Dice of Human Bones: The Death of Payter

by Ryan S. Borgstrom

Copyright (c) 1990

Have you ever heard of a game called World? The young ones play it often. The name, so they tell me, comes from one of the old legends. --Indulgent smile-- Payter once told me in secret that the legend was about the way things actually _were_.

I don't really understand either the legend or the game. --Frown-- I watched them play it once. They put limit after limit on themselves until they were barely shells, and then they stumbled around the network for hours. --Grin-- They never seemed to get anywhere.

I looked at the legend once ... it seemed to talk mostly about "love" and "companionship" -- the "world" thing seemed to almost be incidental to the story, just sort of a backdrop. Rather puzzling, to me at least.

Even if they were right, though, and we did once live in a "world," it still wouldn't make a great deal of sense, would it? The old ways are gone forever. You can't just decide, and bring them back. But Payter's been acting so strange lately. The others tell me he's been pretending to be "dead." It's been disturbing me more and more.

Hello?

Ryan Borgstrom is a Computer Science graduate student at Johns Hopkins. One night it occurred to him to follow David Brin's example and try to fit a working story into 200 words exactly, and submit the result to Quanta ... It is unclear whether this intention is violated by the foolish expenditure of words that makes up this about-the-author note. His interests include computer science, science fiction and fantasy, juggling, Judo, history, other genres of fiction, and classical and other music.

ryan@crabcake.cs.jhu.edu