Another failure at the game 2048 was recorded in the small black ledger. The result, failure. Time spent on the game, 17 minutes and 33 seconds. Other mundane details were filled in like date, time of day, mental state of the subject (one of 30 categories in a model designed by the most trusted psychiatrists available). The alien beings in charge of running things were losing their patience with Pemulis. His win column in the Karmic Life Ledger was growing sparser by the day while the loss column was growing comparatively crowded with thick black ink [you would think that an ultra-intelligent alien species sent to monitor, influence, and in many cases full-on control life on Earth would have systems less primitive than small leather-bound notebooks indexed by a vast library-like Dewey-Decimal system that are filled using cheap black ink pens but there you have it; some say that the aliens were worried about Russian hackers, though those might have just been rumors]. The alien flipped backwards through the pages in the small book he held in his small grey hands. While humans were vastly less advanced than his species and caring for -- or even understanding at any level -- them and their actions would be akin to a human rooting for a flea to, go on! Find a new host! Drink that host's blood! You can do it!, the alien felt sad for Pemulis. He had shown such early promise. Notebooks from years past showed rows full of wins. But lately, something had clearly changed. Some of the alien's colleagues believed the downturn was directly related to the dark days when Pemulis began fairly frequently reading the New Yorker. While this was obviously a serious new objective flaw in his character, the alien knew there was something more profound happening. Could it be his fascination with absurdly expensive clown bicycles built by British mechanics and sold to hipsters who don't understand either bicycles or economics? Sure, that was also disappointing for anyone gunning for Pemulis's ascendancy, but it still wasn't the, let's say, core impetus for his hamartia.
Pemulis steals a glance outside his large office window to the sun-soaked cobbled street below. The wind softly blows and old leaves from last Autumn shuffle slowly by on their way to an eventual gutter. The sky is blue today but the leafless trees give the scenery both a feeling and subtle appearance of greyness. It's Old Europe with frozen American grocery products and a whole lot of shiny new BMWs. Ever since his mid-life crisis hit circa three or four years prior, Spring has been a complicated time for Pemulis. Another calendar year rolls by, and then one day you find ten years have got behind you. No one told you when to run, you missed the starting gun. So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking, racing around to come up behind you again. The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older. Shorter of breath and one day closer to death! Pemulis's brain whirs back to life as the Pink Floyd lyrics circling his head dissipate and then disappear. In an alternate universe, Pemulis was doing something. He spoke Greek at parties on rooftop patios in European capitals while discussing his latest book and how winning that Gold Medal wasn't so impressive because the Russian who was his chief rival had been banned from competition prior to the event for the usual reasons. In this particular universe, however, Pemulis really kind of just steals glances. The sun has set now for another day and out the window that subtle appearance of grey has become an unmistakable objective literal grey.
The aliens have a sophisticated system for running simulations that, while far more advanced than the capabilities held by the humans on which they experiment and simulate, holds a sort of Steampunkesque quaintness and almost old world charm. Rather than calculating actuarial tables and building prediction systems and inputting probabilities computed with Bayesian generative models, the aliens build miniature biological replicas of the human world that have been manipulated both to (obviously) be much smaller but (necessarily) run much more quickly than reality. The alien assigned to Pemulis and his downward trajectory has been busy for months tuning parameters of his simulation, trying to find a correction or adjustment or anything that could be done to reverse his subject's decline. For a brief period in the previous year there was a widely held consensus that correcting Pemulis's hip problem might prove to be the silver bullet that the aliens had been searching for. None of the simulations -- once they were finally built and run -- came close to supporting the theory, however. It was one of the biggest disasters in theoretical applied anthromanipulology. Many of the aliens who had been on the project compared it to the laughable human attempts to unify the fundamental forces in physics into a Grand Unified Theory with a hilarious branch of theoretical physics called String Theory. As the winter leading up to Pemulis's 40th birthday dragged on, just as the aliens were ready to just kill Pemulis off for the greater good (the aliens really disliked failure) one "hail mary" simulation finally showed some promise.
Pemulis decides that though he didn't arrive in the office until shortly before the lunch hour, leaving at 5 pm is probably socially acceptable. He walks to the tram, steps inside, and finds a seat near the back. Following his usual pattern of behavior, he pulls his iPhone 12 out, and starts playing the game 2048. He swipes up, down, right, right, down, up, right, down, and so on. The tram lumbers through the traffic-filled streets and as it approaches his stop in the far eastern reaches of the city, something happens: Pemulis gets the 8192 tile! This is a serious breakthrough in his life and finally he feels that there might be some meaning out there after all. The 8192 tile is a coveted tile, of course, and to reach that level of the game is unprecedented. Pemulis's elation turns to exuberance as he metaphorically climbs out of a dark deep hole where his soul has been captured for as far back as he can now remember. The light at the periphery of the earthen dungeon is blinding. Pemulis remembers that today is his 40th birthday and he decides that to celebrate, he will drink a Starkbier.
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