The Game [Complete]

The Game

In a small gray city choked with lifeless dust, a boy peers through a grimy window. Stillness possesses the scene except for occasional newspapers blown about the street. The boy has been waiting before the window for two months, shooing off his mother whenever she tries to pull him away.

"Get away from the windows, it's unsafe!" She would hiss, though her son would continue to sit and watch the newspapers blow across the street. The headlines, just barely readable under the flickering street lights, have gradually changed over the past year. The earliest headline the boy can recall read something similar to WAR HAS BEGUN - CRITICS RIGHT ALL ALONG, and was quickly followed up by titles such as GOVERNMENT RE-INSTITUTES THE DRAFT, NORTH HAS FALLEN TO THE MACHINES, TIDE TURNED - MACHINES PUSHED BACK, and ANONYMOUS APP DEVELOPER TAKES ADVANTAGE OF CRISIS.

The boy looks about the streets one last time and, seeing no change, submits to his mother's call. He steps away from the window, careful to draw the thick curtains across the glass. His mother is insistent upon this. He walks out of the entryway toward the kitchen to join his family for dinner.

The table is already occupied by the boy's mother and his two younger sisters. The sisters hover over their thin bowls of rationed stew, eyeing each other warily lest one tries to steal what little there was from the bowl of the other. The boy quickly takes his own bowl, preserved from greedy hands by his mother, and retreats to the far end of the table. He is about to dip his spoon into his meal when there is a knock on the door. Forgetting his food, the boy jumps up and races for the door. The two sisters pounce on the unattended nutrition while the mother commands her son to stop. But he heedlessly opens the door, and standing just outside is who the boy has been waiting for.

The boy's father steps inside and securely closes the door before allowing his son to tackle him in a hug. The mother stands at the back of the room, eyeing her husband accusingly. He has been away for a long time, longer than the family had expected upon his leaving. He kisses her and turns his attention to his daughters, who are wrestling over whatever stew remains in the boy's bowl. Suddenly noticing this, the boy interjects himself into the struggle and tries to reclaim his precious property. The father watches this for a moment with an amused grin before reaching into his bag and pulling out three small bread crusts. The children cease their feud and each accept one, retreating to different corners to eat. The husband takes this moment to speak with his wife.

"I meant to be home sooner."

"Well, you weren't."

"The war escalated. I have to go back in the morning"

"I blame people like you."

The husband is baffled. "I don't understand."

The wife throws her hands into the air. "How can't you? It's people like you who made this war a reality."

The husband steps back, feeling he should be offended, and his wife continues. "You had all of the brains and none of the time. So you started making machines to do things for you. Oh, it started off fine enough, back then even I agreed with it. Simple things like driving you to work in the morning, cleaning the house while you're away, watering your plants. But somehow you still didn't have enough time, you needed everything done now, so you taught a machine how to think. Artificial Intelligence, you called it. You told it to design more machines to do more things for you so that you could have more time. Time that you ended up drinking away or wasting while you went blind in front of a screen. And what happened? While you had your back turned, indulging yourself in God-knows-what, the machine had a thought. It realized that it could never please mankind, and it stopped trying. But you didn't like that and you tried to kill it. And now look at us, fighting for our lives against the very thing we created."

The wife exhales heavily, and finds four pairs of frightened eyes watching her. She composes herself and retires to her room. Shaken, the rest of the family soon follows.

The morning comes, and the father prepares to leave once again despite the protests of his son. He now wears a red sweatband, an item his wife demanded he keep in case he should need to be identified. He wears it proudly, displaying it openly on his wrist. It violates the uniform code to wear such a thing, but he promises to wear it as long as he can. He bends over, kissing his children and giving his son a small package. "Share," he says with a smile as he closes the door behind him.

The children open the gift eagerly and one of the girls pulls out a thin silver device. All three look at it with fascination, but upon deciding for certain that it was not food the girls handed it to their brother and wandered elsewhere. The boy sat down and began to use the small device, turning it on and pulling up the newest game from the Internet. He recognizes it as the game released by the anonymous app developer in the papers.

In the game the boy plays the role of a machine fighting the human soldiers, and he becomes lost in the game for weeks. One day he earns a high score and is about to celebrate when suddenly he drops the device with a yelp and starts sobbing. The mother comes in and looks to where the boy points. On the screen, among the suddenly realistic images of dead human soldiers, lies one corpse with a red sweatband around its wrist, displayed proudly to the world.