

“Why? Can’t you delete something else? Like poverty or war or disease or something? Maybe delete hip-hop music, you hate it even more than me.”

“Here’s the problem – when you delete things from any code, other areas of the code that are connected to it cause problems.” Dale sat down again and started to gesture meaninglessly with his hand, as if pointing at lines of programming only he could see.

“Human suffering,” Dale continued, “like famine and rap, is a ubiquitous and possibly essential part of existence. Deleting it without studying the program dependencies more could crash the universe.”

“But Christmas isn’t important?”

“Christmas is superfluous. It isn’t important to human life, but it isn’t one of those elements of suffering that shapes the character of humanity.”

Vince sighed and shook his head slightly.

“Okay, let’s say it works. Would-”

“It does work!”

“Fine, I’ll agree for argument’s sake,” said Vince, rolling his head along the same path he might have rolled his eyes. “A lot of people like Christmas. Is it really worth deleting it just to prove a point?”

“Do they really like it? Do you?”

Vince didn’t answer immediately and regretted it when Dale continued.

“Just think, tomorrow morning you’ll be at work, moping that you’re not with your family and that bossy sister singing terrible songs and eating old fashioned food that no normal person would eat any other day. Then, suddenly, you’ll be moping that it’s just another boring December day. Then sometime in a few weeks you’ll remember that you forgot about Christmas, and like everyone else, you’ll realize didn’t miss it.”

Vince bit his lower lip.

“Dale, it’s stuff like this that make me deny I know you.”

Dale didn’t respond and Vince regretted his words almost immediately.

“Come on Dale. Why can’t you just go back to deleting computer viruses? It helps people, and you’re good at it, you could make a lot of money.”

“This is bigger than me or you or any insignificant human computers,” said Dale, looking up at the top of the stack of computer parts. “Look, all we have to do is set this up on top of Pointer Hill in Memorial Park tomorrow morning. The machine will do the rest.”

“We?”

“Yeah, there’s a bunch of equipment we need to unload tomorrow. Should only take a few hours.”

“Dale, it’ll be freezing out there,” said Vince, an incredulous open-mouthed expression on his face. “Besides, I have work tomorrow morning until at least two.”

“Come on, this is your chance to learn about some real science.”

“I know about real science.”

Dale raised an eyebrow sarcastically.

“Really? You study economics. The dismal science.”

“It tests hypotheses in the real word! It’s more scientific than the I.T. you do.”

“It’s not I.T., it’s computer science!”

Vince stuck his tongue in his lower lip to avoid making another impolitic retort.

“Look,” Vince said slowly. “It doesn’t matter. I have to work tomorrow.”

“Oh, come on,” said Dale, still heated. “You can be a little late. How many people actually call your help desk customer service place?”

“Help desk? It’s emergency dispatch. 911!”

“Does it really matter?”

Dale and Vince glared past each other for a second, both dumbstruck by the other’s apparent cluelessness. They were interrupted by a loud knock at the front door.

“You expecting food?” said Vince, hopefully.

“Why, did you order something?”

Vince followed Dale down the obnoxiously bright hallway to the front door. On the other side of it was a single girl, about their age, though quite a bit shorter, dressed like she had come straight out of a production of A Christmas Carol. She wore a Victorian dress with several layers of shawls and scarves with a large, flowery hat over shiny bronze hair that was even longer and straighter than Dale’s. In her white-gloved hands she held an old-fashioned music book.

“It came upon the midnight clear, that glorious song of old!” she sang. Her voice was rich and precise, like an opera singer’s, but with a feminine quality that the few opera singers Vince had heard seemed to lack.

Dale scowled at her, but Vince smiled, and she smiled back with the edges of her mouth as she continued to sing. Her cheeks and nose were red from the cold, but her eyes sparkled a vibrant green.

“From angels bending near the earth to touch their harps of gold. Peace on the earth, good will to-”

Dale slammed the door.

“What was that?” said Vince indignantly and looking up at Dale, who was holding the door closed with one hand and locking the deadbolt with the other.

“No time for that crap,” said Dale, still holding the door closed as if he were expecting the caroling girl to come back with a battering ram. “I’m in a hurry, there’s a lot of stuff to delete.”

“But…” Vince made a vague gesture toward the door that he hoped indicated something about the girl. “Come on!”

“Now’s not the time to go falling in love with some stranger,” said Dale. “She was caroling. Alone. Caroling was obsolete the day they invented the old-time record player a hundred thirty years ago; what kind of weirdo goes out singing to strangers in the twenty-first century?”

“I don’t know, maybe she was lonely, and she couldn’t be with her family this Christmas. Maybe she’s upholding an old tradition in her own way. Maybe she just wanted to meet someone.”

“She was carrying sheet music,” said Dale, adding a note of distain to the last two words. “Like on paper.”

