The Pedestrian’s Fear of the Infernus

He felt like one of the pedestrians in a Grand Theft Auto game. Not San Andreas, because then he could imagine moving to a small shack in the woods away from it all. No, he was stuck in Vice City, his existence in the sordid metropolis bounded by cruel fences and vast, unbroken, uncrossable ocean, the planes from the airport seeming merely to circle endlessly, taunting him, and never going anywhere. And he wasn’t one of the strutting, swaggering, skanky women, always ready with a quick insult; nor a muscled, tattooed drug-lord, arms-crossed in arrogant defiance. No, he felt like one of the pedestrians who appear from nowhere, then throw themselves into the road in front of the hero’s car. He was voiceless, motiveless, and low-resolution. It seemed that his fate was to be mown down by important events he knew nothing about, and then to fade away to nothing afterwards because of some graphics optimisation algorithm he would never discover.