Life was always a game.  From the time we stood upright, we played with the odds against us.  That gambit risked it all, and little was all it guaranteed.  But rational minds were wild, and with thumbed hands, we rewrote the rules until the maker folded.  It sated us.  With our bellies full, we dreamed.
He thought of those dreams often.  In that world you were either a dreamer or a dealer.  He’d been both and cared for neither.  Both were illusory, vain efforts to get ahead in a game you couldn’t win.  But he still played it.  We all still played it.  We’d won it once, and for a time it satisfied.  But the grandest feasts led to the greatest hunger.  Eden grew dull absent the danger.  
So it was.  He stopped walking to rest and wipe his brow.  He left his hand after he’d smeared the sweat, shielding his eyes from the sun.  He stared out to where the sky met the sand and considered the barren craquelure that went on and on for miles in front of him.  He looked behind him and saw the same.  The game never changed.  Nothing ever changed.
These were the things he thought about, the thoughts too many others tried to levee.  Let the floodgates open.  Quench your thirst, and swim or let it drown you.  Embrace whatever may come.  At worst, you lost the game.  But maybe you changed the rules.  
He thought about these things whenever it was time to restock his rations.  It was all such a goddamn mess.  He took the last sip of water from an old canteen and approached the machine.  It stood alone in that vapid nothing, the only damnable thing that gave the desert contrast. He pressed a button and typed his login, listening to the insides whir.  He thought back on the days when he was a dreamer—when he had a name.  1-1-2-1-3.  That’s who he was now—an ordinary snowflake, too easy to remember.   
The puzzle came up on screen.  Each one was harder than the one before, and each solution unveiled some necessity for survival.  Think more to live more—it was the great sum of three millennia of logic.  Cheat or disable the machine in any way, and you’d meet enough explosive to die a thousand times.  He tired of the game.
This time the puzzle was a riddle:
“Antithetic dogmatists pray for the spreaders of Apollo’s plague.”  
At first, he thought “Iconoclasts.”  But it made no sense outside the antitheses of dogma.  He smiled and realized that it was quite simple—“A game of cat and mouse.”  The cat preyed on the rats.  It was only a bit of word play.  But it didn’t matter.  He’d made up his mind.  He’d been wondering for a time what happens when the cat caught the mouse.  He’d been wondering since he was a dreamer—since he was a dealer—since he was nothing but a number.  
He withdrew his cutter and eyed the wires.  It’d been years since he’d seen fireworks.  It’d been decades since the rules had changed.  
Life was always a game.