“Out of Bounds” is out in The Future Fire

A really sad (but hopeful) science fiction story, “Out of Bounds” is out in The Future Fire.

It was so great working with The Future Fire again. This is my third story I’ve worked on with them and it’s always a great experience.

I wrote “Out of Bounds” after watching speed-runs of the game Portal (which is my favorite), in which players move outside of the game’s constraints. It was sort of revelatory to me, the way the constructed game-world can be seen from the outside, as if contained in a box. If you know how, you can disregard the constraints of the (game-)world and move independently from its traps and challenges. I thought that was a fabulous concept –akin to hacking, akin to what I remember reading about open source by writers like Douglas Rushkoff. To me, the speed-run “escape” from the constraints of the world was incredibly inspiring.

So I wrote this story in which two people fall in love in dire circumstances.

They are both prisoners being shipped to a mining planet. While in cryo-sleep on a long-range space transport, they experience cheap immersive simulations to keep their brains from atrophying. They can only ever meet within the constraints of these simulated illusions, controlled by those who are imprisoning them.

But one of them knows where the pixels of the illusion give way and and so their world – within its awful constraints – becomes rich, loving, and joyful. That is, until the simulated illusion is taken away from them when they arrive at their desolate destination. But by getting used to hacking an illusion, they acquired an attitude of non-complacency, of subversion and discreet non-compliance, which they are going to apply to the real world.

The story ends at an important cross-roads: the moment in which the characters have to decide whether they are able to work up the energy needed to exercise what they’ve learned about hacking the world.