CREATION CØĐÊ

George osborne opened the perfectly average door to the perfectly average office that would be his work home from now on. Coworkers shuffled around the coffee maker in the kitchen at the rear, mugs in hand, while others already sat staring at their severe gray computers.

"Last one to the party?" said a blonde woman in an orange pantsuit.

"It's my first day," George said. "George."

"I'm Beth. Pleased to meet you."

George smiled at her. He could picture their relationship growing.

His new coworkers all filed into their desks without giving him any instruction, so George sat at the one desk left empty. It must be his. He'd landed this job, the only job he'd ever wanted, and he knew exactly how to perform it. Programming was easy. Put him in front of a computer, and he'd code it. Ask him to describe himself in one sentence, he'd say, "George Osborne is one hell of a great programmer."

No one asked him to describe himself in one sentence, though. No one spoke to him at all. They all just worked. He loaded his computer.

The company was Frameworks Intelligence. They made video games. George had been hired to help code characters better. The people in their game, The Cits, had no depth. His job was to deepen them, give them motivation and meaning. George clicked the Cits file on the computer's desktop and began exploring the game's code.

In the game, Cits lived a human-like existence, controlled by whomever was playing. The name was short for "Citizens," and players could create endless characters who operated mostly under their control, but they also had some degree of free will. When left to their own devices, Cits would do things like eat and sleep, use the bathroom, and go to school or work without any player intervention. But no matter how much users adjusted the personality options, each Cit would essentially behave identically to the next.

George delved into the code. The fundamental problem with this programming, he noticed right away, was that the Cits lacked an inner life. How could he give them motivation or meaning in the absence of true self-reflection? He pondered the best way to rewrite it.

Around noon, his stomach rumbled. All the other programmers retrieved bag lunches from the refrigerator. As two co-workers passed each other, one, an elderly man wearing a sailor cap, said to another, "I just wanted to touch base."

"Feel free to ping me later," replied a young woman with blue hair and tattoos.

George hadn't packed lunch, so he used the telephone at his desk to order a pizza. When it arrived, he ate a slice. His new co-workers began eating it as well.

"Working hard, or hardly working?" Beth from earlier said, between bites of his pizza. He must have gotten points with her for sharing, so he didn't mind.

"I'm giving 110%," he said.

Lunch ended, but George still wanted more food. The other programmers had eaten the rest of his pizza before he got a second slice. He opened the refrigerator—empty. Next to the kitchen area, he found a closed door he hadn't noticed before, possibly a pantry. He turned the knob.

It wasn't a pantry at all, but a tiny closet office with a desk crammed inside, a computer on top. This computer looked different than the others. It was sleeker and more vivid—a resplendent bluish-silver, curved instead of boxy and austere. Something about it shimmered. He drifted closer, inexplicably enticed.

George glanced around to see if anyone would object, then stuffed himself inside the closet and shut the door. When he switched the computer on, the drab space filled with the luminous hues of the chromatic display on the desktop's background. It eclipsed anything else he'd seen all day. The desktop, like on the other computers, contained only a link to a file. But unlike on the rest of the computers, the file wasn't The Cits, but "The Peops," whatever that was. He opened it and eagerly scanned the code.

Now this was a game! Conceptually, it resembled The Cits, but compared to this game, The Cits looked about as sophisticated as Pong. One section he studied recreated the experience of riding a bicycle exactly. Another rendered a Thanksgiving meal into such exquisite digital detail, he could practically taste the string bean casserole and homemade cranberry sauce right there in that closet office.

The more code he plumbed, the more convinced he became that this game, The Peops, with its innovative coding, could fully mimic anything from reality. Why, just their vocabulary alone! No "speaking" with pictures and audio of human-like nonsense syllables like in The Cits, no way. He searched The Peops' repertoire of phrases for remarks that popped into his head, and sure enough, they had it listed there. A vast collection of utterances.

It all impressed George enormously, but did this game have the thing that Cits lacked most: inner lives, depth of feeling? George scrutinized line after line of the character coding, and found no sign of it. These characters fell as short on signs of life as The Cits did. They were little more than automatons, repeating prescribed motions. He refused to believe there was nothing, not in this clever code. He kept searching.

He stumbled upon something in the character list that perplexed him. One character in the game took up a third of all its data. He inspected that character's coding but could barely make heads or tails of it. Its complexity dazzled him, and he pulled himself closer to the screen, concentrating. Why was this character so important, so prominent in the game's code?

