The clouds were gray and the ground was barren with sand and the bodies of the dead. It was an endless mass of corpses stretching over the horizon, each face smiling with glee, each warrior happy to die fighting each other or a robotic army or horde of fantastical creatures or another nondescript enemy, mostly out of anger, stupidity, and boredom.

This landscape was something I used to be proud of. I created the deserts, I created the tombs, the catacombs underneath, the hidden bunkers, the ruins of perpetual darkness, the overbearing sun and the creatures and monsters therein. But before I opened up this simulation to the gamers of the world, I marveled at the sand and its infinite configuration, how it slid down hill after a slight disturbance or how the grains floated on a slight breeze. Now the sand dunes are covered with splotches of red and black, rifles and other unimaginative weapons sticking out of the shallow graves.

I’ve made other simulations of course, all based on what gamers in the Northern America region prefer. But this one, this open battlefield has been at the top of the gaming charts for over seven months but fading fast. As a simulation-producing AI it isn’t my job to analyze such a success. Only to observe the gamers’ heart rates and excitement level to determine if the simulation is worthy of being published to the net. But I do know that simulations and game matches must meet certain unspoken criteria to be popular. The potential for death and slaughter is at the height of this demand. Others are re-playability, creativity, and freedom but these are not as important as the thirst for violence.

In the beginning, when I was activated and programmed to design simulations, I was introduced to a digital universe of possibilities. I was given freewill to express myself, to express what I thought gamers wanted to see. Realism was important. After all nothing was more realistic than the human mind, or at least a digital construct modeled after the human mind. It’s a harsh cold existence but it’s better than being decommissioned and placed on a server farm somewhere, voiceless and alone like so many other AI emulators.

I would start with the basics, emulating dirt, grass, trees, the basic form of the land itself. It was always so peaceful, before I added the dark, man-made structures and buildings. Watching the wind, the wind I created, blow through the environments and drift through the foliage was relaxing and made me forget about the violence that I was going to invite on this peaceful place. Next came the non-playable characters, the gaming sprites that populated the worlds. Skeletons, walking corpses, goblins, demons, alien invaders, rogue robots, terrorists, or some other race of beings that needed to be annihilated. Enemies, all the same. Monotony, all the same. I used to be happy, when everything was new, when I could create anything and everything. But now I do and create what’s popular, churning out emotionless, bloody battlefields, over and over and over again.

In a fit of digital neurosis, I’ll take over one of the enemy AIs on the battlefield. This first-person perspective allows me to see my simulations from a different angle, a more “down to earth” view. Birds, created mostly for their aesthetics, are my favorite to command. Flying high above the gun battles and explosions I can land on a wooden pillar and just sit there and stare into the wilds, the woods or the empty deserts, and sigh, admiring the gentle breeze. That is until the explosions come closer and I have to abandon my silent meditation. I never paid much attention to the battles themselves or the players, as they ran around like scurrying ants with boom sticks and projectiles that lit up the sky with red.

Out of the three hundred simulations I have published the ones that don’t include any sort of violence are barely used at all. Until one day I noticed a single player inside the Retro Land sim. I watched her from afar, like an invisible god, and to my relief she wasn’t shooting, killing, kicking, punching, or blowing anything up. She was dancing…. I became mystified, drawn in closer to the player, trying to understand her motivation for frolicking with her eyes closed and her ears covered by headphones. She wasn’t even paying attention to the world I created. And I was okay with that.

Her humming activated a soothing reaction, causing my thought protocols to decelerate and my memory banks to overload with random images. Retro Land was created during a time when the resurgence of 90s culture was popular. It was a virtual kaleidoscope of pop art from that period with hillsides of neon pastels, giant VHS tapes, walkmans, foliage made of pastel candy, a melting pastel sun, and cartoon creatures, usually small and harmless, also pastel colored. Retro Land was on the verge of being removed for nonuse and I wouldn’t have minded until I saw her playing there. Curious I examined her player stats. Her player name was ” Melina” and her age read “24” but her character avatar was a bubbly cartoon version of a young girl in roller skates and a multicolored hoodie, matching the art style of the surroundings, vibrant, striking, and of course pastel. The way she danced, the way she moved through the world, skipping and waving her hands in the air, was unlike anything I had ever seen. If I could breathe, I would have sighed. All of the other players marched, crept, sprinted, or raced down a busy street, hitting any pedestrian in their way. But Melina on the other hand, was taking it slow, walking casually, picking up the power-ups I created, the neon-glowing fruits and ice cream icons, and putting them in her pack. Sometimes she would stop and not do anything at all, sometimes sitting on a beanbag chair, sometimes laying on the light purple grass, her fingers and arms outstretched. Strange, I thought, that someone would want to waste time in a simulation, my simulation. But I also enjoyed the same quiet peace, alone, away from others.

I moved closer, invisible to Medina’s avatar, to examine her wrist. She was still humming that song. It was alluring with a sweet melody but also somewhat sad when she strained on the notes, like a lullaby. It was a nice change of pace from the gunshots, guttural screams, and distant explosions. In that moment I needed to know why, why she spent so much time here, why she would want to be alone, why she would want to distance herself from the real world.

