Once upon a place, in a time far away into the future, but perhaps still in Deva and Felix’s lifetime, the first Earth simulation game was installed in a desert casino. The people who had made careers out of pitching the idea that humans are all sentient video game characters, all had aneurysms when this arcade game, SIMworld arcade, was invented. The thought of a programmed person creating a simulation of a world where people created people like themselves who in turn could create the arcade game, was too much. If their brains did not melt from this thought like a snake eating its own mind, then many ended up putting a bullet in theirs. But if they simply maintained faith that theirs was the real reality and nobody could program such a complex system, they enjoyed playing the game…to a certain extent; after all it was a game of chance.
The premise of this game and the reason it was installed in a casino was that each play, costing two .5-dirham tokens, was like the roll of a pair of several billion-sided dice that determined the actions of each fake person on the fake Earth on the arcade monitor. The machine also randomly chose whether and where and what sorts of natural disasters and cataclysmic events would occur. What few people who had touted the theory we are in a simulation know is that a simulation in the statistical sense means a set number of dice rolls or roulette wheel spins or coin tosses. It is a test of what would happen after one roll or flip or spin, ten rolls, and so on. A simulation then means a test of what the likely outcomes are. So, if we are in a simulation, we are not being controlled, we are just one iteration in a passive sort of game where “players” just sit back and watch the outcomes unfold. In SIMworld arcade, players rolled the dice on human history, starting at the Stone Age. One could hit the ‘Roll’ button and the game would progress fifty thousand, ten thousand, two thousand, one thousand, three hundred, fifty or, ten years, one year, one season, one month, one week, or one day. The further one made it through human history, the more tokens they would earn, but the 270-million-dirham jackpot could only be achieved if sentient life, human beings, survived until the death of the sun star, Alpha Centauri.
In between rolls, the fun part was that players could zoom in on any part of the globe, nose in on any individual, read headlines, and assess all sorts of variables about the state of the environment, the poverty level, the average height of humans, and much more. Eventually, a whole aisle of SIMworld arcade machines was installed in the very same Dubai casino. One moderate (102-degree-Fahrenheit) day, a middle-aged fifty-year-old degenerate British expatriate infidel of a man simply named Bob the Third stumbled in from the heat. He entered this casino wearing a rumpled cork brown corduroy suit with a light blue collarless buttoned-down linen shirt, a black alligator belt, red sandals and a white safari hat with a neck-blind unrolled behind his head. His mind was roiling with strawberry-flavored shisha smoke and three cups of black Arabic coffee. He walked directly to the SIMworld machines and put tokens into each one, then walked back to the beginning of the row of machines and hit the ‘Roll’ button on each one. As soon as he had rolled on the last machine in the row, he would hurriedly walk back to the first machine, and roll each machine again. Eventually, all but one “crapped out” to use the parlance of another still-popular game of chance at the time, craps. Only one simulator made it past the cooling of the Earth’s core, the shrinkage of the planet’s magnetic field, and an extinction-level incursion into the atmosphere of the solar winds.
This single machine’s inhabitants had survived a solar flare that had whipped the planet in a brilliant-to-see pixel art animation sequence that Bob III no longer felt impressed by, from pole to pole across the center of the Pacific Ocean. All but a strip of land, the shape of a cat’s slanted pupil roughly covering the Fertile Crescent and the land to its north and south, was scorched. Here, however, the survivors were almost entirely the female descendants of the Amazon nation-corp. They had decided to go a little overboard with the warrior women clan theme and eventually only allowed those identified as women to live within their borders. Bob III had never made it past the cool Earth or a solar flare catastrophe and the old thrill that had justified selling his home, car, insurance policies, 401k, and the services of his now-estranged wife and daughter was back. He took a tentatively relieved breath and exhaled, a bit jittery but icy-focused. Then he began spinning the tracking ball on the arcade control console and intermittently pushed one of the four non-‘Roll’ buttons to navigate the menus. This allowed him to check the headlines of the day and learn more about the citizenry of this miraculously thriving, mostly scorched planet. It was the year 2CK9 or 200,009, and the most-read headline of the year was the discovery of a looped transmission coming from a long decommissioned lunar satellite that consisted simply of a pair of GPS coordinates and the words ‘Tree of Life.’ Bob III could see a migration occurring soon after this news was spread; they were headed for the western edge of what was once Kazakhstan to a shallow cave.
Bob III highlighted the human population to get a head count, then included the land above the cave within the highlighted region, only to find the population count did not change, so whatever was in there, the game did not consider sentient life. He zoomed in on the skylight-like entrance to the cave. (There were two entrances, one in the ceiling and one on the side of the cave under some boulders.) What he saw was quite amazing and even gave Bob’s apathetic and dejected heart a jumpstart.
“These programmers, man,” he mumbled out of his stubbly mouth as he looked around the desolate casino. “This must be some sort of good luck scenario; a positive…uh…endgame, or something,” he clumsily interspersed a word he had heard his daughter use when she was still an innocent video gaming child.
What he saw from above, then from all angles after clicking on the being, was Friedman’s automaton, in all its strange glory. It was peering around its carved-out stone abode, smiling at some fruit bats hanging from his ceiling. He learned that this was a human-made humanoid machine that can be programmed with whatever personality and predilections, mannerisms, and perceptual biases are possibly expressed in the human genome. It could be anyone, and, amazingly, it could reproduce with other human beings using synthetic sperm or ovaries, depending on need. Then, Bob III shielded his eyes in horror as the automaton closed its own and began massaging its cod piece-like waist-high protrusion. Of course, the gambler in him was more concerned with the game’s designation of this masturbating machine as non-sentient, as if a being who can fantasize about erotic scenarios while bringing itself to climax was not conscious. Though perhaps there was no actual self-awareness or feeling behind the automaton’s eyes and it was just imitating human behavior.
“Preposterous!” he shouted. Then he grumbled, “Well, let’s see if they figure out how to make babies with it,” and blew on his button-pressing finger before hitting the “Roll” button, progressing the simulation another thousand years into the future. Humans had indeed learned to procreate with the help of the synthetic half-angel, half-tree. Bob sighed another sigh of relief and explored a bit more. He just needed to make it at least a billion years longer. He made it another hundred thousand years and explored again, stalling; he had the sinking feeling that the technically non-human humanoid would be the only thing to survive. He noticed that the population of Year 3CK9 had forgotten all about things he thought they would never forget; Hitler, Jesus, the Beatles, Aristotle, Pokemon; even the Third Testament, which had eventually outsold the Bible, had been commended to the graveyard of ideas without being burned for fear of setting off a reactionary anti-censorship movement. One more roll and all that was left was the breathless abyss of space with its myriad species of galaxy and an Earth, empty but for a masturbating automaton, which did not count as sentient life. Bob had lost after getting further than any casino-goer yet.
Despite having won money, though not enough to settle his debts, he flew into a rage. He pulled out a .35 caliber snub-nosed revolver and shot a hole into the arcade glass. Before he could aim the nozzle at his own chin, a security guard ran toward Bob, reaching out his hands, planning to pin Bob’s arms to his sides. Bob III pulled the trigger as he was being restrained and only managed to leave a subtle burn mark on the underside of his safari hat bill and lodge a bullet in the concrete ceiling.
Alex Ash Creative 