The Sitting Duck

The Sitting Duck

PROLOGUE

Sitting, watching the television the author fiddled with a keypad. Space ships darted about the screen and terrible crashes thundered and boomed. A few twitches, a yank of the keypad and a grimace and it was all over. “Twenty six thousand, Alison,” he cried gleefully, “that beats Mark.”

  Walking into the kitchen, he tripped over the dog and stumbled into his wife’s arms, “did you hear me? Twenty six thousand.”

  “Yes I heard you, twenty six thousand,” she replied. “Do you want a cup of tea?”

  “Yes please.” He thought for a moment then, “You know, I’ve been thinking, I could write a computer program with those characters in that I created on the PC.”

  “Yeas,” she said in a drawn out way.

  “Well I could create them again, but in a virtual universe.”

  “I thought they were already virtual?”

  “Virtually.”

  She clicked the kettle on and went over to the fridge to get the milk. “You said that the characters existed inside the computer and you interacted with them.”

  “That’s right, they do,” he mused for a moment, “that means that there must already be a self running program in the computer,” he rushed over to the computer and switched it on. “I wonder how I can access it.” He twiddled for a bit, “eureka!”