The boy was losing. His older brothers were ahead of him by all standards and as the time passed, the gap only widened.

Their father presented each boy with an identical set of the game called Life and each of them jumped into growing their own world.

The older ones pulled ahead right away. They quickly created water and the temperature achieved the level acceptable for life to appear. In no time, they were able to brag about having blue-green algae and oxygen. The youngest one was frantically trying to tame volcanoes and lightning bolts, confusing the algorithms and setting mutually exclusive goals.

While the older brothers’ tribes rounded up prey, the mammals of the Kid had only just begun crawling out of the water.

When his first primates appeared, the obedient, shaggy know-it-alls of his brothers were great at striking fire.

Every so often their father would abruptly interfere in the game, sending floods, glaciers, and meteorites. Those interferences, which he called rebalancings, brought discord and chaos. Such disasters threw the players off – a part of the so-called “units” would perish and the remaining ones needed to be urgently reprogrammed, considering the newly gained experience. It was a grueling ordeal requiring a fair amount of player’s focus.

The older brothers quickly learned to anticipate their father’s next strike. They created adequate shelters and fortifications, so many of the units survived.

The youngest couldn’t boast about such foresight. In the heat of the moment, he made countless mistakes and his unfortunate souls got the worst of it. After every “rebalancing,” the Kid fell further behind, so dismayed that he expected the oncoming Global Catastrophe, ending Level One.

The Catastrophe was somewhat of a subtotal that could spell the end for any competitor. Nothing like it had ever happened before, the minor tricks of rebalancing were nothing compared to the upcoming clean up.

Level One was considered complete if the civilization not only survived the Catastrophe and its consequences, but also demonstrated population growth.

So the older brothers prepared.

Calculated.

Checked.

The day before the Catastrophe, each of them had a highly developed technological society that had long since forgotten about wars and epidemics.

Forty billion well-fed intellectuals indulged in comfort and prosperity with no knowledge of cold or hunger completely relying on technology. They were programmed to think positively. The air temperature did not change by more than a few degrees, and any kind of manual labor had long been automated.

The units didn’t even need to push a button. A mental command instantly transformed into an electromagnetic impulse, and the rest was “only a matter of technique,” something the older ones knew pretty well.

The Kid didn’t get into it as much. He was playing with childish joy and spontaneity. His miserable seven billion units lingered in hunger and poverty, and his overstrained and stressed “one percent” suffered from internal conflicts, competition, and stress.

The units did not live, they survived. The boy suspected he was not doing everything correctly, but he did not have the understanding, the experience, the time, or the patience to fix it.

Undoubtedly, his brothers’ creations were much more fortunate, but the control program was built the way that the units considered themselves to be creatures of free-will, making choices and decisions independently. They had only themselves to blame for all of their troubles and failures, and they took credit for any achievements and merits they accomplished, which was also a part of the algorithm.

Then came the day of the Global Catastrophe. By that time the civilizations had accumulated an impressive technological potential. Even the slow people of the Kid had enough energy to wipe off all life from the face of the Earth more than once, to say nothing of the highly developed units of his brothers.

That day, the father easily broke through their firewalls, created sufficient system errors, and implanted destructive thoughts into the right heads. And then, Her Majesty the Catastrophe swept away everything the brothers had so painstakingly crafted. Like an angry mother tired of asking the unruly kids to clean up the toys, kicking loads of blocks, toy tanks and miniature soldiers off the table.

The Kid witnessed the tiny bright flashes on the play field, which spread around the fire wave like rings on the water. The circles blended together turning cities into flaming ruins, and each explosion swirled into a tiny white mushroom.

Is it really the end and we have to start all over? thought the Kid, looking at the collapse of his long-suffering civilization. Will I have to sort the boring algae and oxygen again?

But there was another, final stage of Level One ahead of him. The one that had to total the results.

The father had calculated everything with extreme precision. Despite the fiery tornado that raged throughout the planets, each player still had a handful of units scattered around their worlds. They were destined to determine the winner of this round. And that is where the older brothers started having problems.

Yes, due to the great technical training and the impressive resources, their civilizations were not completely wiped off the earth, unlike the Kid’s world. However, the units themselves, deprived of the help of their electronic servants, wound up being absolutely unable to survive in extreme conditions. Even with the direct threat to their lives gone, more than enough supplies, and the walls of the bunkers having stood up to the attack, the majority of the units died in the first days after the Catastrophe. From that point on, the population decreased steadily. The change of the algorithm did not help the situation, the intense mental shock of that power almost killed them all.

The Kid’s playfield, though, was not as bad. Years of unskillful ruling had taught his creations to sustain hardships and there was no need of reprogramming for them. The units quickly adjusted to the new conditions. Some went on to live underground, some learned to live amidst ruins, others settled in the mountain caves.

Soon enough, the population of the younger brother started to grow! That was a win.

The father apparently, was not surprised.

“So, congratulations, Son. You are going to the next Level. Your units will get rid of the need to sleep and eat, and they will have new abilities: telepathy, controlled regeneration, telekinesis, and teleportation. And most importantly, during the entire Level Two, there will be no rebalancing, which you hated so much.”

***

The man pressed his feet against the rusty steps and his back against a heavy, cast-iron manhole cover. Routinely he pushed open the lid with a heavy thud and climbed out of the vault and onto the gray snow.

The man got on his feet and enjoyably took a breath of the frosty July air with his nose. He rolled up the sleeve of a worn-out jacket and tried to see the face of an old mechanical timepiece in the twilight. Seven in the morning. For over fourteen years of nuclear winter, the man had learned to distinguish between the many tiny shades of gray and black, from pitch black darkness to midday twilight. Something was definitely off today. It was too bright for seven in the morning. He traced the horizon looking for an answer before he suddenly froze. In the east, high above the skyline, a bright spot was trying to shine through the milky veil, something the man had not seen for almost a decade and a half.

Fascinated by the long-forgotten miracle, a brilliant, vibrant, kaleidoscope of bright, pleasant memories flickered through his mind. A smile of pure delight grew on his tired, scruffy face.

“Thank you, Lord,” whispered the man. Then he rushed to the open manhole and, with a hollow echo, shouted into the darkness, “Children, get out of there! Annie! Throw something on Stanley and get up here quickly! I will show you the sun!”