While Milan bunkers down for the Winter Olympics, amid a frenzy of construction and controversies I’ll happily leave to the papers, I’ve spent the week waging a silent, private war. A war against a draft that simply refused to work.
At the beginning of the month, I was thrilled. I had completed the first draft of my retelling of Dostoevsky's _The Gambler_. On paper, the concept felt solid: transposing the obsession of roulette into a sci-fi/cyberpunk setting. Yet, upon rereading, I tasted that metallic tang every writer dreads. The story "flowed," the mechanics clicked, but the most crucial element was missing.
It lacked a soul.
You only need to read the opening I published last week (*[Entropy has no memory](https://medium.com/the-null-coordinate/entropy-has-no-memory-960cb0da14bf )*) to see it: the style is there, the atmosphere is there, but the heart isn't beating.
### The Deception of Technology
Trying to understand why, I went back to the source. I reopened the Russian novel and realized that my technological transposition had, paradoxically, defused the drama.
For Dostoevsky, gambling isn't a game: it is a demonic force that obliterates logic. The gambler doesn't play to win money; he plays to feel the thrill of the abyss, to taunt Chance itself.
In my version, I made three fatal mistakes:
1. **The Handling of Chance:** Dostoevsky's gambler is a victim of fate. My protagonist, Alex, thanks to his neural implants, tried to hack the system. But if you can "rewrite" reality or calculate probabilities, ambiguity vanishes. Existential torment becomes a cheap technical puzzle. I turned a mystic into an engineer.
2. **The Nature of Relationships:** Dostoevsky binds Polina and Alexei in a relationship of profound psychological masochism. My characters, linked by debts and neural interfaces, seemed bound merely by a financial transaction. Cold. Functional. Dead.
3. **The Weight of the Fall:** Antonida Vasilievna, the "Baboulinka," represents the solidity of ancient Russia crumbling before the irrationality of the spinning ball. My Donna Isabella, a near-omnipotent post-human entity, couldn't "collapse" with the same pathos. The fall of a god is a tragedy, but the ruin of a stubborn old woman is _humanity_.
### Kill the Monster to Save the Man
So? So I made the most difficult and liberating decision a writer can make: I dragged the file into the "Failed Experiments" folder.
I’m not abandoning the idea of rewriting _The Gambler_. Obsession is too powerful a theme to let go. But I’ve learned a fundamental lesson in worldbuilding: **if the setting solves the problems the characters are supposed to suffer, then the setting is wrong.**
In the next draft, the Villa d'Este Arcology and the holographic neon will stay in the background. I want to focus on the flesh, on the blood pounding too loud in the ears. Because you can have processors instead of neurons, but desperation has a flavor no technology can filter: it tastes of iron, bile, and the cold sweat trickling down your spine.
The fear of losing everything remains an analog vertigo, impossible to digitize.