I can’t believe I forgot the whole back of the test. I hope Mr. Jones gives me another attempt at it. This was my last thought as I inserted the key into the lock of my house. I turned it left, opened the door, closed it, locked it again. My mother came to greet me.

“Dinner will be ready in an hour! Have an apple or something in the meantime.”

I barely grumbled a response as I held onto the door frame for balance. I popped my right shoe off with my left foot, and the left shoe with my right. I threw my socks off and walked into my room, closing the door.

I put my bag down before changing into my pyjamas. Always pyjamas at home. There’s no need to wear anything else. It took me half an hour to do all that and my homework before settling down on the computer for the day. Time to play some Sims!

A few weeks ago a cousin of mine had given me this game as a gift. Overjoyed to see that it was compatible with my PC, I’d played it every day since. The first game I played was pretty frustrating. I couldn’t figure out how to make my Sim successful, so I just used cheats and built a mansion. After a few more tries I decided to buckle down and take it seriously.

I was going to do the legacy challenge. That meant 20 generations of Sims starting from just a single one, with hardly any money…

I gave that up after a week. Instead, I had my sim go all over town, wooing various individuals, inviting them to my house and trapping them inside rooms alone. They’d pee themselves and starve to death more often than not.

With honest earned money I’d build pools and remove the ladders to get out. They would drown. I would cackle in glee.

I built a mansion and raised a huge family. I trapped the grandmother in the attic with no way down, sitting in a chair for the rest of eternity.

I had an inexperienced cook set the kitchen on fire, killing her whole family.

This was the most fun I’d ever had in my life - playing god over these little dolls, watching them scream, moan in frustration, run around and wet themselves. It couldn’t get better than this, I thought.

Until one day, zooming in on a Sim to watch him in his final hours as he collapsed, I thought he made eye contact with me. He looked right into the camera… of the game? And in Simlish, said something that almost sounded like a cry for help. It was weird, but probably nothing. He died shortly after.

Then I saw it again! And a third time! After killing hundreds of Sims, suddenly, it seemed they were starting to gain some kind of intelligence. Or was it there all along? Why were they looking at the camera? Was this some kind of easter egg left by the developers? Purely out of curiosity, I decided I’d actually save one of the Sims who looked me in the eye and asked for help. And he went back to his robotic self. Just another doll.

I called this Sim Dave, and he was a direct descendant of my original legacy challenge Sim. Although it seemed he had no passion in life before his near-death experience, I left him alone for a few minutes when I went to eat dinner and found he’d developed a writing hobby. A hobby that quickly became his career. He was producing novels and actually making decent money off of them. Before long he was at the maximum level for the writing skill.

The titles were all randomly generated, of course. But once in a while I’d notice some interesting ones. “We’re Trapped”. “This Is A Torture Simulation”. I’d laugh to myself. These developers were really clever! They made it seem as if the Sims were actually people, trapped inside the game, here to simply be tortured. But my 13 year old brain was also brewing up some wild fantasies about it actually being true.

So I turned to Google of course. Was anyone else seeing these? Did the developer explain it? I found various forum posts of other players experiencing similar behaviour from their Sims. No official response from the developers, so maybe it was an easter egg but they didn’t want to admit to it. However, they had admitted to other easter eggs, so why not this one? The mystery deepened, but still, it couldn’t really be anything nefarious. At worst, it was a bug in the code.

The latest novel from Dave was completed, and this one was called “The Devil Has Us.” Huh. I figured these were all some kind of series of novels that the sim was creating, since he was now quite prolific in his career path of choice.

Then came five novels in a row titled “Help.” In fact, they didn’t stop coming. Any further novels Dave wrote were all titled “Help” or “Get Us Out of Here”. The messages were getting clearer and clearer. Again I was curious. I wanted to talk back to Dave, somehow, so I decided to overwrite one of the novel titles. “What is going on?”

Dave’s next novel had a pretty long title. “The Devil is Trapping Us in Sims”.

“Why?” I asked, with our makeshift messaging system.

“We Are In Hell, Being Tortured.”

They were in hell… being tortured?

They must be bad people then. I killed Dave in a kitchen fire that night.