People Needed Supermarkets

Scanning the universe, projecting images, a plaything at first, now a more serious thing. Projecting images of Venusians onto lifelike dolls — the lives become the living. The clones saw them as a life of their own and sought to conquer these images. It was a life-sized world as the room in Isaac Asimov’s novel where people project their images in three dimensions and then suddenly one is really eaten by a lion.
These people believed it was their world and fought, and died. Now, the whole planet was like that.
To think it started as a toy, some sort of advanced computer game on another planet that played with the minds of men and women.
It started as some writing down of thoughts and then a year and a half later the system was on the verge of collapse. Society was breaking down, some sensed it in advance, Golem saw that something was happening to society; some sort of perversion — he saw the goodness in the collapse of the suits, but to have the system itself fail — it seemed to him a dangerous precedent as the edge of the sea can be when water is rising. What if the water rises to twenty-one meters?
People needed super markets; power supplied on demand through electrical outlets and Golem liked this world and couldn’t understand how some seemed to want to destroy it. Golem liked the beach and living out doors, but after a month he was ready for a hot shower, some air conditioning perhaps and peaceful indoor living. Sure, he wanted to be outdoors than most, and he knew what it could get to be like after a month or so.