I spent a couple of weeks alone at home that summer. My brother was at camp and my father on a business trip. Bored one rainy day, I opened up their last game on the computer. They had been going on about it. for weeks.
     I began from the beginning. A splendid start: texts backed by imaginative visions. Then darkness. In the middle of it a gold-coloured, glimmering dot. Nothing else. I waited for a long time. Nothing else. I waited. Nothing. Then I pressed the computer's space-bar. The dot exploded and the explosion filled the entire screen. From its centre swarmed familiar patterns. Diagrams of atomic nuclei, electrons, radiation.
     So: the big bang. The clock had begun to tick. Digital numbers flashed. So: the beginning of time. The explosion faded. The screen turned dust-grey and a hand appeared at its centre. A hand in the middle of empty space? I pressed the Help button. A text appeared: Get going, time is not eternity.
     I moved the hand with the mouse. As it moved, it wiped the screen clean of the fine dust. When I had cleared a large, circular area and had got the dust into a heap in one corner of the screen, I clicked the mouse and the hand pressed the dust into a ball. The intention was not, after all, to clean space of dust, but to collect it. I prodded the ball with the finger. It began to move. It drifted outside the screen. I scrolled the screen and brought the ball back into range. It moved, collecting dust. I prodded the ball harder: it broke into two pieces, both of which continued to roll. They grew and became round. Not only did they wipe dust into themselves, they attracted it. The larger they grew, the more intensely they attracted dust and the faster they grew. Then they changed them from grey to red, yellow and glowing gold. I made more balls, set them spinning and in dashing across the screen. When a small ball came near a large, glowing one, it began to circle it. Gravity. I realised that I could use one of the function keys to zoom. I zoomed the screen further away from the balls, and three-dimensional space opened up before me.
     The same process was taking place at every level of space. Balls of different sizes were being created from dust. Some of them glowed red, some yellow, they circled one another. I had created space, with stars and planets. But what is the purpose of the game? Star-wars? How does it work, what gives it rules, magic or science? What is its aim? I pressed Help.
     A billion years have passed; get moving, the text chided.
     Then one of the stars collapsed, glowed white and exploded.
     I zoomed closer. All that was left was lumps and coarse dust. I remembered from school physics lessons that our solar system is built of the primal elements created by the pressure inside a white dwarf, mainly carbon and metal. So I gathered the remains of the white dwarf on to my hand and pressed them into a large ball, and made a group of smaller ones circle it. The big ball began to glow and I had a solar system. A very     beautiful solar system, when I had patted a couple of planets into a slightly rounder shape and made rings for a few more.
     The game appeared to be a scientific teaching game, fairly simple. But why had Dad and the boys stayed interested in it for weeks?
     I tried the function keys. A window appeared, with distances, temperatures, speeds, masses, analytical diagrams.
     Good. I moved the earth a little closer to the sun. The ground was deserted and empty and covered in water. I checked the temperatures at the poles and the equator, and straightened the axis slightly. I made depressions in the earth with the hand. I crumpled the earth's core into mountains, stroked it into valleys. Continents and oceans were born. Volcanoes appeared.
     What now? It was probably necessary to create plants and animals. How to create life? Help told me I was about fifty thousand years late. Late for what?

From Virkamatka ('Business travel', Otava, 1996)
Translated by Hildi Hawkins