‘Why is the multiverse always so crap?’ I screamed petulantly, stamping my feet, all six of them. That’s a joke, by the way. I don’t really have six feet. I don’t actually have any feet because I’m a giant worm. I was in foul humour – nothing ever seemed to work out for me. I’d been trawling through alternative realities for hours and had come up with nothing but rubbish. ‘Isn’t that always the way,’ I commented sourly to myself, ‘thousands of channels to choose from and there’s nothing on them but shit.’ Isn’t this isn’t this always the way always the way I moaned but no one was listening. Even I wasn’t listening to myself at this stage. As usual I was alone by the console trawling away trawling away trawling away through the realities. Flicking feverishly from one to the other, not even paying any attention to what I was doing. Why is the multiverse always so shit I cry out? Why is it always rubbish? I’m sitting here trawling through alternative realities; I’m standing here on the deck trawling away trawling away. Pulling in the nets, pulling in the nets, pulling in the nets bringing in nothing but rubbish. The rubbish of the deep – plastic bottles, old broken sunglasses, e-cigarettes, polystyrene beads, dental floss, screen protectors for mobile phones, hair-brushes without any brushes on them, plastic dolls with their eyes missing which stare up from the nets smiling their empty smiles at me. I’ve entered into the plastic doll phase I think, struck by a sudden nameless horror – everything I see is a reflection of my own inner death! Thinking this I am immediately transported to another world, another reality, another life. I’m searching for the game-maker, trying to track him down, posting queries on every internet forum that I come across but I never get anything back. If the game-maker is out there then he doesn’t want to be found. Why would he, it occurs to me. The very structure of the game would preclude the players from accessing the mind of the programmer who programmes their reality. That’s the prerogative of the game-maker – to render himself invisible, to remove himself from the reality which he has created. That’s what it means to be the game-maker – it means that you can’t ever be found. The dolls are all smiling so sweetly at me, their empty eyes setting up strange resonances in my psyche. I’ve been here before I think, but then immediately forget the thought. Something is making me feel unbearably sad and the tears start to trickle slowly but surely down my gaunt shrunken cheeks. I used to have a life I realized. I had a life to lead. Once. A long long time ago. Unintelligible deteriorated fragments of innumerable recycled thoughts run through my head. The garbage banks of my memory are disgorging their cargo on me, swamping me under a deluge of rubbish. The memory banks of the multiverse are emptying their nets over me, swamping me under a million smiling empty-eyed doll-faces.