The end of the world creeps up on you when you don’t even realise it. One minute you’re comparing facts, figures, statistics, reports, the next you’re writing something down and that something twists out of the path you’ve predicted and your essay suddenly includes things like “possible societal collapse” and “inevitable ecological catastrophe”. I’m reading Timothy Morton, the end of the world as an end to the understanding of the world as compliant field of resources to be burned and pillaged at will, and I look out of the window and the trees feel so much older. So much more powerful. Ineluctable in their terrifying natural serenity. And the planet will rise up like a hand crushing a gnat—
It’s 2am and I’ve just woken up. In my dreams I was screaming, screaming against myself, against the world, against the manifest godawfuldamnedness of it all. Yet the world outside is still. Real air has no room for phantom screams. The end of the world has already happened, but it doesn't feel like it yet. Christmas is coming.
Christmas is coming.
Christmas is
Christmas
Christ
Christ what do I do what do I do what do I do
Days pass. Weeks. Months. The panic, too, passes, becomes a thudding anxiety, becomes a dull ache. I develop unnatural sensitivity in my skin, nervous jerks, my features a mode even more unsuited to human charisma (if that was even possible). My exams are brief jolts of urgency in a landscape devoid of motion. The end of lockdown approaches, and I take up video games, turning to fictional problems I can solve rather than the problems outside I cannot. One in particular catches my interest, a diplomatic simulation where you are tasked with averting a fictional war. I substitute this dreamed topography for my own, Konso and Merovia and the White Revolution and Wilhelmsdottir and the Vilnic Empire. In endless replays and cycles I try to avert the war as a diplomat: interviewing war-hawk generals, buying goods on the black market, attempting to assassinate key political figures. Nothing works, and the war breaks out after a week each time. The best I can do is uncover the conspiracy early and report it to my superiors, ensuring that they launch a surprise attack before the enemy launches their own. I become convinced that the game designers have designed the game to never be completable, to never offer a way out of hell. I become convinced that I alone am especially cursed to never find a way out of hell. When I go to the store and buy a soda (plastic bottles) and crisps (plastic packaging) I am filled with a momentary disgust between picking up the packet and the automatic checkout. The many and loathsome crimes of daily living make the mirror unbearable, yet watching the people on the streets waving their stupid useless banners fills me with a similar impotent revulsion. Nothing changes—nothing can. My belief in my trapped nature hardens into an almost mystical, totemic core.
Then, one day, the impossibility dissolves. Peace is achieved. For a moment, the faux vintage animation on the screen showing the peace negotiations pauses, then an additional typewritten diplomatic note slides up:
CONGRATULATIONS
If you are reading this, you are within the 0.01% group of players who have prevailed, based on a sample of 30000 paid playtesters. We, the developers of this simulation, believe you have what it takes to serve a vital role in resolving global crises of an even greater complexity than the Merovian-Kosovan war.
If you believe you are up to the task, follow this link. This link is unique to your playthrough and will not appear again. This is your chance to help save the world.
Yours sincerely,
THE RADIX GROUP
A QR code then pops up on screen.
Confused, I try to probe for answers online from my phone, having captured a picture of the code just in case. The online storefront records show a different developer (“NetRouter Games”), and the game hasn’t amassed anywhere near enough of a following on Discord or in forums to have a detailed list of bugs or easter eggs beyond a barebones wiki. Of the obsessive fans I do find in general game chatrooms, none of them admit to having solved the game. Even its title (“Attaché for Seven Days”) is depressingly vague, like a title for some existentialist French novel. Searching for the Radix Group reveals a corporate entity that looks like a think-tank merged with a hedge fund, and shows nothing about them making games. Possibly the executable I had downloaded had been tampered with by a malicious entity, or this was some elaborate joke by the developers. Either way, common sense told me to simply ignore the QR code.
I hope you can understand why I accepted the invitation.