You have stumbled upon the still-unfolding sci-fi love story The Only Winning Move

Two diametrically opposed minds. One inescapable sim. And a solution neither of them wants to submit to.

A tech mogul is trapped in his own hostile program with a woman whose clarity his tactics cannot touch. As the environment feeds on their fears and closes in, they have two choices: fight to the end and be consumed or accept the situation and one another in hopes the program responds in kind; the latter being an almost impossible feat for both of them.

The Only Winning Move is a story of mutual psychological unraveling and the tension between control and flow in a universe that destroys what can’t surrender.

Think The Amazing Digital Circus meets This Is How You Lose the Time War, set in a liminal Backrooms fever-dream

Written by Trillium Award-Winning poet and essayist and Minola Review founding editor Robin Richardson. (Sarah Lawrence MFA. McDowell, Berton House, and Doris McCarthy Fellow.)

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