12:29 PM Jun 28, 2004
In the beginning, there was nothing.
Then a boy named Doug, his allowance burning a hole in his pocket, had his eye caught. He was brought up in a household that could appreciate the value to be found in a yard sale. His veins ran with the blood of the suburban deal-stalker. Needless to say, the nondescript glass box with its faux ebony base was a trophy too sought after to be passed up. Two years ago, it a perfect ecstasy of boredom, society had conceived this device. Doug’s family could never afford the fad, until now. He didn’t even question the yard sale peddlers; he just threw his money down and carted his prize to his house.
After school the next day, he brought three of his friends home to look at the box. “You guys all have one of these, right? You can tell me how to work it. It doesn’t have an instruction manual,” Doug said.
“Look, man,” said Tyrell, “if you have any skills at all, you wouldn’t need an instruction manual.”
“Oh.” Doug furrowed his brow, looking around nonchalantly for the power switch.
Yin-li noticed his machismo-shrouded struggles and pointed out the switch. “But Dougie, be careful;” she warned him, “some people get really attached to these stupid things. You don’t want to turn into one of those people.”
“I know what I’m doing!” Doug snapped, turning on the machine. He took a surreptitious look at Jerry’s smug face.
Jerry had three of the glass boxes, and he wore that fact like a badge. He told Doug, “Perhaps you should begin with the easy stuff, all the default settings.”
“Do you want any hints for starting out?” Yin-li asked.
“No no no,” Jerry said sardonically. “He knows what he’s doing, remember? Let’s go. You can tell us how it’s going tomorrow, Doug.”
Doug wantonly selected settings in the options screen. “Let there be light,” he muttered under his breath, “and water, and land, and AutoHelp off, and day, and night...” He waited for the simulation to load. When the first image appeared in the glass box, he shouted triumphantly to his exiting friends, “Look! I’ve got it started already!” They came back and crowded around the box.
“What is that?” asked Yin-li. “It’s disgusting!”
“It shows promise,” Doug said unconvincingly. A lonely, amorphous blob quivered drearily behind the glass. Doug turned back to his friends and said anxiously, “You mean that you didn’t have one of these?”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, Doug,” Jerry soothed. “It’s not bad for a first try. Talk to it. Give it a name.”
“Are you serious?” Doug looked at the globule. “Hey, poo-brain. Your name is Doug Junior. You will serve me, and me alone.”
“Wow. My first was a little girl, and I named her Beautiful Pink Butterfly Princess.” Yin-li noted the small snicker coming from Tyrell’s direction and added, “Bearing in mind that when I got it, I was seven.”
“Look!” Doug exclaimed. “Doug Jr. just split in half! There’s two of him! Four! This is the greatest game ever made!” After being completely ignored for a few minutes by Doug, his friends left. Doug broke out of his reverie enough to say goodbye, then he turned back to the hundred or so Doug Juniors. He left them to grow, multiply and organize during his dinner. When he came back, he was disappointed to find that the glass box contained none of the people that his friends’ boxes had. “Hurry up!” he told the box, and turned up the simulation speed. He watched as the little blobs clumped together, and one blob swallowed up another. He watched as they became recognizably different, and as horrible as the little things were, he couldn’t get his eyes off them. Eventually, he couldn’t get his eyes open, either.
The next morning, many of the blobs had become insectoid creatures that navigated about the water. When he came back from school, plants were growing, animals were scurrying onto the land...and they were brutally killing each other. Doug nearly had an aneurysm. “What are you doing?” he shouted. He was ignored. He set the speed at real-time. “We need to lay down some ground rules, okay? Could you just try your best not to do that while I’m around? It’s gross.” Some of the animals turned their eyes to their sky cautiously. Doug did a thorough search of the terrain, and still saw no people. Hopefully the place would be a little less savage for their arrival. He turned the speed back up again.
Boredom set in. Every day the animals chased each other around the lump of rock in the centre of the box, and in the water it was the same. They got a little bigger, and a little scarier, but it wasn’t enough to hold a ten-year-old’s attention span over a period of time. He left it alone.
One Wednesday afternoon, Doug came into his room, distractedly smacking a baseball into its corresponding glove. He wiped some dust off the top of the unit, gave the inside a cursory glance, and saw the land and sea both populated with monsters. He made a small noise, whose closest rendition in onomatopoeiacal form would be “gnenehahh.” He stuck his head in the top to get a better look, and in doing so, lost his contact lens. He reached down to retrieve it, and one of the monsters bit him. He reflexively threw his baseball at it with a curse. The baseball made an indent in the monster, and an indent in the rock, then bounced up and began circling the sphere. All the monsters withered and were gone.
Doug had learned his lesson. The glass box needed constant supervision and maintenance. He turned down the speed, and wondered how everyone else in the world could own one of these and still have a life. The rock was splitting open in some places, and water was rushing in. Non-monsters warily crept about again. Doug congratulated himself.