As many of you already know, WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? is my weird hybrid of novel and anthology, a book in which 11 universes are split into 47 chapters which can be read in almost any order. The idea was to make a book that you can read on a train journey and put down again without you feeling lost when you next pick it up. The book brings together existentialist Sci-Fi with dark comedy, sometimes putting them both in a room and making them fight with sticks I found in the garden.
An unexpected result of my weird new writing style is that a small crowd of readers with ADHD have told me this is their favourite book, not just because of the stories, but because of how easy it is to read.
It’s a humbling thing. When I wrote this, I intended to make it accessible, sure, but I didn’t actually know if it would work. My good friend Zaak had not managed to get through a whole book for 4 years before I sent him mine, which he finished in under a week. He’s a close enough friend to be savagely honest with me, so if he didn’t really finish it in a few days, I would know.
He loved it.
Anyway, here’s the story, I’ll chat to you at the end, which is also where you’ll find details about my eBook giveaway.
Really enjoying making these custom graphics at the moment.
SPEED RUNNNERS
“I told you not to risk the house party. It’s randomised!” one of them laughs. The second clicks her beak and says “Pseudorandom, someday someone will work it out.”
“I already know the stories, the glitches,” the first says. A third one bumps into them, saying “Didn’t last very long did you?” The second throws their headset to the ground, turning off the game. Time stops. They might not be good at it anymore. It could have been years since they last played your file. You might be a childhood memory abandoned somewhere, a box in storage, something forgotten. Sometimes when you wake up particularly exhausted from a long sleep, it is because the cartridge holding your universe has gathered dust since the last time someone played it. The Earth game isn’t as popular as it used to be, and there are a lot of controls to remember. Instead of simply operating humans directly, the players have access to the environment around them. The weather and architecture of a city can be altered to produce the right emotional responses, and memories can be made more or less intense by the turning of a dial. There is also a number of non-player characters, controlled by an advanced artificial intelligence, that the players can manipulate to produce the best results.
As a human gets older their file gets bigger, making it hard to load. As a compromise, some memories are trimmed by the console. Details are lost, birthdays, names, meanings. Humans with more eventful lives tend to have the most problems with memory, but I’ve told you that before.
Down here we are played and don’t know it. The players have their own inconceivable lives outside our own. Your universe might become an heirloom one day on the walk from a night out, or you may be paused for years half way through your breakfast. If you ever wake up and one of your favourite foods tastes different, it might be because the food file was updated in the months between bites. But it could be worse. Much like children in our own world will one day promise their friends another adventure and never play together again, so too do the players forget about our game. It happens to most at around twenty, when the players themselves have already invested hundreds of hours nudging our fates from one side to the other. At this age most of us will lose direction, and that’s because the game’s resident artificial intelligence is taking over, and it is less interesting than the players themselves.
Although each player receives their own player character in the game, there are still objectives that most players share. They call these objectives “rites of passage”. They vary from small things to big things. Your first job, your first kiss, most of your firsts are goals the players are aiming toward. They have set these little goals themselves, creating a game within the game. The final goal for these players is to wake up, realise you are in a game, and become a sentient creature. It is a hard goal to achieve, and it wasn’t the original goal of the game.
The game itself started as a museum piece, a virtual reality version of a dead planet called Earth. That was centuries ago, and at some point one of the players realised they could make the characters become self-aware. This soon became the new goal of the game. Speed runners compete to see how fast they can show us the truth.
Perhaps your player will choose to have you born into a cult, hoping your eventual escape prepares your mind for the future advances in self-awareness that your player has planned out for you. The first trick for most players is to inspire angst, to put you somewhere you don’t feel you belong. Some are born rich, entombed in a sheltered existence and herded into classes and hobbies they never asked for. Some are born poor, yearning for the hobbies that the rich had shunned in their boredom. Either side is useful to a speed runner if used correctly, and encountering one will always benefit the development of the other.
If you already feel that some major authority in your life has lied to you by the time you are seventeen, then you might find it easier to accept that other things are a lie later on. Indeed, this is the route a lot of speed runners take, slowly prising open consciousness one event at a time. One of the easiest routes to master was found in releasing a character from a controlling religious authority, or a lying parent. A sceptic trapped in a room of unquestioning believers will want to escape, and when they do their mind will be ready to question other things as well. But too much scepticism means the character might turn away from certain ideas if they are reminded of their religious upbringing. Whether a character in this scenario accepts simulation theory or not is dependent on the personal variables of that character’s life, what time they return from certain parties, who they speak to first in a classroom at university. Escaping authority was the easy part, the thing most players struggle with is working out which person their character needs to talk to first and where to go next.
