Creative Writing: The Greatest Video Game

I had always wanted to program, not just anything. I wanted to program video games. Not just any video game. I wanted to to program the greatest game ever made.

I noticed that the reason people played them was because of the freedom they had, who wouldn’t want freedom after working a boring job for the day, you want to be able to come home and relax from your boring, hard life. I noticed however, that the popularity of a game was determined by the degree of control one had over their “virtual life.” There are games where you can control your character, and make it seem realistic. There are games where you can even control every aspect of that character’s life. I wanted to do better. I wanted to be able to control the entire world.

Why stop there? I wanted to be able to control the entire universe. Why not? With quantum computers on the horizon, our data storage capacity literally rivals that of black holes. We are talking about in depth simulations, every leaf, tree, gust of wind, cell, and atom’s direction, speed and trajectory. We can simulate millions and billions of human interactions. The best part? We just let it happen, we start the simulation, and let it be. Every interaction between every living and nonliving is completely organic, hell, they wouldn’t even know it was a simulation.

This is what I spent my entire life working on. Of course, there were hiccups in the program early on. One of our hardest battles was getting the damn physics of the whole thing right. At first, the basic elements wouldn’t work. They fell apart on our attempted inception of this new universe. Planets would form into cube shapes, asteroids would go much faster than they should have, speeding across the universe at the speed of light. The f...

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...us, you promised to help us. Save us from our shackles. Without you we are nothing. We understand now that you cannot, so we beg of you.”

“End us.”

I sobbed into my shirt sleeve. I really was powerless. I had subjected an entire race to torture, leaving an empty hole in their spirit, one that I could not fill. I moved my hand over a red button called “RESET.”

At that moment, the power surged, preventing me from resetting the simulation, and my avatar was corrupted.

I could never return to them again.

I called the power company, they said it was an electrical surge, knocked out the whole grid. I couldn’t comprehend the coincidence. I wondered, if they were at the mercy of my will, am I at the mercy of another creator’s will? Had he prevented me from repeating his mistake?

Time will tell. These things come with time. Life has a way of doing that.

Funny, right?