CHAPTER ONE
GAME DAY!
PART ONE
They said it was alien interference that caused it to happen but if it was, it wasn’t anything like in the movies. There were no flying saucers hovering ominously in the skies, no laser beams aiming to kill and no one even asking to speak with the President. No, it wasn’t at all like that but whatever it was, it came peacefully and left us far more presentable to the rest of the universe.
It started to take hold of us on Game Day in the year 2075 when millions of the world’s children, ages twelve to sixteen, were up and dressed and out the door at the first light of day. Off they ran to the nearest download stations where video games were let out to play. Excited? Nothing compares to what they felt that morning -- it was game day! And it wasn’t just any game day, it was the long-awaited release of “Pixel Mania”, the most widely advertised video game of all time. Even next-gen Super Mario took a back seat to this one: way, way back.
“Want to be ‘in’ the game and not just sitting on the sidelines?” one advertisement played-up to the kids. “Want to move about freely, breathe the air and feel the spine-chilling thrill of adventure?” That’s what the game creator, Mission 2075, promised the kids from the very start but, as we all observed, that was just the beginning. They, whoever ‘they’ were, went on for months promising just about everything you’d expect to see on a video gamer’s wish list including, to quote one of the ads: “a few bytes of technology from out and beyond the stars.”
Of course, by the year 2075 most kids were immune to such outlandish claims but on this game, Pixel Mania, the kids believed everything they saw and heard, as if the ads were as good as their word.
“But why, why believe any of it?” implored the media.
“Why not?” the kids asked in return. “Everything they say is said for a fact and facts don’t lie, everyone knows that.”
“But why just you guys, kids ages twelve-to-sixteen? What’s that all about?”
“It’s about us for a change, us, too old to be easily fooled and too young to make up our own mind, like you guys do.”
So went the interviews all around the world, as if logic and reason had given way to dense clouds of believe-a-bubbles. Those who didn’t believe what the ads promised were either under twelve, over sixteen, skeptical beyond belief or, just not listening.
Pixel Mania ads were in your face no matter where you looked, attractively displayed and always in the best of good taste, whether stamped on T-shirts, buses, fast-food containers or decorated on birthday cakes. Call it a game frenzy and you’d not be alone. The kids who’d get to play, the so called ‘chosen ones’, talked about nothing else for months.
“These Pixel Mania ads are getting more and more ‘out there’ everyday,” wrote one media post after another. “User friendly, yeah! we get that. We get that all the time, but a game that now promises to speak to us in the language of our thoughts? Wow! can’t wait to hear that.”
“I know, right?” wrote another. “If even half of what they’re promising comes true, look out! we’re in for something special.”
Social media chats like this were as commonplace as the newest bio-phones and game chips implanted at birth. Even teachers and parents were remarkably grown-up about the game and they didn’t hesitate to say so, surprising even themselves. “Come on, lighten up!” they told school principals and worried grandparents from No Place, England to Nowhere, Australia. “It’s just another video game for the kids. Just leave them alone and let them play.”
Obviously, something other than pollution was in the air. Or, maybe it was just us, the human race, calling out for help.
PART TWO
Before the arrival of Pixel Mania (BP), the world was going pear shaped. Mother Nature was chronically ill; her own doctors overworked to the bone and too busy for their own good health. Wars and conflicts were all too common and ceasefires, timeouts to regroup, were being traded like baseball cards. People who had everything wanted more of it and those with little got less.
On top of that and worse still, free thought had giving way to endless advertisements: blips and bleeps telling us what to think, what to do, when to do it, where, and why we had to. You couldn’t blink without a blip, eat without a beep or even dream without earworm ads getting into your head. And then there was that one final insult that probably best explains why the Pixel Mania video game landed on our doorstep when it did.
