Hard Mode

The familiar sound rang out. The sound of defeat. The little red plumber fell down a hole, again. Another life lost, go back to the start. George threw down the controller in resignation, and went out for a walk. Super Mario World: just another thing he’d failed at.

The last couple of years had been hard on George. On his darker days, he felt like all 28 years of his life had been a challenge. Like he’d been playing a video game on hard mode.

George was a father, to three beautiful children who he got to spend a few hours with every other weekend. He was divorced, as of last year, when his trial separation had become a permanent ending. His wife’s new boyfriend had moved in surprisingly quickly after that. The kids had a new dad, George thought. I’ve been completely replaced, so depressingly easily.

This replacement did not, however, take his place financially. George was still paying regular payments to his ex-wife, to help look after the kids he rarely saw, and the upkeep (and indeed the mortgage) of the house in which he was no longer resident. Those payments had become another source of stress, when George lost his job six months ago.

He walked on, past the site of a pub which was in the process of being demolished, in favour of an office block. The pub had character, George thought. A beautiful old brick building, crawling with ivy. To replace it with yet another glass block was an insult.

He was replaceable too, it turned out. In his marriage, and also in the job that he’d loved for almost a decade. Not only that, he was replaced by a computer. A glorified random number generator. An LLM, built to create soulless images from prompts written by project managers, and executives, and other people without an artistic bone in their body. As a graphic designer, he was irrelevant now. Nobody was paying for a human to create art when you could get some machine-generated bullshit for a fraction of the price. He was 28 years old. He supposedly still had forty years left in his career. What was he meant to do now? Nobody was hiring for his job any more. Overnight his whole career path had vanished.

Still he walked, reaching the footbridge over the new motorway. When he’d be a kid, this had been a field that he’d played in every day. Now it was just another pollution-filled testament to humanity’s inevitable, unstoppable, destructive march toward progress.

He’d been replaced. He had no future. No family life. No career. No friends to speak of, because he’d been so focused on his work that he’d neglected so much else. The world was falling apart.

This was it. The end. He couldn’t go on like this. It was too much.

He jumped.

…

And he woke up with a sharp intake of breath. What was this? What just happened? He was falling, and then… what, exactly? Where was he? It looked like an arcade, but with VR headsets everywhere. He looked at the machine in front of him. “Life Isn’t Fair”. What? And at the bottom of the game setup screen: Hard Mode. Hard Mode! It was a fucking game! His whole life really was a simulation, and he was playing it on Hard Mode! He was shocked, but even more, he was furious.

George felt fuzzy for a moment. He blinked, and looked down. Game Over? And I only got to 28? David had hit 68 last week. He’d never live 28 down.

“Right, still got time before I need to be home for dinner. One more go.”

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