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The vicar gritted his teeth. There it was again! An irritating thumping sound which wasn’t quite loud enough to be heard over his sermon, but which was just insistent enough to be noticeable. The sound had an irregular rhythm, and it interrupted the measured cadences of the vicar’s voice. This time, the vicar finally managed to isolate the source: a young boy, somehow scruffy even in his Sunday best, was idly swinging his heels against the hollow wooden stand of his pew. What was his name? Michael? Daniel? One of those. At any rate, his mother was Mrs O’Reilly, a good God-fearing woman who faithfully attended all the church services. She should know better than to let her son act like that, thought the vicar, and caught her eye. He gave her miscreant son a significant look, and watched in satisfaction as her face reddened. She applied a quick, sharp twist to her son’s ear – what was his name? Peter? Philip? – and a glare that promised that there was plenty more of that, should it be necessary, which it had better not be. That’s better, thought the vicar, happily settling back into the familiar sermon.

✪

The boy – whose name was Simon, as it happened – behaved himself satisfactorily for the rest of the service, and escaped further molestation. His mother complained about his misdemeanour over Sunday lunch, to which Mr O’Reilly responded with his customary lugubrious disinterest. Simon mumbled an apology and kept his gaze on his plate. He had learned that this was the quickest way to deflect his mother’s ire, and, sure enough, she soon turned her displeasure on Mr O’Reilly, who had opened a second bottle of the bitter ale he favoured. Shortly afterwards, Simon was excused to escape to his room. He firmly closed the door, changed out of his constrictive shirt and tie into his customary hoodie, and settled in front of his computer with a sense of relieved homecoming.

Simon loved computer games. His shelves were lined with them; he had magazines about the latest releases; he even had small figures of characters from his favourite games. His mother would periodically demand in exasperation how he could spend so much time and money on the confounded things – “When I was a girl, we spent time together, as a family!” – to which Simon’s invariable reaction was an ambiguous shrug of his shoulders. If pressed, though, he might have said something like this: that the games offered him an escape to his own world, a world away from the bullying at school and the shouted arguments at home, where no one told him how to behave, or dress, or think, where he was in control. His favourite games were the ones which allowed him to control civilisations. He would take his chosen tribe from its humble origins, and direct them until they had built mighty cities and powerful armies; then he would send those armies to expand his empire, until the whole world acknowledged that his were the mightiest people. He could lose himself in these games until the small hours of the morning, when he would stumble into bed, bleary eyed and foggy minded, and dream dreams of conquest and glory.

While Simon waited for his saved data to load, he wondered what it would be like to live in one of his games. Probably not so fun, unless I was a king, he thought. But even then, he would soon die, and be replaced by another pixelated monarch, and the game would move on without him. It was a lot better to be outside the game, to watch events unfold over hundreds and thousands of years. Being a king would be alright, but being a god was infinitely better.

But I’m not a god. It had not been Simon who had designed the game; he had only the vaguest idea of how a computer worked to present sounds and colours and stories and whole worlds on their screens. Simon was just using what someone else had made. That didn’t make any difference to the characters in the game, of course. To them, Simon was a god, and they obeyed his commands or suffered the consequences.

The game had loaded, but for once, Simon did not plunge into it. Instead, he sat staring into space, and chewed on his fingernail, while his thoughts whirred and spun with unaccustomed energy.

✪

The next Sunday, Simon once again sat next to his mother in church. The vicar was in fine form, and, though he had been speaking at interminable length already, showed no sign of flagging. Simon looked around at the captive flock, most of whom were showing signs of restless boredom; then, with a smile more sinister than mischievous, plugged his mind into what he had found: what he thought of as ‘the code’. Gently – he had already learned to be cautious when manipulating ‘the code’ – he applied his mind just so, and sat back happily to watch the calamity that ensued.