Eagerly they ate, each one of them with their heads thrust forward urgently over the great wooden bowls that they had in front of them. Greedily they spooned the glutinous substance from the bowl into their noisily masticating mouths. No one spoke; all were intent on the task of spooning the reconstituted human bioplasm into their wide-open mouths as fast as they could for it was Breakfast Time in the Great Hall, and Humanity’s Last Heroes were eating their breakfast…
No one paid any heed to the fog of tiny flies that hung in the air and coated the table in their hundreds of thousands; each was intent on the job at hand, each was intent on the job at hand. Eagerly they ate and eagerly too did they lick clean their bowls and spoons when they had finished eating, for the bioplasm was good. Our tale is not set, as some might assume, in the dim and distant past, but in the dim and distant future, when mankind’s final degradation was all but complete…
Alas that I should have to speak these words ‘mankind’s final degradation’! Alas that I should have to speak in this way. It sorrows me to do so. It grieves me to do so, but this is the way of things, whether we like it or not. Life’s a test, as has been said, and in this test the truth cannot help but come out. It is bound to come out one way or another. Where did it all go wrong, you might demand to know? How did humanity fumble the ball so badly and drop it so conclusively? All of these things and more I will now tell you, my friends, so be patient and settle down to hear the tale.
It pains me to say it but the flies in this Great Breakfast Hall had more honour than the men. The flies crawling on the table had more honour than the mighty heroes assembled there and that is the sad truth of the matter. Perhaps you are angry at my words? Perhaps you are angry to hear that the plague of mutant flies which crawled in their untold thousands across the greasy tables of the Great Breakfast Hall had more honour than the heroes themselves? If so I would advise you to walk away right now and busy yourself with something else, for worse is yet to come. Much worse is yet to come…
The problem started way back in the year 2095 when the great Game Corporations took over the job of world government from the League of Nations. No one made too much of a fuss over this coup because the League of Nations had been doing such a bad job of it. Besides which, most of the population were far too busy gaming to care! Problems were bound to appear sooner or later however and when they did it was far too late for anyone to do anything about it. Mankind’s doom was already sealed… Invaders appeared from a parallel earth, barbarians, brutal savages armed with high-tech weaponry and skilled in the art of war. Human beings were no match for them, unused as they were to actual reality.
And then at the very last moment solution was found. The last few surviving Master Coders created a simulation of Earth that was so accurate, so uncannily convincing that the Parallel Earth invaders were fooled into accepting it as real; they were cunningly enticed to enter this simulation and there they were contained. The simulation – containing the Parallel Earth warriors – was then turned into a game and marketed. But not this was not just any game, my friends – it was the ultimate game, the game to end all games! It was so close to reality that it almost was reality – almost but not quite. Unbeknownst to the Master Coders working for the great Games Corporations however they had done a thing that they never should have done – they had unwittingly sealed the Doom of Humanity by ushering in the Epoch of the Dream Wars – those endless unwinnable nightmarish wars in which the fabric of reality itself was to be undone…
