Thanks for Playing (With Short Story)

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Thanks For Playing!
By P.V. Tims

Well, folks, as the Music of the Spheres reaches its final crescendo, the black holes disgorge their best-kept secrets and the firmament bursts open in swirls of gold and abstract, screaming pigment, we come, alas, to the end of this aeon’s episode! There’s just time to look at the scores and, I’ve got to say, on a personal note, what a joy it’s been to have you on the show. Really, you’ve been a wonderful civilisation! So much potential! So many inventions and innovations and moments of soaring genius! Honestly, I haven’t seen the game played so passionately in a billion epochs.
But does passion mean points? Let’s take a look at the score board and find out!
Ooh. Now, this – this is very interesting. You’re scoring so high for individual moments of greatness. I mean, figuring out the secrets of relativity before you even had the microchip to help you? Quantum mechanics? Your operas and art? All amazing, amazing achievements and you can see that our inscrutable and mysterious panel of judges just loved it: nine and tens across the board! If you were just being scored based on your high points, you’d be laughing all the way to the bank. In fact, let’s take a quick look at today’s top prize, shall we?
Wow! Cosmic transcendence! Now who wouldn’t want that? Think about what that could mean for a civilisation like yours: an endless utopian age unbound by the limits of physical law; perfect enlightenment and peace; nothing between idealised thought and practical execution. But is it going to be yours?
Well, you scored high on art, philosophy and science… but we need to factor in your goofs, too. Those World Wars were nasty and you DID stumble into a few genocides. And, let’s be honest, how many times were you planning on rebooting the same movie franchises? It was getting kinda cring there, towards the end. Plus, you decided that FTL travel was impossible really early on, and it scuppered your attempts at interplanetary colonisation, which, as we know, is a BIG deal for our judges. Let’s see what all that’s done to the scores…
Oh! Bad luck! You’re below this episode’s ‘Transcendence Threshold’. In fact, you’ve actually been knocked right down to into our ‘Hall of Shame’ and won today’s consolation prize: the complete eradication of your planet and species!
Well, you hate to see it, folks, but them’s the rules. Ta-ta until next time and, as always, thanks for playing!

About the image: I started by separately generating a background, character and other elements, including musical notes and flourishes using my own doodles, stock images cribbed from the web and previous AI images as starting points.Then I assembled them into a digital collage and fed them back into DDG as a base-image, along with the text prompt. It was a fair bit of work, but I think the end result was worth it.