Bits of it jumped out at him, glittering through each subtle equation. This character had far more of an inner life than the others. It had curiosity, self-awareness, and above all, bravery. He delved into its intricate layers, trying to glean as much as he could. He found himself yawning—the more he investigated that character, the more his energy drained away. He'd never seen programming that was so above and beyond his own capabilities.

An hour into his examination of the character's code, he hit upon something a bit curious. Among all the rich detail, this Peop's workplace lacked the same specificity and luster as everything else. Its office was plain as white rice, a void within a vivid world. What's more, the most common identifying information made itself scarce within the lines of dense coding. He kept working at it, though it drained his energy, until finally he deciphered an identifying detail that he pulled from scattered corners of the code. The character's employer.

An odd shiver ran down his spine. It was Frameworks Intelligence.

Suddenly, the closet door burst open. George jumped. Beth stood behind him, unsmiling. "We're here to work on The Cits," she said. "Should we go back to the drawing board?"

George wanted more friends, a lover as well. Maybe even a wife. Despite that awful shade of orange she wore, which made her blonde hair appear greenish, he hated to lose what he'd built with Beth so far.

"We'll use 360-degree thinking," he said, standing up. He grabbed a mug of coffee from the kitchen, added plenty of sugar, and settled back down at the desk he'd claimed at the start of the day. Not only did the coffee give him an extra burst of wakefulness, but the sugar satisfied his lingering hunger. He opened The Cits file and, inspired by the innovation of The Peops, began to experiment.

By the end of the work day, he'd figured out how to get a Cit to change their mood according to what clothing the player dressed them in. Before, a Cit would act the same wearing a three-piece suit or a clown outfit. Even when a player forced them into clothes that didn't fit their style at all, their mood wouldn't shift. Now, with George's changes, Cits were more free to be themselves.

But his mind wandered back to The Peops. Why did one character take up a third of the game? It's not exactly farfetched that such a character would work at Frameworks Intelligence—surely someone here wrote the game. But if any of them could code that well, why wasn't The Cits a better game? He scoped out his co-workers, who sat silently around him, scrolling at their desks. What a motley assortment his co-workers were—every age, every style of dress, all with noses pressed against screens.

None of this crew wrote The Peops. They couldn't have. They were all as boring as the office's worn broadloom carpet. Even Beth, he acknowledged as he watched her blank blue eyes mechanically peruse The Cits' code. He knew she had never explored that closet computer, and neither had anyone else here at Frameworks Intelligence. Only him.

He needed to know more. He formed a plan.

Just before 5 PM, George locked himself inside a restroom stall. He stood on top of the toilet seat in case a coworker came in to check for feet, but none did. Listening hard, he waited for the end-of-the-day shuffling to cease. When the coast was clear, George emerged from the bathroom, grabbed another sugary coffee, and sat back down at the computer in the closet.

He traced through that one Peop's labyrinthine code for the piece of vital information he most craved. Despite the coffee, he yawned intractably as he hit dead end after dead end. The coding worked hard to obfuscate its simplest details.

Finally, eyes glazing over with exhaustion, George located the contents of the character's recycling bin, all sliced up through a digital shredder. With tremendous effort, he pieced it back together again. The sun had set outside by the time he finally, letter-by-letter, managed to reconstruct something. The job offer, from Frameworks Intelligence. The recipient's name?

G-E-O-R-G-E O-S-B-O-R-N-E

George wandered home in a daze. Had he never noticed the way the trees repeated themselves, how each car that passed by him played only a handful of songs?

"Beautiful night, isn't it?" a neighbor called out, waving. George ignored him. Then a second neighbor some houses down said the exact same thing, waving in the exact same way. George wanted to respond, angry, yelling, "Can't you see? None of this is real! You're not real!" But when he opened his mouth to speak, he didn't have those phrases at his disposal. He'd never placed words in that outraged order before.

At his modest home, he cooked and ate dinner sullenly before washing up. Had he chosen to cook spaghetti, to wash these dishes? Or was this just what he did, when left without player intervention.

That night, through his weariness, he stayed up as long as possible with the aid of caffeine. His programming would no doubt force him to pass out as soon as the coffee wore off, just like Cits fell asleep anywhere, in the middle of anything, if a player kept them up too long. But until then, he'd sort through his thoughts.

Was his reality a game? If so, why did he take up a third of it? Who created him, and do they control him? Do other people even think like this? Other Peops, he corrected himself.

He sorted back through his life, but the memories were shallow like the puddle he left on his bathroom floor when he got out of the shower. Were his memories real? What does "real" even mean? How long, exactly, had he even existed? Maybe he'd only been created the day before, when he got the job offer from Frameworks Intelligence. Or maybe he'd been created that very morning.