Vince bit his lower lip again, almost drawing blood.

“You are just… unbelievable.”

Vince reached for deadbolt and forced it open. Dale stepped back in surprise.

“Where are you going?”

“I have to get up in time for work at four in the morning tomorrow,” said Vince, his voice getting harsher. “Before that, I’ve got to make something to eat, since I was hoping to have some kind of Christmas Eve dinner.”

“That’s no biggie,” interrupted Dale, but Vince continued, pulling open the door and stepping into the cold.

“And if possible, I’d like to find a certain girl who was just trying to be friendly and go apologize to her for me hanging out with the world’s biggest jerk.”

“But, come on, I haven’t even shown you how the transmitter works yet!”

“Dale!” Vince shook his head and let his voice cool down before he spoke again. “Merry Xmas, or whatever.”

Vince scanned the doorways of nearby apartments as he returned to his car, but he didn’t see the caroler anywhere. The night was dark and there were patches of ice on the sidewalk that slowed his progress, so that his nose was already red and runny by the time he was in his car and it had warmed up to a reasonable temperature. He pounded his palm against the steering wheel once before setting off.

He watched the passing Christmas lights as he drove back to his apartment. He hadn’t thought about how nice the color green could be until that evening, as he saw it illuminating the roofs of some of the houses he passed.

Vince’s Christmas Eve dinner was a frozen meal. Chicken fettuccine alfredo. He dressed it up with a little extra garlic powder and cayenne pepper. He watched the first half of Elf on his laptop as he ate and only laughed twice. About forty minutes in, his phone started to buzz, and he swiped to ignore when he saw who was calling.

Vince woke up with “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” playing in the back of his head. The sunrise was still hours away and the air between his apartment door and his car was murderously cold. The melody continued to play in his mind on the way to work mingled with the image of the girl, even though only occasional pieces of the lyrics emerged from his melody to fill out the tune.

The morning was long. There was a fair share of calls about accidents and domestic disputes caused by the drunken nights that were just ending for some people, as well as a disproportionate number of medical emergencies being called in. Vince was on his second can of Monster when the volume of calls started to recede late in the morning.

“911, what’s the address of your emergency?” said Vince, giving the designated unfriendly greeting as he took another call.

“It worked! My experiment was a success!” came the excited voice from Vince’s headset.

“Dale? You can’t call me here, this line is for emergencies!”

“Whatever, the records of this call have already been deleted!” said Dale quickly, before raising his voice again. “You know how you’ve been feeling all mopey today and you don’t even know why?”

“Not really,” said Vince, but Dale ignored him.

“Well, you don’t have to be sad anymore, because I deleted the very reason for your sadness. It’s been X-ed out!”

Vince searched his memory. The Christmas carol and the memories of gatherings and presents from years past was still present. There was even a Christmas tree in the far corner of the office still twinkling at him.

“Dale, it didn’t work. And you can’t call me here.”

“Of course it worked! Where is your faith? You know, that’s the problem now days, no one has faith in anything!”

“Faith? Really?” said Vince, almost forgetting that he was having this conversation on an emergency line. “Faith in you or your programming stuff?”

“This is bigger than any ordinary programming,” said Dale, his voice starting to take the tone of a speech, or a sermon. “To quote a famous essay, ‘there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. In all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.’ That’s the programming of the universe. That’s what I want to show the world with this experiment.”

Vince was silent as he thought about the words for a second.

“Wow. That’s actually kind of beautiful. What’s it from?”

“It’s from an old newspaper article, the one where it says ‘Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.’ Of course, you probably don’t remember any of that since I deleted Christmas. But I should probably also delete your memory of that girl you’re mooning over.”

“I’m not mooning over her,” said Vince, as the caroler’s face appeared in his head again.

“Sure you are. You’re looking for something to fill the hole in your memory left by Project X-mas.”

“Dale!” said Vince as loudly as he could without drawing outside attention. “Merry Christmas.”

Vince hung up the phone before Dale could say anything else.

He passed the rest of his shift in relative silence. There were a few more heart attacks and a couple of nasty accidents with cars sliding off the icy roads. But he was still exhausted by the time he left work in the early afternoon.

The skies were a pale grey, with the sunlight filtered through clouds and fog. It was pale enough for the Christmas lights to remain vibrant in the daytime, and Vince reminded himself more than once while driving home that the lights were proof that Dale’s project hadn’t succeeded. His phone buzzed a few times as he drove, but Vince’s fresh memories of the accounts of car crashes he had heard about at work kept his eyes glued to the icy roads.

Vince didn’t check his phone until he was back in the warmth of his apartment. There was a message from his sister asking for him to call when he got home from work. Above that, there were about twenty messages from Dale, spread out over the last couple of hours:

It’s going to work

It’s going to work

It’s going to work

It’s cold

It’s going to work

It’s going to work

This time

This time!!!

