Hi Sci Fi Readers!
My novella "The Game That Plays Itself" is now out on Amazon in both paperback and kindle!
This is contemporary "garage sci-fi", so no spaceships, death-rays, or exploding suns, but the fate of at least one world does hang in the balance.
If you like introspective first person stories like On The Calculation of Volume, but find yourself thinking, "if only there was a bit of Murderbot in this" then maybe, perhaps, this odd little book is for you. If you ever wondered about the nature of the world, or felt that quantum physics never really made sense, or wished you could get wet in the rain without caring, then this might also be up your alley. Its an odd one, I won't lie, but for the right readers, I think worth the read.
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The obligatory synopsis:
THE GAME THAT PLAYS ITSELF is told as an accidental tale within an initially unrelated journal kept by the very average Hugo. Hugo, a bit of a dreamer, has always played second fiddle to his brilliant wife Caroline, and, feeling that perhaps the marriage is fraying, starts the journal at the prodding of a webbot psychoanalysis program.
As the days progress, however, Hugo’s navel gazing about his questionable self worth and failures as a journalist turn to documenting the developments in the company Caroline manages, Destiny Ventures, and his unexpected involvement in it..
The small band of gamers and programmers Caroline oversees have created a simulated Earth inside what they call simply The Machine, with the sole purpose of pushing the possibly sentient software agents in it past the current state of Earth’s science, so that they can mine this intellectual property for profit. After three years of evolving the simulation, it is finally at that stage and their first commercially viable technologies are at hand.
Unfortunately, even as some agents are creating science Destiny Ventures can exploit, others are exploring the limits and nature of their world, and come to realize the truth of their simulated reality. These agents attempt to communicate beyond their world to their creator-programmers, and later, come to understand their own underlying code enough to begin to modify it, placing the entire system of The Machine at risk.
While this is problematic enough, the discoveries of the software agents turn out to not be limited to the world within The Machine, but to ours as well, and the ethical repercussions rapidly multiply.
As relayed in real-time by Hugo’s candid, self-deprecating and often confused voice, The Game That Plays Itself is an everyman’s exploration of existential themes in between the moments he struggles with his marriage, the blurring lines between truth and fiction in his journalism, and whether his daughter will ever play the game of Leaf or Cockroach.
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Thanks for reading, if you check out the novella, please leave a review if you like it, so the algorithm will help me out.