When We Were Real, Daryl Gregory.

I've been a big Daryl Gregory fan for years, but most of his novels have been in the horror or dark fantasy realm. This one, though, is an SF novel that has one of those simple twists:

What if the world is indeed a simulation, but instead of a small cadre of rebels knowing, literally every person in the world is aware, having found out via floating letters in front of them at the same time. Further, a number of "Glitches" have entered the world, including an instantaneous tunnel from Kentucky to Utah, a place where gravity shifts ninety degrees, a metallic whirlwind, and other things (all of which serve to help prove the point about the simulation).

In the five years since the news broke, no information about who the folks running the simulation has been found. Nor has anyone found a way to actually leave the simulation. So instead, the world has simply had to learn to live with the knowledge. Sometimes that means cults who attack scientists for being wrong, or philosophers who opine that it really is The Matrix, or that some users are actual bots, or that the system is designed for people to keep reliving their lives and learning lessons (technology as religion to the extreme).

But for the most part, life goes on. Which means you can have things like cross-country bus tours visiting all of the Glitches in the US. And that's what this book is about -- a group of people on a bus tour, many of them with their own personal agendas. You've got an influencer, a skeptical podcaster, two nuns (one of whom has questioned her faith a lot since the news, the other of whom has retrenched), a rabbi, a tour guide on her first day, and more.

But this isn't a slice of life novel. Thanks to an encounter with a scientist who's on the run, the trip ends up starting to lead to answers, or at least to the potential for it. Gregory (deliberately) doesn't provide them all, but does provide a great story with a ton of interesting (and mostly sympathetic) characters, and it's an engrossing read from beginning to end.

I don't normally recommend soft SF here -- it's not the subgenre that I think of when I think of btc and adjacent fiction -- and folks looking for all the definitive answers or some sort of singularity moment will be disappointed. But this take on how everyday people would cope with the knowledge (but without any power to create change) in such a changed world felt real in a way that other takes haven't (for me). Really well-written and entertaining.