Life Itself was a dreamer's project, an artistic endeavour, not a business proposition. That had been clear from the start; it had all the hallmarks of a video game but without, well, a game.

Strictly observation only. Well, who would ever really go for that?

Except.

Except...

Keys had seen Millie before he met her, and hadn't long met her when he found he loved her.

Millie felt real. Not manic-pixie-dream-girl-come-to-wake-me-from-my-drudgery real, but actually real. Like she was in 1080p resolution and everyone else was 720p, barely perceptible but you knew it when you saw it. A cappuccino in a world of lattes, even though her order was a medium coffee with cream and two sugars. Engaging. Questioning. Determined.

He kind of disliked her to begin with, mostly because he only knew her as the one who kept beating him to the highest score in most of their exams. It was annoying to always be second to ask the questions, to no longer be the only genius of the room, to be so thoroughly invisible to her that in their second year she forgot he'd been a row in front for all their core classes the year before. Jealousy was ugly, and he was grateful later that it hadn't completely blinded him.

A group project had thrown them together. The others were all nice people who would inevitably do well in some dull corporate IT department bitching about their boss around the water cooler someday, but Millie was the only one who responded to his "could we?"s with "let's try!"'s

Their ideas spiralled off each other, bouncing and building and cascading until -

"No player interaction!"

"No player interaction? So what, they just... watch pixels on a loop? And that's supposed to be fun?"

"No - the thing is, they won't be looping. They'll grow, develop, change over time. Unique NPCs, in an environment that becomes more enriched as the player watches - even when nobody watches. Artificial intelligence, left to learn. Left to grow."

Keys knew about growth.

Once upon a time he'd been Wally the nerd shuffling from school to computer, worrying his mother with the time he spent outside his own head, waiting for the day he figured out how to live there. Waiting for the day things started to make sense, when he could show people what he meant instead of just... describing it.

His first encounter with video games was watching his older cousin playing something with Mario in - he was too young to remember exactly what. Then came Pokémon, Final Fantasy, GTA at a friend's house, Kingdom Hearts, Call of Duty also at a friend's house... franchise after franchise, game after game, experiencing the story instead of tallying the wins. Something that bit more than a book or film, that you could visit.

That you could almost change.

He was seventeen when a friend called him Keys for the first time, laughingly, referring to how long he spent on the computer trying to emulate what he'd seen in other games. Some of them made it onto Newgrounds but most languished as his ideas ballooned until they were too big for him to build alone, expanding in his brain and heart to encompass a lonely longing to create something that would surprise him too.

Hours of his free time was spent outlining, creating, drawing, developing and it still wasn't enough.

His desktop could barely handle the software he loaded onto it, trying to build something more tangible than dry words on a page.

The words weren't enough.

Weren't comprehensive enough, precise enough, and always left room for doubt. So, so much doubt.

And honestly? He always wanted to see the worlds he built.

He wanted them to grow.

He didn't want to be the only one who could see them, and only when he closed his eyes and dreamed.

"She's the genius, really."

Watching it back, he wondered if Millie could see his adoration painted on his face, bubbling out of his throat with every word, as easily as he could.

Watching her face as she watched the interview, he wasn't sure if he was happy or not that she remained oblivious.

Imagining a game is exciting - building it, a little less so. Keys' fingers flickered love through the code they wrote, stitched care through the patches for the inevitable bugs, always, always, because if love and care and passion wasn't there, even faintly, he'd have been bored to tears.

It was unholy am on day oh-god of oh-no in the project, and he was creating NPCs just as he had been for three weeks now. They were just outlines that, if Millie's engine worked, would fill in their own gaps to become "people" worth watching, but there had to be that initial spark.

He believed that if her engine didn't work, it would be because their dream wasn't possible with the technology in existence.

(Secretly, he believed even if it wasn't possible, she'd figure out how to do it anyway.)

"Nothing comes from nothing,

Nothing ever could."

The song span through his head as he started planting the metaphorical seeds of digital life into the build, tweaking as he went and patching bug after bug.

So he wrote the (hopefully) preliminary loops for the NPCs. Each one had a point - the woman at the waterfall taking water back to the village, the man guarding against predators from the jungle - and just after hitting number one hundred he also hit a wall blocking his inspiration.

A guy, randomised body and currently no brain. Basic, boring, banal. Wakes up, gets breakfast, does his job, goes home. Same as the last one, and the one before that, and before that...

Millie started singing under her breath again, and Keys smiled.

Well, why not give a working guy a dream?

LOVELORN ID.0BE1

Friendly, dedicated, cheerful

Enjoys his work, enjoys his life, but is looking for the perfect girl.

Likes: swings, bubblegum ice cream, medium coffee with cream and two sugars, weird funny and Mariah Carey.

What could be the harm of creating something whose artificial heart beat so similarly to his own?

"I'm sorry. I'm taking the deal."