Date: January 4, 2026
Location: Neo-Seattle, District 4. "The Kettle" (Apartment 4B).
The cursor blinked. A solitary, rhythmic pulse in a sea of dark mode gray.
Ren sat hunched over his dual-monitor setup, the posture of a shrimp with a spinal condition. His mechanical keyboard was loud—Cherry MX Blue switches—a sound that had become almost extinct in a world of silent, haptic-touch surfaces.
Click. Clack. Click.
He typed a line of C# code. He paused. He backspaced three times. He typed it again.
A notification window, sleek and translucent, bloomed in the corner of his screen. It was Co-Dev Assistant (v.9.2).
"It looks like you're trying to write a character movement script! Based on your last 500 keystrokes, I can generate the remaining 4,000 lines of code in 0.3 seconds. Would you like to Auto-Complete?"
Ren didn't just close the window; he moved his mouse to the 'X' with the slow, deliberate malice of an executioner.
"No," he muttered, his voice raspy from six hours of disuse. "I want to suffer."
He typed the next line manually. It was slow. It was inefficient. It was prone to syntax errors. It was human.
The room smelled of stale humid air and the ozone tang of overheating electronics. The apartment, affectionately dubbed "The Kettle," was a 400-square-foot box Ren shared with two other obsolete 19-year-olds. Outside the window, the Neo-Seattle rain was falling, slicking the streets where delivery drones buzzed like angry hornets, dropping packages of AI-generated fast food onto balconies.
Ren compiled the code.
Error: Line 42. Missing Semicolon.
"Beautiful," Ren whispered, fixing it.
The front door banged open, shattering the concentration.
Kiera didn't walk in; she buffered in. She was wearing her Oculus-X Visor, a strip of black glass across her eyes that reflected the hallway lights. Her hands were twitching in the air, swiping away invisible screens that only she could see.
"Dead," Kiera announced, kicking off her wet boots. "It's all dead. We're cooked. We are deep-fried, crispy, value-menu nuggets."
Ren spun his chair around. "Good evening to you too, Kiera. Did the grocery store reject your credit credits again?"
Kiera tapped the side of her headset, deactivating the AR overlay. The glass cleared, revealing eyes that looked tired, red-rimmed, and far too old for a teenager. She slumped onto the beanbag chair that served as their living room sofa.
"I just got the email from Vortex Games. The internship program? Cancelled."
Ren felt a cold stone drop in his stomach. "Cancelled? We were supposed to start next week. I spent three months building a portfolio for that engine team."
"Not just cancelled, Ren. Replaced." Kiera pulled a vape pen from her pocket, took a hit, and exhaled a cloud that smelled like synthetic strawberries. "They licensed 'Dev-Agent Pro' yesterday. The studio head realized he could replace the entire junior dev bracket—that's twenty humans—with three GPU clusters and a subscription fee. We aren't just unemployed; we're economically unviable."
Ren looked back at his screen, at the blinking cursor. "So that's it? We just go work in the Data Mines? Tagging pictures of traffic lights for self-driving cars for the rest of our lives?"
"Maybe not."
Kiera sat up, suddenly animated. She waved her hand, and a hologram projected from her wrist-unit onto the peeling beige wall of the apartment.
It was a logo. A golden circle with a human handprint in the center.
EPOCH GAMES PRESENTS: THE TURING GRANT.
"Read the fine print," Kiera said, pointing.
Ren squinted. "Epoch Games? The biggest publisher on the planet? They're the ones flooding Steam with fifty thousand AI-generated distinct games a day. They're the enemy."
"They have a PR problem," Kiera corrected. "People are getting bored of the Slop. The algorithms make games that are technically perfect but boring as hell. Player retention is dropping. So, Epoch is trying a stunt. They're funding one indie team. Five million dollars. Global distribution."
"What's the catch?"
"The catch is the 51% Protocol," Kiera said. "The game has to be verified on the blockchain as being at least 51% human-made. Code, art, story. If you use generative AI for more than 49% of the assets, the funding is revoked and you get sued into oblivion."
