Hello, and welcome to my Life of Steve contest entry. I don't really have too much to say about it other than that I hope you enjoy it. 

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Something in the world wasn’t right.

Alas, that seemed to be all Steve was certain of.

His world had always, for the most part, stayed the same. No grand events, no large wars, no real excitement. That was fine for Steve. Peace and excitement didn’t always mesh well, and Steve preferred the peace anyway. Peace was stable, and Steve was by no stretch of the imagination a fan of change. His life had always been peaceful, and he didn’t intend to change that.

Unfortunately, our intentions often differ from the events that go down in actuality, and that was why, at the current moment, Steve was running. He wasn’t entirely sure why. Something told him that he needed to run, now, and that’s what he did. Steve, as intelligent as he was, wasn’t one to ponder an instinct much. He ran from the city into the forest to which he had been told never to go. Another thing he wasn’t entirely sure of was why he had been told not to go into the forest. He wasn’t one to question things, though; it seemed wholly unnecessary and besides, he didn’t have the time to dispute the things that worked.

He slowed to a stop and when his blurry eyesight cleared itself up, Steve noticed that something was very, very different. He looked around. What was this phenomenon that he was observing? Surfaces jutted out a little from other surfaces, in stark contrast to the city he called home, which was made of cubes. He observed another strange sight, but he wasn’t quite sure what to call it. It was a tree that he was seeing, he knew that much, but it was different from all of the other trees he had seen in his lifetime. The ones he had seen were blockier than this and had corners instead of these odd curves. But why? 







Steve shrugged. It didn’t matter. Time to go back to the city, he thought. There didn’t really seem to be any purpose in his coming here. Thinking back on it, it was probably a bit silly that he came in the first place. All he had done was ducked out of his work. Steve was a builder. He enjoyed helping structures grow from a blueprint to a skyscraper, decked out with all of the latest technology.


Steve had something of an interesting relationship with technology. Technology had a habit of breaking around him, and he had to know how to fix it. So much of his world was technologically oriented, it didn’t make sense for anyone not to at least be a little tech-savvy. Many lived exclusively through their GUIs. It made sense - the GUI allowed for effortless storage of items and for easy access to information regarding your health. As fascinating as he found it, the usage of such life-altering technology made Steve a bit uneasy, so he tried to use it sparingly.






Steve was, to put it simply, tired. He sat down and leaned against a tree. The roundness felt odd. It was unlike anything Steve had ever experienced in the city. He didn’t have the time or desire to epiphanize too much. It’d be a waste of time. The odd feeling didn’t last for long, though. The tree morphed into the kind of flat, blocky, and utterly bland tree that Steve was used to.


This made Steve even more confused than he already had been. What was this, some kind of touch of pixelation? He wasn’t in a game, he could attest to that - so why was it seeming like he was? Steve was 100% ordinary. He had never tried to question that. Ordinary was okay. Ordinary was safe. He was no hero, no chosen one, no savior of the universe. Odd things happened to odd people. Ordinary things happened to ordinary people.


Of course, by that logic, Steve was far from ordinary.





Steve wasn’t exactly sure what happened after that. An explosion? A particularly large flash of light? He was knocked out cold.


He woke to a pixellated landscape, resembling that of a game. His memories were gone. His only instinct was to survive.

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That's it! I hope you enjoyed this little story.