It was the coming together of world leaders in the year 2075. They talked for days about the need for environmental controls, stronger gun laws and world peace. They ate well and, at times, they looked surprisingly hopeful. Then, after the usual photo shoots and handshakes, the biggest of the big cheeses, the most powerful of Presidents, went sheepishly to a jungle of microphones and addressed the world thusly:
“Hello everyone! Believe it or not, we’ve come to an understanding. Now don’t be cross with us; it wasn’t as easy as it sounds. Look at my knuckles, they’re worked to the bone. Anyway, we’ve agreed for now to just disagree and get on with life as it’s always been. Think of ourselves as worms,” he tried to explain while squirming at the podium. “We spend piles of money fighting other worms and there’s never enough leftover to clean the backyard and feed the little ones. We’ve been arguing and fighting like that with each other ever since the first worms began to wiggle in slimy ponds. So, we told ourselves and I quote: ’Why the hell change it now! It’s gotten us this far.”
The world was absolutely appalled and shortly after that, in fact the very next day, the first Pixel Mania game ads began flooding the air waves, ad nauseum, interrupting programs on ear-chips radios and the new screenless, 3-D tele-spheres. Even the socially-minded ‘tell-us-what-you-think’ platforms around the world were taken over with nothing else but the latest Pixel Mania news.
The ads were not shy in boasting a game with screen images beyond HD, ultra-HD, 8K or more Ks for more sales -- all of it made possible, they told us, by the creation some year earlier of the first ‘perfect’ picture, a crystal-clear image with not one pixel too many or too few.
Throughout the pre-game frenzy, kids arrived at school earlier than usual and they didn’t show up empty handed. Pixel Mania memorabilia was everywhere: tank tops with a Pixel face, sign-language cards with Pixel hands, gummy Pixel lips, Pixel spinners, bikes and wheelchairs with Pixel-decorated spokes. All of it in the stores from where? no one had the slightest idea and no one cared to find out. Regardless, noise on the playgrounds was as deafening as the excitement was electrifying.
“Hey, Chiquita,” one of the chosen ones looked at another, “where’d you get those bubble-gum cards, the ones with pics of kids climbing trees and people cheering them upward? Hello! where’s the fun in doing that?”
“I got the cards in the FedEx mail, drone-delivered, like I was someone special that day. But so did the other kids on the street. The pics are kinda like ‘last year’, like who climbs trees these days but aren’t they cool like? I’d bet my Pixel T-shirt that these cards have something to do with the game.”
“They are kinda like, absolutely ‘not today’ but I kinda like ’em too. And look at these pickle-shaped buttons they’re giving out everywhere for free. I’ve got one for every colour in the rainbow.”
The pixel buttons and bubble-gum cards chewed up most of the time before class and all through recess. Wireless film crews were buzzing about the schools like satellites snooping from above, amped-up and busier than Girl Guides with free peppermint cookies. One news outlet described the scene as ‘kinda like a Scout’s jamboree times ten-to-the-power of youthful imagination’. And it played out like that in all parts of the world.
When Game Day finally arrived, only those kids who qualified by age, confirmed via multi-factor, biometric identification, left the store with a nano chip of Pixel Mania. The chip came with a full-length poster of Pixel, the game protagonist, smiling like she totally loved everyone in the whole world. The kids were instantly blown away by the lifelike image, itself a perfect picture so strikingly alive as to speak more than the usual one-thousand words.
“She’s as 3-D as the rest of us,” said one kid to another. “When I look at her straight-on she looks to be twelve or thirteen years old, a few years younger from the left side and older from the right.” She oozed of boldness and adventure, her blue eyes half closed and an infectious smile to brighten everyone’s day. But most striking of all was Pixel’s multi-coloured hair, rainbow ringlets dangling to shoulder length. She sported a school-bus yellow T-shirt, black jean shorts and the latest Pixeldidas sneakers, the ones with the gold-braided laces that everyone was dying to tie in a bow that summer.
All to say, the kids were strangely drawn to the image, a kind of sibling attraction, it was that magnetically 3-D and 20/20. By the time the kids arrived home to play the game, they were totally taken-in and ready for whatever: it was Game Day!
