Cory asks, roughly, if this is a simulation, why isn't it more kick-ass?

Perhaps your posthuman progenitor has reasons unfathomable to the currently constrained you. Perhaps you're just a bit player in someone else's simulation, so it wasn't designed with your satisfaction in mind.

Perhaps it's as simple as the idea that intelligences prefer mysteries and challenges in their games/entertainment, to obvious and trivially easy alternatives. If you had a virtual eternity to design and play any game you'd like, would you choose tic-tac-toe?

Perhaps your posthuman progenitor chose a competitive, adversarial environment. Perhaps it's a masochist.

Perhaps the simulation has been finely tuned to keep you just-this-side of doubt about its true nature. (If your life were twice as kick-ass, would that clinch for you the argument that this must be a fabricated reality? How about 100 times as kick-ass?)

Perhaps it's not an entertainment simulation for your benefit, but a training or testing ground. (Maybe you're a posthuman AI being inculcated with human values by "walking in the creators' shoes" for a lifetime or two. Maybe if you don't get properly socialized by this experience you'll be discontinued/selected-out.)

Perhaps it's just a giant oulipo exercise.

We can't really know. We're "0wnz0red" processes in this universal machine.

(BTW, great story, Cory... I really thought it was going in this "world-is-a-simulation" direction at the bottom of page 2, the idea that we ourselves are running inside a Palladiumized environment, and Liam had broken back in to let Murray in on the secret... until it went in the other direction!)