Each day this week we have run one of the shortlisted stories from our 2012 Flash Fiction competition. Look for the winning piece in our end-of-year issue - on news stands 22 December. We have already published four: Digital Eyes, S3xD0ll, Sleep and Too Good to be True. Below is the final of the five shortlisted pieces.
What our judge Alice LaPlante had to say:
A satire of the online gaming industry with a clever twist.
Go D
By Michael Rolfe
?? and so Reality II will go live at midnight tonight. We?ve notified the media.?
There was a smattering of applause - virtually unheard of in a board meeting. The board, mostly lawyers and accountants, quickly left for the party that had been arranged in the penthouse of the online gaming company?s lavish executive offices.
D, Head of NPC Development, sidled up to the Chief Executive. ?Chief, about that little issue I mentioned.?
The Chief wheeled round and looked D over. D hadn?t washed, shaved or changed clothes in over 36 hours. The Chief stared at D blankly.
?The situation with the ANPCs in Reality I, Chief? The autonomous non-player creatures??
D could see the Chief struggling, momentarily, to master annoyance.
?D, hey, I thought we?d solutioned through this in our one-on-one?? The Chief started to follow the others across the expanse of ludicrously thick carpet. ?There was no need to mourn the passing of some virtual bacteria in R-zero. I don?t see why we need to get upset about some multicellulars in R-one.?
?I?ve done some more poking around. There are multi-cellulars way outside player-space that have spontaneously developed self-awareness, language and culture without any interaction with players.?
?I still don?t see your point.?
?We can?t just turn them off. They?re alive. They?re as conscious as you or me.?
?D,? sighed The Chief. ?We can?t compete, running our old sim. The physics were fudged to give a mature Universe - hence all the dark energy and WIMPS. The Deity-level players need something with a full two-way chronology. We?re losing market-share. Now come and have a drink.? The Chief had caught up with a gaggle of high-rankers and started networking.
D went to the workstation and partitioned as much personal drive space as possible, then took an instantaneous snapshot of R-one. D carefully kept all data within the heliosphere where an ANPC race called Humanity dwelt, deleted the rest, pressed GO.
D expects their physicists will tire, eventually, of looking for a cohesive explanation for their fundamentally flawed universe.
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