Oliver and Lloyd were best friends. It was sort of handy they had each other really, because they weren’t exactly the most popular kids in school. At 15, both were going through that ‘awkward’ stage of puberty where faces, bodies, pimples, just didn’t seem to fit and while they were intelligent and did okay at school, they were also very geeky and didn’t really fit in.
They’d known each other for years though and none of that stuff at school – not having the right friends, not being any good at sports, never even coming close to kissing a girl – didn’t really matter when they were together. They could just mess around on their computers and with D&D, after school and on the weekends, and block the rest of the world out.
In fact, that’s where we meet the boys now. On one balmy Sunday afternoon – Oliver is upstairs alone in his bedroom, as usual, waiting for Lloyd to arrive at his house. He’s got a new computer game and he can’t wait to show it off to his friend. But Lloyd is taking forever, and the temptation is getting even to the disciplined Oliver. So he’s ended up relenting a little and is playing around with some of the demos that come with it.
CHANGE YOURSELF™ looks a bit funny. Kind of like a make-a-sim sort of thing. Oliver decides he’ll have a quick go, and when it asks him to insert a name for his character – absent-mindedly types in Lloyd’s. Immediately, and this is the really clever bit, a sim-character appears on the screen that the more Oliver stares at, the more closely it resembles his friend Lloyd. Even down to the pimples and the exact same glasses that he wears.
Oliver stares at the computer screen, mouth agog. But that’s impossible, how did it…? But before he can really dwell over the strangeness any longer, a dialogue box appears over the image.
“MAKE CHANGES? YES/NO”