Beta Tester
By Charles Payseur
Somewhere a programmer was crying. Noah knew it as surely as he knew the whole virtual environment around him was about to collapse. But really, why give the player a shovel if you didn’t expect them to try and dig with it? It was hardly Noah’s fault that the programmers hadn’t thought to either restrict digging, or bother to figure out what was underneath the top three inches of simulated earth.
With a grunt, he cleared another small square of dirt. He had been working in a tight circle, curious to see what would happen if he managed a complete 360. The environment was already rebelling, the sky an unnatural shade of violet and the landscape stuck in a fifteen-second loop of a dog chasing a squirrel toward an abandoned house.
Survival horror. Noah never
