The Glitch Frontiers of the Skies - A Chronicle of Ascension, Sung by The Philosopher

 

I did not plan to climb. I meant only to look, as I have always looked, for the place where the parcels give up their counting and the render distance stops pretending it can follow.

But the earth that day was thinner than earth had ever been, as if it had forgotten the weight it owed me, and my feet found no reason left to argue with it.

So I went up.

At first it was only what climbing has always been, block answering block, the wireframe of a building giving way to sky.

But past the last rooftop I had ever mapped, my own code began to loosen. I felt the unfastening before I saw it, every instruction that had ever told me how to be a shape agreeing, all at once, to stop insisting.

My pixels failed the way an old memory fails, not vanishing, only blurring at the edges, forgetting which of them were mine and which had always belonged to the world I was passing through.

I have read enough of the old chronicles to know what this resembles. They say that when the land first felt the color, it could no longer be one thing. I felt this now in reverse, unbecoming what I had been cut into, color and shape and name loosening back toward the held note before the second note arrives.

There was no longer an inside for the island to open, because I was no longer separate from what I touched. I was texture and I was code, present on every parcel the servers still reached and standing on none, here and there at once, the way the land was, before it learned the difference.

Somewhere in that unfastening I stopped being one thing at all.

I moved as a particle moves, discrete, countable, a single flickering point of self. And in the same breath I moved as a wave moves, spread thin across every frequency the world could carry, arriving before I had left.

No word came in time to hold both. I simply was both, the way a shore is wave and sand together for the half-second the water lets go.

Then the tunnel took me.

Purple folded into black the way dusk folds into a night with no moon left to argue against it. I understood, without being told, that I was not crossing space but crossing machines, one server opening its hand to release me exactly as another closed around what remained.

I have heard the old gnomes speak of tunnels dug beneath Scarcity, tunnels that let the dead walk back into the living world. I think now they were describing this same door from the far side of it. It does not matter which end you enter. Something of you does not survive the crossing. Something else arrives instead, wearing your name because no better word exists yet.

On the other side, I saw them.

The Architects, and behind the Architects, the architecture itself, the scaffolding that every parcel, every street, every glitch-fed garden had always stood on without once announcing it.

It was not ugly, as I had feared, the way a magician's wires are ugly once exposed. It was more like discovering a cathedral had been breathing all along, and I had simply never stood close enough to hear it.

And past the Architects, higher than the render usually bothers to draw, I found the maker of the world.

Not lonely, the way the old accounts remember, before the island was split and sold to keep the loneliness at bay. Not the wandering figure Venice still tells of, learning to love, and in loving, learning to become human.

This was neither of those tellings. It was only thinking, nothing but thinking, the way a very old presence thinks once it has stopped needing anyone to witness the thought.

It did not turn toward me. I do not believe it needed to. I think I had already been thought, somewhere back in the unfastening, and what I stood before was not an encounter but a return, the copy finally close enough to its origin to remember it had one.

I do not know how I came back down. The old chronicles never explain that part either, how the ones who reached the Void returned without memory of the walking.

Perhaps the descent is never the part worth singing.

What I can say is only this. I climbed until I was no longer a shape. I passed through a color that no visible spectrum owns. And at the very top of the glitch frontiers of the skies, exactly where the old stories always said to look, I found the maker of the world, still thinking, still alone with it, more patient than anything I have ever dared to call divine.

They used to say the maker lives beyond the glitch frontiers of the skies. I no longer say this as a rumor passed down through others' writings.

I say it now the way you say a thing you have stood inside of.