THE GAME

This special Game was played by wizards cooler than we were –like a Boeing compared to the very first wheelbarrow. They used the sacred Ammonite. Anyone could enter the Game, but firstly, it was scary just because every participant’s life was at stake here. Secondly, it was risky, because the Game could reject you – which meant it took your life. This is why no one was too excited about getting in thinking, quite rightly, that the Game would open its doors for those who were ready when the time came.

As far as I could understand, it was pure creativity for the Gamers who rendered our world in any which way they wanted, creating new principles that affected different levels: basic laws of physics and chemistry, season change, human fashion and entertainment, world trends and hashtags, TV shows, insect populations, human love. All of this depended on the Gamers’ moves. The whole World played by the rules they created! They were no Gods, but surely, they could be considered His ministers. My premonitions about the nature of our magic, which I developed in our half-criminal life, were confirmed. Magic was a side effect of this Game, and by closing our deals we were simply parasitizing on it. However, it didn’t really bother any of the Gamers, because our magic was one of the stages of the universal growth. It should have been over when we realized that we couldn’t do it anymore and understood the consequences that followed.

Nevertheless, we convinced each other that it was okay, driving faster and faster straight into a concrete wall. I can tell that actually meeting the wall was disappointing to the extremes.

First off, I learnt the reason of our misfortunes lay not in the Game but outside its limits. And then it turned out that they really played, following different logical rules. The Game accepted only the selfless, the honest, those free from egotism and greed. But the reward was most generous. Anything you did for the World got back to you a hundredfold. Which is why the ascetics never had a care in the world – they didn’t need anything. I was far from being ascetic though, which is why they took away the little something I really had.

So hello everyone, I’m dead!

 

P.S.

However, me entering the Game wasn’t pointless at all – in fact it turned out to be a gift (I mean, I didn’t ride a rare 1989 Harley into the wall for nothing). In the Game I learnt that our aluminum tricks awoke some deep world underneath our own. That’s where the group fell into. I would have joined them, if I hadn’t joined the Game first. Which is why now I can go there and try to fix the things we’ve done. It has to be me since they most likely have no clue about anything that happened directly after the fall. Whereas I got to go through with the Game and could have changed something.