Residual Income

Residual Income

This is a vampire heist tale with vivid imagery and a clever twist. Except I'm not fully clever enough to understand the twist.

You break into an apartment to find a writer in a future set in a technological city. The writer escapes into his panic chamber in the center of the house while you circle around, looking for information on him. You don't show up on cameras, which made me immediately think of ghost or vampire, thought it soon becoms clear.

The main big twist, which I won't write here, is about the vampire's method of feeding. What I am still pondering are the other facets of the game, not spoilers, but worldbuilding. It's not necessary to answer questions about that (ambiguous worldbuilding is often better than clearcut!) but I wonder how the place into the game. For instance, the author claims to have written a thousand or thousands of stories, and talks about not getting 'come-alive chips'. In our day, even the most prolific authors struggle to reach a thousand books (except, of course, Corín Tellado), so that combined with the idea of needing a chip to come alive made me wonder if this were an AI author, but that doesn't fit at all with the other themes. Maybe life is prolonged in this future world?

I'll try running through the game again real quick and see. Hmm, just noticed that the very first link is a different voice we tell to shut up. I'll have to see if that recurs. I also see a flower saying it looks like it comes from a virtual render, which would fit with my ai idea. I find a minor typo in the name of the writer's love; I remember the first time being surprised at the discrepancy but thought I had just misremembered (unless the typo is also intentional). The story says the guy has been writing for 50 years, so this isn't an expanded lifespan situation, this guy is really cranking about a book every few days. And the game says that his books were selling millions of copies, so is this guy a billionaire? No, because someone has his residuals, his 'owner'. So he's forced to make books in a book sweatshop?

That's why that original idea popped in my head. Couldn't the vampire be a reader, someone who desires interest and fun, so they turn to an AI that cranks out books, but finds it intellectually bankrupt? I doubt that's the intended story, but it was fun to analyze.

Anyway, I thought this interesting, fun to read, good to have in the competition.