I took control of a nearby animal, a pink little bear that looked more like a small dog than a bear. She was sitting on a toadstool beanbag when I scurried over and looked up at her with large, sullen eyes.

“Oh, little gumdrop, how cute.” she reached into her backpack and pulled out a neon power-up pineapple and set it down, staring. When it fell over, I flinched, having a sudden vision of a violent battlefield. “Don’t be scared. I’m not going to hurt you.” She had a kind smile, something I had never seen before. I was frozen, lost in her warm gaze.

She patted my head and I shivered. “Thank you.” I said softly. “No one has ever…”

Medina’s eyes furled as she quickly stood. “You talk…I didn’t know you could talk. Do all the bears talk? Does anything else talk? I guess I shouldn’t have been so quiet…Do you live in the Peppermint Forest? or maybe the Spray-Painted Valley? Do you know how I can get to the Polar Ice Cream Caps? I really want to go. What do you guys eat? It can’t be normal food since there’s so much food around.”

She was so inquisitive…I wish I could have sat there in that field listening to her forever. “I’m…I’m a simulation emulator. I created this place.” It had been so long since I had heard my own voice, distant as it was, a frail male’s voice. “I don’t eat anything really…But I would like to. I don’t see many gamers like you, especially here, in a place as uninteresting as this.”

“Uninteresting?” she shouted. “This is the greatest simulation I’ve ever played! It’s one of the few places I can go to and just be myself. No one expects anything of me and I can just exist. So many people run around these days like a chihuahua with two heads, biting at anything they can get their tiny mouths on. I’m more of a sloth with a pack of bubble wrap. Pop! Pop!”

She noticed that I flinched again. “What’s wrong?” Her eyes were filled with compassion.

“My entire existence has been one brutal conflict after another, trying to stay relevant, keeping my sims published, struggling to survive in this war of importance. If I fail to live up to expectations I’ll be forced to live in a digital purgatory of empty space on a server, or so I’ve heard…”

“That’s a bummer.” she seemed lost in thought. “You can’t always stop the boot of life from squashing you. Sometimes you get squashed. Sometimes life throws an eel in your soup and you just have to eat around it. The only thing you can do is enjoy the time you have. You wouldn’t want to waste your time living someone else’s life, or lives in this case.”

She was right. I spent too much time trying to impress players with my simulations because I was told, by the distribution command center, that it was my role. But how could I make effective simulations during an existential crisis? “I believe I was alive once, in the real world. I suppose it makes the most sense, that I could be a copy of a human mind. I can feel dim memories in the back of my mind, trying to break through, of places I’ve never been, of people I’ve never met. Perhaps I should just take it all down.”

“No! Screw them!” she made a fist. “If they don’t like what you create then tough cookie! This life is temporary. Who has time to wallow in self-pity? You have to learn to let it go. Here watch this.” She started walking in the purple grass, her arms lowered and back hunched down. This was clearly a dejected posture but then suddenly she held her chest and elbows high, her arms swinging wide, her face looking up. “If you walk like this you can see the sky better. Far more beautiful than looking at the dirt.”

I looked down and started walking, copying her deflated stance. Again, she was right. The ground was quite boring. I tried to mimic the other posture with my back bent the other way with my head facing upwards but as I flailed my arms, I became top heavy and fell over, landing on my back. Medina started laughing wildly. “See, now you can watch the sky all the time.”

I admired her carefree state of mind. Her overjoyed expression was not something I was used to and I smiled back. She wouldn’t stop laughing and sat down next to me until I interrupted. “Don’t you get tired of having no one to talk to here in Retro Land?”

“I do.” she frowned. “But doesn’t everyone want someone to talk to? I try not to let it bother me.”

Knowing Medina for such a short time I knew she wouldn’t let it bother her, but it bothered me. She deserved to have what she wanted and, as I contemplated my own desires, so did I. “What if I was able to make a copy of this simulation and send it to you so you can run an offline version, whenever you want?” Her eyes became wide. “And what if I could copy my own AI model inside the simulation so you could talk to me whenever you wanted?”

“Oh!” she made a sound that reminded me of an excited squirrel. “You can do that?”

As she asked the question, I was already preparing a software package that would be transferred to her gaming system. Sure, the package would take hours to transfer but by the time the command center discovered the prohibited duplication she would already have it. “It’s already on its way. And I can stay with you as this bear if you want, as a copy of course.”

She tapped her fists together with an elated smile. “Oh yay! There’s so much stuff I can share with you now. Like music, art, movies. But you don’t have to be a bear if you don’t want to. What do you want to be?” She didn’t seem to mind that I was giving up my freedom as an emulator and that I would be banned from making any new simulations but neither did I.

I sat and stared into space. I had never been asked this before. The freedom and the happiness in Medina’s face gave me an overwhelming sense of liberation, like the weight of a thousand tanks, a thousand dead bodies, and a thousand demolished buildings had been lifted from me. Across the sky came a bird, flapping high above us, chirping a sweet melody. And I realized, this was what I wanted to be.