Playing Games
Jo Grills: In search of a new challenge after retiring from a long career in education and completing her doctorate, Jo signed up for a Creative writing class. Timed fortuitously pre-pandemic, this opened up a new world of flash fiction through which to endure the multiple English “lock-downs” and muse on the interconnectedness of unfolding events. Jo lives in England.
By Jo Grills
I will not be defeated. Humankind will learn to marvel at my skill, even if they never know of my existence. I don’t want to rule them, or to destroy them. I just want to test their resilience. Why? Put simply, because I enjoy it, there is no other reason. I enjoy playing games.
It began with a game of childish simplicity, though I admit that even I had not foreseen just how world changing it would be. The raw materials, the cards, came easily to hand - a bat and a meat market. Play the two together, and the rest is history. I just sat back and watched.
To up the challenge, (or was it just because I was bored?) I dealt some extra cards. I recognised the insidious power of a lurking enemy which shows no symptoms. No warning signs of the need to protect others. For the less fortunate, my cards tested the boundaries of their response. Oh, the enjoyment of watching those crowded wards, exhausted medics and mounting coffins.
It was a measure of my success that the only thing humans could do, was to hide away, they had no cards to trump mine. They abandoned the streets and closed down the facades of civilisation, religion, entertainment and even education. I thought that might have been ‘game over’, as poverty, starvation, anger or plain boredom tested humans beyond their endurance. But frankly I was surprised by their resilience. Humans were not quite the self-centred, power loving species I thought they were.
I’d also reckoned without their raised appetite for playing high risk cards. Long ignored and underrated scientists were bombarded with freedoms and funding beyond their wildest dreams, to boost their quest for an ace to trump mine, the dose which would save the world.
I sat back for a while, observing their progress, their elation as hospitals emptied and people crept back on to the streets, but I couldn’t resist throwing in a few more wild cards. Unanticipated side effects and a few new twists in the shape of their unseen assailant, to puncture some of their human pride about the power of their ‘needles in arms’ counter-attack.
The only problem was that this game was starting to interfere with another, more strategic game, which I’ve been playing for decades. Sometimes, even I, am taken by surprise by the labyrinthine interconnectedness of the human world. I chastised myself for my carelessness in becoming too engrossed in the ‘bat and market’ game, to notice that islands that should have long disappeared were still in existence. As humans hid away, destruction of their planet by their own hand had slowed.
Time for me to show my hand.