Twenty One Meters Mind You

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?