It’s going to work

It’s going to work

Still going to work

It’s going to work

It’s going to work

It’s going to work

Nevermind. But it’s going to work

I think it’s working!!!!!!!

It’s going to work

It’s going to work

It’s going to work

It’s going to work

It’s going to work

It’s not over this is going to work!

The oldest of the messages that day was just a picture from ten that morning of Dale’s giant tree of electronics and wires set up in the snow on a hill in the park with a couple of large cables running out of the equipment and down the hill.

The video call with his family back home was a dreary half hour. But it seemed like Christmas hadn’t been deleted back home. Traditions went on without him, presents were opened, the music in church was allegedly the best it had been in years. And Vince’s mom was still maintaining the ancient tradition of cooking a goose on Christmas Eve.

“What about you?” said Vince’s mom. “Cara said you had dinner at a friend’s house.”

Vince made a vague expression, not wanting to bring the mood down any further.

“So, what’d you have?”

“Uh-” said Vince. “-nothing, actually, I just made a frozen dinner at home.”

Cara emerged from the side of the screen to look at the camera.

“Dale didn’t make anything? I thought you were going over there for dinner.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought. But he just wanted to talk about his latest crazy scheme,” said Vince.

“He invited you over on Christmas Eve and didn’t have dinner?”

“Sounds about right,” said Cara. “Why do you still hang out with that jerk?”

“Sorry, who are you talking about?” Mom asked Cara.

“Dale. You remember? That dorky guy that was always hanging around Vince’s freshman dorm. Dale the Deletor. The really tall kid.”

“I thought he was special or something.”

“He’s not special,” interrupted Vince.

“No,” said Cara, “he just has no regard for other people or the way the normal world works. And sometimes you just have to cut toxic people like that out of your life. It doesn’t make sense to keep treating them like they’re normal.”

“Wait, I don’t understand,” said Mom. “Why did he invite you over if it wasn’t for dinner?”

“He wanted to show me the machine he’s going to use for his scheme to delete Christmas.”

“To do what?”

“He said he was going to delete Christmas.”

Vince’s phone buzzed with another text message just as he spoke.

“That doesn’t make sense. Does he even celebrate Christmas? Is he religious?” asked Mom.

“He thinks that the universe was created by a computer and that we’re living in a video game,” said Vince. “Does that count as religious?”

Vince’s Mom and sister spoke simultaneously.

“No.”

“Yes.”

Mom scowled at Cara

“All I know is that he’s not much of a dinner host,” said Vince quickly. “But he’s still an old friend. Besides, he’s sometimes interesting to talk to when he’s not driving people crazy.”

“Vince, people like that don’t change,” said Cara, and Mom nodded in agreement. “There’s no reason you need to keep being nice to him.”

Vince nodded in halfhearted agreement as his phone buzzed again. The call ended soon after as his family returned to other Christmas celebrations. They were probably going to sit around and maybe play cards, as was tradition. Vince looked in his freezer and picked out a frozen pizza that looked edible.

While the oven was preheating, Vince set down his laptop on the living room table and continued Elf from where he left off when he went to bed last night. Peter Dinklage beat up Will Ferrell, which finally got Vince laughing a little. Then it got to the part about the Christmas spirit meter powering Santa’s sleigh, which had Vince rolling his eyes. And when Ed Asner said something about Christmas spirit being about believing rather than seeing, Vince was reminded of the essay Dale had quoted at him over the phone.

He Googled the essay, ignoring the latest ‘It’s going to work’ text from Dale, and found that it was actually a newspaper editorial from 1897, titled “Is There a Santa Claus?” Finding the part that Dale had said to him, Vince noticed that Dale had omitted some of the words:

There is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

Vince paused the movie and reread the second sentence several times. His eyes burned, as if he were going to tear up, and he looked around his living room, distracted.

On the end table, Vince had arranged the several Christmas cards he received. One depicted an old-fashioned Santa Claus in his workshop, one had the golden silhouetted shape of a nativity scene, but Vince found his eyes drawn to third, which depicted a lone pine tree in the mountains, topped by a star that might have been on the tree or in the starry night sky of the background.

Vince stood up, now pacing around the room. He wandered back into the kitchen and stopped the preheating oven. The clock read 3:14. His phone buzzed one more time.

An hour later, Vince pulled his car into one of the snow-covered parking spots at the edge of Memorial Park. Two parking spots over, a generator hummed from the back of grey pickup truck, with a couple of thick cables running from the truck to the hill in the center of the park. Vince bundled up in the various snow gear he brought and took his small cooler from the trunk.

Many sets of footprints in the snow ran to and from the hill, but they all appeared to be Dale’s. Even following in Dale’s footsteps, it wasn’t an easy walk, but it only took a few minutes to reach the top of the hill.

