unfathomable. exe by Ben Allee
You ask it for an answer. It suggests an “idle game.” Though you’re unaware, quick research shows that they are video games you do not play, but set in motion and then set aside, observe. A cookie clicker, paperclip maker, score increaser, hardly supervised. You take its advice.
Download too quickly, upon first boot you are unsure. Then a tentative click, engaging, to see how sedentary value might awaken. So it does. A while later, the number of click-widgets rises to your quiet satisfaction. A few more taps you offer and it’s off, score compounding like a number saucer flying for the sky. This, you find, feels rather nice.
Hours pass, more than you’re okay to measure, as the score’s tens places become hundreds, thousands, millions, syllables compounding prefix-like to form comma-ridden countings of unfathomable size. That night you feel your finger twitching in your sleep, synaptic rush repeating clicker’s rewards as you dream.
The next days lose themselves in hippocampic waste while the engine reaps its greedy life—you had not expected such a want in you to bloom, had not anticipated the high climbing of this ever-greater thing. Wipe your bleary eyes. You’re good at this clicking business, getting idler, getting better. The widgets’ consequence reduces, simmers down, the game abstracted into incremental matter built to flatter you alone, while the score shows logarithmic growth unbounded. Weeks pixelate, resolve, it seems, to canny algorithms autonomous and keen. You’re hardly clicking anymore, but still the clickings bind—what had you done before? Unsure.
Click again one later evening to keep the ticker gaining, a single press while many hours pass, to watch as trillions father octillions unto quattuordecillions and you’re beaming for such progeny devised—there is nothing nonexistent, all claimed within a hundred and eleven oughts, each microcosm caged inside the loop circumference spiral of the zeros, clicked, unclicking anymore.
Ages later, you no longer lift your finger as the numbers ever multiply, claiming universal matter in each oblong iris while, somewhere behind you, everyone burns, but it was right. It was right. For every click you’ve offered, it was right.
Benjamin’s prose and poetry appears in X-R-A-Y, BULL, Revolution John, Roi Fainéant, and other journals and anthologies. His debut short fiction collection, MEDIAC, was published in 2025 by Anxiety Press. He lives with his wife in Athens, Georgia, where he works in digital marketing, is drafting a novel or two, and writes arts and culture criticism when he has the inkling.
