Sim City 1: Through the Looking Glass
13 October 2016
She led by example. When she told her followers something had to be straight to the point, she was cutting to the point of being hurtful. It was her nature of course or rather, he thought to himself in a chuckle, her nature as he had programmed it. He was not sure it was the right thing to do though…
He sighed and rubbed the stub on his chin. He was getting tired of the same final events but he had unfortunately not been able to solve the loop. Every time, the same thing would happen over and over again. No matter what he changed slightly in the code before the chain of events, it still happened. He had attempted modifications to her too but those had been disastrous. She somehow seemed to identify the change in her which ruined everything else as she then no longer behaved according to her programming code.
Every time she became totally unpredictable and he could no longer direct the city as he wished it to evolve. He could not find the origin of the nasty bug that seemed to be causing the problem. Had someone tampered with this part of his Universe? It could not be… Yet all the other planets were behaving according to the program as with the rest of this one but just this small city was not conforming to its coding.
He wondered if perhaps he should remove her character altogether but then that would take too many changes in the code as he had initially really liked her and had woven her all over into the city’s matrix. She was present in every corner of the city through what she had done there in the past or what she would be doing there in the future. There was no escaping her, it was almost as if he had created someone in his own image, impregnating the city with the essence of what she wished to accomplish like he had done it for himself with the coding.
He wondered if she acquired every time something new over and above his coding that allowed her to become unpredictable but that was impossible. She was a series of impulses put together through an intricate coding which then translated into the body he watched through the giant screen. He looked at her again as she slept, oblivious of his presence. He inserted the dream program into the mainframe and watched as she stirred blissfully, slowly evolving into the dream world he had plunged her into. He then inserted the nightmare program as he had been doing for days now and his body tensed waiting for that impossible glitch in his system.
Her body stirred again and stiffened. As the first characters of the nightmare emerged from the dark, he watched her observe them with curiosity and once again he witnessed her somehow transform them into the characters of the dream before. Her body twirled around the transformed characters before she looked straight in front of her. Her eyes did not seem to be looking at the dream world around her but rather beyond. He drew back startled. For one moment, he had thought she was looking straight at him.
Impossible, he thought, shaking off that chill that had come over him when she had looked at him. It was almost as if she had been there right next to him touching the small of his back. He rubbed his chin again. He was tired. He needed some sleep and a good shave. He turned off the giant screen and slowly left the room.
The giant screen emitted a strange sizzling sound and ignited again. Her face filled the screen…
Beyond Infinity – Robert Craig Coxon
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