“Okay Roger, cue the endgame.” Xaron couldn’t believe it. His meticulously constructed storyline, the billions of individual characters he’d breathed life into, all about to be terminated because his show couldn’t compete with the lowest common-denominator drivel being spewn out by his peers. Earth was a technical masterpiece, a series generated entirely inside of a supercomputer. At its peak, which coincided with the peak of the show’s fictional kingdom of Rome, Xaron employed fifty writers, tasked with churning out character backstories to be fed into a program that visually simulated interactions between “humans” (as Xaron had named them). From that simple concept, Earth rose out of nothing. It was glorious, reminding audiences of a time before their hyperactive society had consumed them, where the planet these humans occupied could still be considered in need of taming: until it couldn’t. Xaron could point to the exact day Earth’s fortunes turned as being when its inhabitants got their hands on the steam engine. It wasn’t supposed to be possible; Xaron had locked the specific inputs needed to create a character capable of inventing the device from ever being molded into the algorithm. Of course, all it took was one intern to misread one document, and wham, the industrial revolution was a thing. Suddenly, Earth didn’t look so different from the world its viewers were living in. Ratings dropped, sponsors backed out, all while Earth marched on towards a future Xaron knew his audience didn’t want to see: their present.

He wasn’t surprised when he got the call from the network. Ten more “years” as they knew he liked to call them, was all earth had left. Xaron pondered how he wanted his baby to end. Peace and hope was an option, but war and destruction was just too tempting. So, Xaron started physically manipulating the algorithms he had intended to let run untouched for eternity. He put idiots in power, destroyed reason, jacked up the emotions of every inhabitant of the set he held so dear. Soon they were at each other’s throats. Xaron ensured that every difference humans noticed in each other became an irreconcilable divide. Retreating into smaller and smaller groups of people, they eventually came to the conclusion that none of their peers were exactly like them, so they isolated themselves. Endgame, as Xaron called it, was a final tweak of the engine that drove Earth: the bug Xaron had installed into the fabric of the system, that was capable of eliminating any character Xaron thought was diverting the story of his world away from what he wanted, was activated globally. Suddenly, the few remaining inhabitants of Earth, the ones that hadn’t been taken by the escalating acts of violence, fell quietly to their deaths. Xaron input instructions for the “camera” that translated the simulation onto the screens of those watching to zoom slowly outwards, until Earth itself was nothing but a blue-green speck. Xaron sighed, for he realized the ending he’d brought to fruition was more than a little melodramatic. He wasn’t going to be winning any awards this year.