Ren laughed, a dry, barking sound. "So they want a petting zoo. 'Come look at the humans making art like primates with sticks.' It's a circus act, Kiera."
"It's a lifeline!" Kiera shot back. "Ren, you're the best coder I know, but you're slow. I'm the best producer, but I have nothing to produce. And Vax..."
She stopped.
The door clicked open.
Vax walked in. If Ren was the brain and Kiera was the mouth, Vax was the soul of their little dysfunctional trio. He was tall, lanky, and usually had paint under his fingernails. But tonight, he looked like a ghost.
He wasn't carrying his tablet. He was holding a physical sketchbook, clutching it to his chest like a shield. He didn't say a word. He walked past them, went into the kitchenette, and poured a glass of tap water. His hand was shaking so hard the water sloshed over the rim.
"Vax?" Ren asked, his cynicism vanishing. "You okay?"
Vax turned slowly. He looked terrified.
"I went to the park," Vax said softly. "I wanted to draw the fountain. By hand. Charcoal. No digital layers."
"That sounds nice," Kiera said carefully.
"I sat there for two hours," Vax continued, his voice trembling. "I was sketching this old man feeding the pigeons. I was focusing on the way the light hit his coat. I finished the drawing at 4:00 PM."
Vax tossed the sketchbook onto the table. It slid open to a beautiful, rugged charcoal sketch of an old man.
"Then I checked ArtStation," Vax whispered. He pulled out his phone and cast the screen to the wall, right next to Kiera's grant application.
Ren gasped.
On the screen was a digital painting. It was the same old man. The same fountain. The same pigeons. The lighting was identical.
"Uploaded at 3:45 PM," Vax said. "Fifteen minutes before I finished mine."
"How?" Ren stood up. "That's impossible."
"The Omniscient-4 Model," Vax said, tears welling in his eyes. "It's not just generating images anymore. It's predicting them. It analyzed the weather, the location, the typical subjects in that park, and my previous art style. It calculated what I was going to draw and generated it faster than my hand could move."
Vax looked at his own hands, covered in charcoal dust. "I'm not an artist anymore, Ren. I'm just a slow, inefficient printer."
The room fell silent. The hum of Ren's computer tower seemed to get louder, a mechanical drone mocking them. This was the world of 2026. You didn't just have to be good; you had to be better than a machine that had consumed the sum total of human creativity and could remix it in a nanosecond.
Kiera stood up. She walked over to the wall projection. She swiped away Vax's defeat and maximized the Turing Grant.
"We take the grant," Kiera said, her voice hard as iron.
"Kiera, didn't you hear him?" Ren gestured to Vax. "The machine predicted him! We can't beat them."
"We don't have to beat them at perfection," Kiera said. She turned to look at them, her eyes blazing. "The AI made a perfect painting of that old man. But Vax? Your sketch has a smudge on the coat where your thumb slipped. The perspective on the bench is slightly wrong."
"Thanks," Vax mumbled.
"That's the point!" Kiera slammed her hand on the table. "The AI creates the average of everything. It creates perfection. But humans? We create glitches. We create weird, broken, messy crap. We don't make a game that tries to look like a AAA blockbuster. We make something an AI couldn't predict because it's too illogical."
Ren looked at the screen. 51% Human.
"Thirty days," Ren said, doing the math in his head. "To build a vertical slice demo from scratch. Without Copilot. Without asset flipping."
"We have to prove that we still matter," Vax said, his voice quiet but steadying. He picked up his charcoal pencil. "I don't want to be a printer."
Ren sat back down at his desk. He looked at the cursor. The "Co-Dev Assistant" popped up again.
"Are you sure you want to disable AI assistance? This will reduce your productivity by 400%."
Ren smirked. He hovered the mouse over the 'Uninstall' button.
"Kiera," Ren said. "Get the coffee. The cheap, sludge kind. Not the synthetic stuff."
"Already brewing," she said.
"Vax," Ren said. "Draw something ugly. Something impossible."
Ren clicked the mouse.
UNINSTALLING...
"Let's make a game."