Dale sat cross-legged in the snow with his laptop on his lap, next to the same tree of electronics and wires Vince had seen in his living room the previous night. Dale was staring at his screen, pressing the same key over and over again. He looked up when he heard Vince coming.

“Vince! You’re just in time. It’s just about to work.”

Dale sounded too tired to believe his own words.

“What’s with the cooler?”

“I thought while we wait, we could have Christmas dinner.”

“Oh,” said Dale, looking closer at the cooler. “I don’t like Christmas dinner.”

“That’s what I figured,” said Vince, setting down the cooler and opening it. “That’s why I brought this.”

He took a bag of Funyuns and a package of beef jerky out of the cooler.

“Nice,” said Dale, getting up and taking the bag.

“There’s hot chocolate, too,” said Vince, reaching back into his cooler and taking out a couple of mugs.

They snacked on the feast in silence for a few minutes. “It Came Upon the Midnight Clear” snuck back into Vince’s head and he started humming it without consciously intending to.

“What are you doing?” asked Dale sharply.

“I don’t know,” said Vince, swallowing a chunk of jerky. “It’s a Christmas song. We can use it to test your machine. The moment I forget the words, we know Christmas is deleted.”

“That only works if you sing it.”

“I don’t know the words very well.”

Vince started singing anyway, starting from a low mumble.

“It came upon the midnight clear, the glorious song of old, from angels something to the earth to touch their harps of gold. Peace on the earth, good will to-”

“That’s it!” exclaimed Dale suddenly.

“What?”

“Midnight! It will work it midnight!”

Vince gritted his teeth.

“What? I thought this was supposed to hack into the programming of the universe,” said Vince, thinking quickly for an argument that would keep him from staying here until midnight. “Why would the programming of the universe even be in our time zone? It’s midnight somewhere right now.”

Dale shrugged and his face fell. His face continued to fall even further and he dropped the bag of Funyuns into the snow.

After looking like this for some time, he stepped toward the tree of electronics. After walking around it a few times inspecting the equipment he looked back at Vince, an oddly blank expression on his face.

“Vince – why are you here?” mumbled Dale.

“You know, show support. Help you load the equipment when you’re done,” said Vince, watching Dale closely.

“No,” said Dale, looking at the back of his hand as if to indicate himself. “Why are you here? With me?”

Vince shrugged. He struggled for an answer for a minute and didn’t come up with anything. Dale stared blank-eyed at the snowy ground.

“It doesn’t make sense, does it?” Dale finally remarked to his feet.

They stood, Dale watching the snow and Vince watching Dale’s face for a while before Vince finally thought of something to say.

“You know how you said that there was a hidden world, something beyond the logical explanations of the physical world?”

Dale scrunched up his lower lip and shook his head.

“That’s what I thought. But I don’t know. I just can’t reach it.”

Vince stepped closer so that Dale looked up to meet his gaze.

“I don’t know either,” said Vince. “But maybe- you were kind of right about that.”

Dale the Deletor seemed to think about this for a long time. It was already getting dark, and the red and green lights from the electronics were starting to illuminate his face.

“You know what?” said Dale finally. “What if we put my invention to better use?”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve been thinking about that girl from earlier, haven’t you?”

“Yeah, I guess I have,” Vince admitted.

“So why don’t we go set up the code injection system back at my place and search the universe for her. And then you can – I don’t know – go caroling to her house or something.”

Vince thought briefly about how the plan might be considered creepy before remembering that, based on Dale’s previous universe-hacking record, it wouldn’t work anyway. He didn’t mention either of these doubts to Dale, though.

“Sounds like a plan,” said Vince. “Thanks, Dale.”

They spent the next half hour unplugging Dale’s equipment and loading it back into his truck, leaving deep tracks in the snow between the hill and vehicles.

Dale had started his truck and driven away first while Vince was still waiting for his car to warm up. Vince sat in the cold car for a few minutes, exhausted from the long workday and hauling Dale’s ridiculous machine to the car. He thought of the events of the last few twenty-four hours. So little had happened, yet Christmas Day had felt full in a strange way.

The song popped into his head again, and this time Vince pulled up Spotify to actually listen to it. He skipped over recordings from Frank Sinatra and Josh Groban before settling on one from Burl Ives with an old-fashioned looking album cover of a house in the snow.

Burl Ives’ warm, friendly voice filled the iced-over car, accompanied by what sounded like a harp and some bells. He sang it at a relatively fast tempo. Vince heard the hymn uninterrupted for the first time:

It came upon the midnight clear,
That glorious song of old,
From angels bending near the earth
To touch their harps of gold;
‘Peace on the earth, good will to men
From heaven’s all-gracious King.’
The world in solemn stillness lay
To hear the angels sing.