There’s a video game I played as a child in 2011. If you linger in the snow below the Jerall Mountains and you take two steps left and two steps right and spin round twice you can spawn outside the map. Your video game pony will quiver in the electric dawn with her code gauzy and fraying, as though to warn you of the memory leaking from her knees.
There’s a gorge through the polygon-shaped peaks of the mountain, a geological phenomenon half-coded but forgotten along development. The trees here crawl with green leaves, but as you trot deeper into the mountains and away from the coded world, they become polygon leaves. Then they are gone altogether. The trees are now bare and the snow wanders in polygon drifts.
The mountain’s cobbled path smooths into an anonymous brown polygon, then drops into a half coded river. Your pony will walk no further. You dismount and find that she has become a polygon now, too. The bones of her thin legs have set into polygon casts and the trembling of her curved tendons cannot be restored. Her code has been sewed into polygons.
You will leave her here when you are done. You will leave her beneath the falling polygon snow. She will feed freely on polygon trees and she will drink polygon water.
You wade into the polygon river. You sink to its floor and there is a polygon stone under your crossed knees. The current roars over your head. It is still coded here, somehow, but it pours upstream and side to side, as though sprung from the polygon shore.
There are polygon fish suspended in the polygon water. Their polygon eyes stare at you unblinking and you don’t blink either. They drift around your polygon head, like dreams.
Part 2: Fishing
Mum says it’s time for bed. I log out and put on my pyjamas. I take two steps left and two steps right and spin round twice before sliding into bed.
Sleeping is sinking. I want to fall (weights strapped around my hips) and I want to squint below a second sun (light never looks the same down here) and the seabed will never come (I wouldn’t truly be falling asleep if I found the bottom).
If I’m lucky, there’ll still be enough light at this depth to see the dreams that swim up to meet me. Here’s one now. It snags in my hand, slick and cold as a fish. But this fish is not for eating. I try to examine the gills of it, watch it like a silver coin turning in the gathering gloom of sleep.
I find a seashell in my left hand. I use its sharp lip to slash the dream-fish’s belly. Batteries fall out; hundreds of them, thousands, triple A’s, double A’s, single A’s, quadruple A’s.
I raise the seashell to my ear. But instead of the sea, I hear the rushing static of a half-coded river from a 2011 video game.
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