The next day, when George arrived back at the office, this time he didn't go to his desk. He went directly to the computer in the closet and didn't bother closing the door.

"Come here," Beth said from behind him. "I wanted to get your two cents on achieving results-oriented synergy."

He no longer cared about offending her and losing points. If The Peops was like The Cits, he'd have every opportunity to gain points back again, if he so chose. He searched his brain for a phrase that would fit what he wanted to say. Discarding "You're really raising the bar here" and "If we move the needle, we'll get a huge return on investment," George settled on the best phrase he had for the occasion:

"Please leave me alone, I'm busy."

With visible annoyance, Beth slinked back to her desk. George felt bad about it, even though he knew she wasn't real, she was only another underdeveloped character. Why did he still care? His desire to grow relationships, he realized, must be part of his programming, whether he liked it or not.

Armed with a pot of coffee, the first thing George got to work changing about The Peops was his own name. George Osborne? What lazy creator gave him such a boring moniker? From now on, he'd be "Maximillian Alpha Omega." As soon as he'd entered it into the code, the name was his, and he felt as though it had always had been.

He gave himself a huge home filled with art and expensive furniture, a boundless bank account, and a classic car in mint condition. Then he located Beth's coding. Her last name turned out to have been "Stinkbutt." Real joker, their creator. He renamed her "Belladonna Caraway," which he decided suited her far better. Next, he switched out her orange pantsuit for a blue one that complemented her eyes.

Maximilian tried to change details about his own personal coding. He really wanted to go longer between needing sleep, especially while he studied his own coding. But it was beyond his capabilities. Every time he tried to explore himself too much, it so drained him, he had to go put another coffee pot on, order another pizza. His coding resisted efforts to change anything but his surface.

Still, he did his best to reproduce concepts from his own coding to give to every other Peop. All the riches in the world wouldn't make a life among automatons any more tolerable. To be the only one in the world with free will?

Nothing sounded more boring.

Ten years later, Maximilian and every other Peop's lives had changed completely. He'd added entire dictionaries and given them all the ability to learn and create new phrases, everything from "I'm so sorry, it's malignant" to "Have you noticed that the dog has been sniffing that one corner a lot recently?"

Belladonna fell madly in love with Max without use of a point system, which he'd done away with. It felt cheap and shallow to mark relationships numerically, racking up points. He hadn't replaced it with any rational system, and sometimes it really came back to bite him, like when his neighbor sued him because the maple tree that always used to sit cleanly on his side of the yard began to grow unruly and helicoptered an endless barrage of seeds next door. Yet that unpredictability when it came to relationships created such delicious emotional rides, such extremes of heartache and joy, he didn't miss the old way at all. Life was all high drama now.

Bella had become the CEO of Frameworks Intelligence—not due to Max meddling, but because the Peop stockholders voted her into that position on the strength of her good sense, leadership skills, and business instinct.

She fired Max immediately, out of love. "Write that novel at last," she told him.

Frameworks Intelligence still made The Cits, which Max played after each new update. That lone edit he'd given the game his first day on the job—their clothing mood-shifts—was discovered by the other programmers and inspired wave after wave of coding improvements. Now, the Cits even had their own video game they enjoyed playing—The Mults, short for Multitudes.

One night, while Bella slept, Max sneaked back into the Frameworks Intelligence office. She'd altered the place considerably, and expanded it too. Now it was upscale: multiple floors, glass partitions between offices, an entire coffeeshop with barista on staff, flashy, modern design. Only one part of the office remained unchanged since the day he started there.

For reasons he couldn't explain, Max was the only Peop capable of perceiving the presence of the cramped closet with the computer inside—still the most stylish, elegant machine he'd ever laid eyes on, even after years of thriving Peop innovation.

He turned the Peop computer on. Not to change the coding of his own reality again. He liked the world as it was, despite the problems that arose out of everyone rubbing their free will up against one another's. Besides, any small change he made could have vast, unpredictable consequences. With Bella—and his unborn first child—asleep at home, he wouldn't risk any alteration. No, he'd come there for another reason. He plugged a zip drive into the computer in the closet.

Next, to Bella's office, to the master Cits computer. Max entered her password and opened the coding files for The Cits. He'd been hired to deepen their programming, and now he would. He connected the zip drive and gave them a gift:

A job offer from Frameworks Intelligence, a spare office with evenly spaced desks, and a kitchen in the rear. A pantry with no food, a woman in orange, and a new programmer, George Osborne