The clock blinked 3:50.
Paul stretched, his back aching. He took a swig of coffee and grimaced. Cold.
He stood, stretched again. His back popped.
“orfee” He mumbled, surprised by his own voice. He looked at the time again. It had been at least 36 hours since he last spoke to anyone.
He stumbled to the kitchen and filled the kettle. He yawned again, listening to the water heating.
“Fuck that.” He clicked the kettle off. “Sleep.”
Setting his alarm clock for 30 minutes, he pulled his duvet over him and closed his eyes.
***
His hand reached out. 5 seconds later he clicked off the alarm.
Another yawn and he pulled himself off the sofa and moved over to the computer.
It had finished.
Paul had been programing a Narrative Simulator. His theory was simple. Fiction was an observable world. As long as he built a good enough simulator, he could observe it.
For the past month he had been hacking personalities into a fairy tale village. He pulled down some menus and piped the output to a document. In the time he slept, it appeared that certain personalities had coupled, built houses and had children.
But no stories. No wicked step mothers, none of the animals in the forest had done anything and no one had moved into the castle and had a ball.
All in all, it was disappointing.
He slumped back into his chair.
“Bugger.”
***
Observation causes change.
In the next output, his village was now productive. There was a tailor, a shepherd, a shoemaker and a lumberjack. He set the output to follow the shoemaker and went out go get some milk. When he came back the shoe maker had made hundreds of pairs of shoes. At night. While he slept.
And Paul couldn’t see how. And that’s when he knew it was working.
***
He programmed a new variable and prepared to send it into the system.
This would prove everything. He took one more look around his room – the networked machines all looking at different sections of the world, all taking different feeds.
He pressed “RETURN.”
The networked machines kicked into life. An old woman in a house in the forest, a wood cutter, a family in the village, a little girl.
The red hooded cape.
He focused on more characters and went to have a cup of tea.
***
Half an hour later he sat staring at the screens. All of them showed variants of Red Riding Hood – rocks in the stomach, the woodsman coming to the rescue. Even an incredibly strange “it’s all sex and she’s growing up” version. The dialogue was a bit ropey, but it was Red Riding Hood.
All generated through observing the characters in the engine. All the stories existing simultaneously in the engine. It was his own narrative quantum paradox.
He picked up the phone and called his friend. “Andy? Can you come over? I think I want to show you something.”
Hanging up, Paul mused at what a great story this would make.
He stopped.
His story.
Him.
He reached for a keyboard and started tapping.