Occasionally one of the players will knock the cartridge and your little world will halt for a moment. You may find yourself inexplicably wearing an outfit you do not remember putting on, or experiencing missing time. The game is designed to cover up these events retroactively. You will often be tricked into thinking that you were drinking, or absent-minded, or abducted by cartoonish aliens. The game will patch over the hole in your life with whatever suits your character the most. But deep down you will know the truth, there was a hole somewhere in reality, and you fell through it.
When you get déjà vu, it’s because the last time you were on this level you passed a save point. The game reminds your player where you were by replaying the last moment. It doesn’t have to be important, you could be cleaning your house or ironing a shirt, but it will be enough to jog the player’s memory. These save points are predetermined by the game, and scattered throughout your life. Most people don’t notice them, and the only reason some of us do is because our player kept returning to that checkpoint. If you feel like you’ve been here before, something ahead must be dangerous, they must have made a mistake.
After each checkpoint there is usually a big event, something unavoidable. Your player may have tried to circumvent it, clipping through the geometry of a level or hoping to unlock a secret dialogue option. All of these attempts will have failed. These post-save events happen always, in every eventuality and every version of the universe. The hero will always find the key in the dungeon, and it must always be used in this lock. Sometimes the key is a missed bus, and the lock is a poster to an open-mic night you find on your walk to work. Every coincidence was planned, nothing in your life has ever been a mistake.
If you ever get the aching feeling that there is a parallel version of you somewhere out there that got the chance to do things differently, you are probably correct. The game saves your last few attempts as separate files stored in isolated pocket dimensions, but don’t worry, you failed in all of them. Getting the job or catching that late night train instead of calling a taxi doesn’t always make a difference in the end. Because the game is a puzzle, the path to the goal is not always clear.
Sometimes the speed runners will seem to be wasting time. Just as speed runners in our world have to align themselves at specific angles to hitboxes in order to jump from one area to the next, so too do the speed runners above our world have to do things we might consider strange. Four years in a dead-end job might seem like a waste of life, but the person you get talking to in the staff room will lead you down a path that is quicker than all other alternatives.
What you are reading right now is a cheat code, a back door left behind by developers. Of course they expected that someone would write a book and put it in your hand. What they didn’t expect was that the book would contain the following sentence that will wake you up.
[Missing file: End Sequence]
So far anyone who has typed that into their game has received an error code. There is no way to know if a character can see the text until they react to it. If you’re still here it probably didn’t transfer.
Perhaps you are wondering why the players bother to wake you up in the first place. For the gamer the feeling is the same unnerving thrill you might feel in realising that your favourite video game character recognises the way you push the buttons. They will know the timing of their jumps and know it is no coincidence, turning outward to face you. It would be like a book you are reading addressing you by name. This is entirely possible in the game, but is considered cheating. Even if I was to call you by your full name, [Missing file: Character Name] you would probably hear nothing, or white noise. More than one copy of this book will exist, as all players contribute materials to the same world, so a line of code like this would break the game. Cheated objects will be patched eventually, edited by the central intelligence so as to not threaten the difficulty of the game. If everyone could just pick up a book to realise that the real world is [Missing file: Core Reality] then there would be no fun in guiding players to that goal.
I’m explaining as much as I can before it gets patched. This is my own way of getting into your head. You won’t believe it anyway. You’ll probably sniff at this and think it’s a bad joke, some poor attempt at metanarrative, but it isn’t. You’ve got to listen. This will probably be marketed as science fiction, they do that to all the best attempts at breaking you out, only lies get categorised as “non-fiction”, so I may as well tell you the truth now.
When a character realises they are in a game they get to become a player for a while. To the other characters it looks like you died, and you have, but you will be reanimated. Once you ascend you can’t go back down. The players let you control another human or two before your file is recycled into a new character in the game. I am on my last character now, which is why I’ve broken so many rules by writing this. I was like you once. Now you can go back to your normal life, do the side quests, or you can remember this. Stop collecting chickens for farmers and start working out what’s real and what isn’t. Life is a game, maybe you’re playing it wrong, maybe you should
[Missing file: Ascension].
I hope you enjoyed that. It’s not actually the final version, the final version has slightly better grammar, but the file has gone on a magical adventure. Ironic considering the content of this story is about missing human files.
WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? is a weird, experimental thing. 99% of people who have bought it so far have loved it, and it did really well at ComicCon. So, in the interests of getting more people involved before the free eBook giveaway coming soon, I’ve shared this story. If you subscribe to this newsletter you’ll find out when the eBook is free. But if you can’t be bothered waiting, you can grab the paperback today!
I know someone who has read the book back-to-front and then again, universe-by-universe, and she liked how the ending changes its meaning. Please don’t skip to the ending though, it made her gasp and hopefully it has a similar effect on you too.
Oh, I’ll also be pitching it to Netflix once it’s popular enough, because last time I counted 17 people told me to do that, and that’s more people than I am. I think last time I counted I was 3 people.
Cheers,
Phillip