Twelve seconds.
How had it all started? He’d been leading such a normal life by the average human’s standards.
He had a few “real life” friends. They called him Tom. Everybody else was met online. There he was known by many different names, but most common was CowS1ayer. He had a few true friends online but most of them he’d never met in person and a few he’d never even seen the faces of. But they had still hung out and played different games together.
Eleven seconds.
That’s why he loved the games so much. In physical life he was just a guy who had created a few video games with mediocre success. But in the games he was everything. He was a hero. He was a mastermind. He was a thug, a gun-shooter and a race car driver. He had lived in the Wild West, saved the mythical kingdom and pulled off the greatest heist in modern history. He was everything and everyone but himself.
Ten seconds
He woke up like every other day since the past infinity. There were chip crumbs all over his face and shirt and he smelled awful.  He rolled over and placed his feet on the ground, sitting up on the couch. The chip bags underneath his feet crunched whenever any pressure put onto them changed. After blinking a few times to make sure he was awake, he moved to check his email and social media accounts. He then got up and exited the room to go take a shower.
Nine seconds.
He put the last dish in the dishwasher. Now that he was clean, fed, and had cleaned up the dishes from his food, it was time to go to work as always. He walked over to his plush leather chair. All four of his computer monitors were already on, still left from when he forgot to turn them off last night.
As he opened up the correct programs and started typing in code, he heard a soft click, as if a door were closing. He turned around to look at his own apartment door, but no one was there. He turned back and continued typing in code for a few more minutes until he was sure he heard the creaking sound made by the floor when someone walked on it. This time he spun around, but again there was no one there. He stared at his surroundings for a moment, testing to see if he could hear the noise again or if he had just been imagining it. When all that was to be heard continued to be silence, he shook his head and turned back to his computer to continue his work.
But then, after what could have been no more than a minute, it hit him. Literally, it hit him. There was a flash of pain in the back of his head and then black nothingness as he slumped forward unconscious.
Eight seconds.
He woke up. Or had he? He felt as if he had woken up, but there was nothing around him. Only a flat surface he was standing on. He wasn’t even sure he was standing on something either, because like all the nothingness that surrounded him, he could not see it. The only indication that it was there was that he could feel it. Everything surrounding him was nothing. He didn’t see white or black because that would be a color, that would be something. Nothing had no color, it just didn’t exist. Nothing was nothing, the absence of everything.
Seven seconds.
All he could see was himself, but it was not long until he realized that he could “focus” better. In his head he imagined the command console, where he would usually type code in to create his games. But rather than it just be an image you see in your mind’s eye, but can’t really keep a hold of, he could focus on it. He could imagine the letters appear in it as clearly as if he could really see it right in front of him. He imagined strands of code being typed in that created a terrain, and imagined the code being run. All of a sudden, grassy terrain appeared around him!
He was amazed. He thought of in his head an image of a cow. A three-dimensional model of a cow, not just some flat image you see on a painting. He imagined the cow appearing a few meters away from him, and appear it did! In his imaginary console in his head, he imagined code appearing that made the cow move around, eat grass, and occasionally ‘moo’/ When he imagined the code being run, suddenly the bovine sprang to life and behaved exactly in the way he had imagined the code would make it. He had created life.
Six seconds.
It wasn’t long until he had buildings created and other people walking around. He kept shaping things in his head and making them a reality. He created a sky and a sun, and he created the people to be interactive and to know him, He never gave himself a name, everyone knew him so there was no need. Slowly he build towns, cities, people, objects, everything.
Five seconds.
He looked around at all he had made. He lazily floated around, observing people as they went along their pre-programmed actions. He wanted more interaction; he wanted someone he could truly share this with.
Four seconds.
On and on he labored programing in hundreds and thousands of options and reactions people could have to things. He added randomizers to make sure he didn’t always know what they were going to do next. He gave each person and individual personality, and had them react to situations in different ways. He had them store information so they could have different relationships with everyone and remember things.
He created them to be as close as they could to real life.
Three seconds.
That is why he did not like the term “real life.” This was his real life now. He had no idea how long he had been in here, maybe it had been years, maybe it had been minutes.
He had spent time wondering how he got in this place. But no matter what he did he could not “code” himself out of the game. He never felt hungry or tired, although he could program in food and beds for himself to eat and rest on. There was nothing he needed to sustain himself. He just existed.
Two seconds.
It might have been that he made his people too realistic and gave them too many choices. Somehow somewhere someone had created dissent among some people toward him. At first he found things such as graffiti art sprayed on a wall against him, saying mean things or portraying rude images. But then people began to get really mad, and there were riots against him with large groups of people in attendance. Yet he couldn’t find it in himself to simply change them and force them to like him by programming in that behavior. He wanted them to like him on their own, without him controlling their every action. It felt wrong, and made them feel less real.
One second.
He remembered all these things as he sits inside an old fashioned guillotine, the giant blade hovering high above his exposed neck. He is wondering what will happen if he dies. Will all this disappear, as if it had never existed? Will he go wherever people go when they die? Will there be nothing? Will he wake up and find that all this has been a dream? Will this angry mob of people surrounding him and their home-made guillotine miss him? It is too late, because the few precious seconds they have given him are over and the man holding the rope attached to the blade tugs, letting the blade fall down.
Time is up.