It moved to the screen and brought up the images of where it had last played its game.
The room it occupied was one of several that made up a very small proportion of the interior structure of the gigantic alien craft. Although it hovered silently within its cloak of invisibility a vast distance from the planet whose images were displayed on the screen, the player’s access to it was entirely open and available. Ever since the world in question had been allotted to the young alien, it had played with it whenever it liked. The gaming structure was complex, with the controls comprising of a large, curved control panel, which sat below a huge screen. It was covered with symbols and groups of coloured button-like sensors. Using a system made up of millions of tiny beams, not dissimilar from the strings used by a puppeteer, the player was able to manipulate events on the targeted world.
The craft itself was in place for reasons far greater and more expansive than anything the gamer played out on the distant planet. This world, like so many others that have been randomly set up around the cosmos, was created for the sole purpose of allowing young beings to manipulate them at will. Their role in the whole scheme of things was nothing more than to provide pleasure for the gamers. From the console it was able to rearrange weather patterns, create global warming, change shipping routes, manipulate world currencies, manifest plagues, bring about insurrections, all of this together with the ability to increase or decrease the intensity of those belief systems held by the planet’s inhabitants. This meant that the gamer could generate situations where wars could be played out between countries.
It just so happens, that this particular planet being toyed with, being the third planet out from a sun within this particular solar system, recently detected a vast number of unknown beams, splayed out across its surface. Unfortunately, the scientific community was in the process of making a world-wide statement to this effect when they all suddenly disappeared.
For those alien elders who relied on the system to prevent any mischief arising from bored youngsters, the knowledge that the program was not completely fail proof was always there. However, if the beams were detected by the planet’s inhabitants, and in order to protect their own hidden location, all beams were instantly retracted. Further, if prior to the removal of the beams, it is considered that the constant random manipulation performed by the game players has caused the planet to become politically unstable or economically unbalanced, it is vaporised.
Hopefully, in the case of the vulnerable planet in question, they’ll consider that this kind of intervention would be just a touch premature.