SNAKE 2.0.0.0.0.0.0…

Flash fiction

It should terrify you to learn what became of Andrew Walmsley. After watching Tron from the musky shadows of his attic bedroom, the 15-year-old ambitiously attempted to create code so complex that he could disappear forever into a high-stakes, neon game world. As the architect and God of a glitch-free paradise, he would be free of the laws of physics shackling his sun-starved ankles to this spinning space shit stool. But the timing was not on his side. It was the year 2000 and as he went to press enter, his elbow caught the unwashed duvet underneath him, causing the tiniest of keyboard errors.

The catastrophic mistake saw him confined to the painfully limited Snake 2 on his retro Nokia 3310 mobile phone handset until the sun burned out. Even when all life on Earth was obliterated after a collision with an asteroid, some 2 billion years after his natural life should have ended, the phone survived and the battery lasted until - heartbreakingly for Andrew, who yearned the sweet release of death - it was kept at full charge by deep nebula electromagnetic fields. Finally, 4.34 billion years later, the phone melted upon direct contact with the sun, just before it burned out. His score was capped at the maximum of 3000 when after all bugs disappeared, he filled up the screen and his head was left banging against the tail for all but 2 hours of that time.

I’m sure you’d agree that it was no small mercy that Joyce and Raymond Walmsley remained ignorant of their only son’s twisted fate, spending the rest of their lives seeking closure, posting new missing posters, and occasionally convincing the town’s police force to reopen their half-hearted investigations.