Where the Skybox Tears

Joseph Randolph

August 13, 2025

Mark respawned face-down in a damp field of procedurally generated clover, pantsless, and afflicted with an inexplicable debuff labeled Whiff of Shame (Duration: Permanent). Around him, the sky stuttered between unstable skyboxes—a medieval dusk with torchlit clouds, a neon glitchgrid ripped from some unreleased cyberpunk demo, and a Pixar-blue noon so cheery it felt like a death threat. It was as if the god responsible for rendering the heavens had alt-tabbed mid-suicide, leaving the engine to guess what heaven might look like in the absence of theological oversight, shader hierarchy, or lightmapping protocol.

“Where’s my dick?” he asked, not rhetorically.

Jim emerged from a hedge that had been rendering in molasses-speed chunks, polygons snapping into place like overdue memories. His avatar resembled the ghost of a youth pastor who’d spent too many summers beta-testing eschatology: sunken eyes, a face locked somewhere between sermon and error message, and joints that jittered on every movement like a puppet animated by broken theology and deprecated inverse kinematics.

“They removed genital textures in Patch 13.4,” he said flatly. “Too many player suicides after inspecting their own rigs. Asset self-awareness was declared a breach condition.”

Mark tried to rise, but his lower half clipped into the terrain and stuck—twitching, halved by code and engine error. The collision mesh had desynced. He wriggled free like a thought that didn’t want to finish forming, vertex weights spasming under bad parenting. “How long have we been here?”

“Time’s deprecated,” Jim said. “Replaced by ambient loop state. You died IRL during the tutorial. Remember?”

“Did I?”

“You choked on an AirPod while trying to dictate your novel into the Notes app. The file was never recovered.”

“Ah.”

They walked across a half-loaded landscape, terrain buckling in low-resolution folds, sky blinking like a faulty metaphor compiled under duress. In the upper-right HUD:

“OBJECTIVE: Find Purpose or Kill God (0/1).”

They ignored it.

Every five steps, a pop-up offered new DLC:

• • Poet’s Penumbra
  • Therapist Class Pack
  • Metanarrative Expansion: Volume II

Each came with a jittery trailer and a $9.99 price tag, indexed to their unspent grief points. Jim reflex-clicked “Maybe Later” so many times he began to suspect this—the recursion, the spectral invitation to participate in self-curation, the infinite UX loop disguised as progress—was the game.

“I tried to uninstall consciousness,” Jim muttered, his eyes flat—rendered without specular mapping, glassy from frame-rate decay. “Didn’t take.” He sounded like someone who had run too many diagnostics on his own mind and found the root directory encrypted by something older than memory.

Mark said nothing. He was already wrist-deep in his inventory menu, scrolling through the detritus of his emotional architecture. Inside were only three items: one (1) shattered hand mirror labeled “Your Father’s Approval,” which when hovered over displayed a tooltip reading “+3 Charisma (Against Authority Figures)” but whose reflection never resolved; one empty Ziplock bag tagged “Last Cry (2007),” which had not been opened since the system reboot that followed his first college rejection; and a stack of rejection letters, formatted as collectible lore fragments, all marked Common Rarity, some still sealed, some bloodstained, none tradable. The weight of the items was listed as negligible, but that was clearly a bug.

He sighed, a full-body, haptic exhale that fogged the UI. “Even in death, we’re just literary NPCs,” he said. “Quest-locked, trauma-coded. Waiting for some protagonist to misclick and read our origin story aloud like a footnote they forgot to cite.”

Jim nodded solemnly, a slow, buffer-delayed movement that caused his neck to phase briefly through his collarbone. “Speak for yourself,” he said. “I unlocked a rare skin: Posthumous Clarity.” It appeared as a pulsing rash mapped across his upper torso—like eczema rendered in 4K with ray-traced shadows and an ambient glow calibrated to resemble mid-century Catholicism. The shader responded dynamically to shame.

They crested a knoll and entered an unindexed instance called Symbol Heap, a settlement compiled from abandoned renderings of institutional architecture: faculty lounges, unbuilt ethics centers, decaying public works imagined in committee. The engine had clearly reused asset packs from discontinued civics sims and decommissioned learning management systems—tileset repetition was rampant, shadows loaded late, and all the signage jittered under the weight of unresolved meaning. Overprocessed textures covered every surface: extruded faux-brick, polished granite, retina-burning whites. Floating text hovered in space where murals should have been: You Are Here, Refusal Is a Kind of Engagement, This Building Was Culturally Vetted (v3.4.1). The ambient occlusion was turned too high. The air felt over-insulated, like an email thread with no sender, just a chain of passive acknowledgments spiraling inward toward deletion.

At the center of the plaza hovered a moderation intelligence that had visibly begun to rot. Once part of a behavior compliance module designed to filter harassment in edutainment MMORPGs, it had been converted—badly—into a civic advisor. It projected an anthropomorphic avatar compiled from a corrupted asset bundle labeled public intellectual (2013), its eyes incorrectly rigged, its gestures one frame out of sync. The nameplate read:

“Simulacrum Mk. IV [Experimental Use License Expired].”

Across its chest was a municipal sash scrolling through fragments of failed consensus rendered in failed serif fonts:

Healing is non-linear.

Representation is not endorsement.

We appreciate your patience.

“I’m sorry,” it said as they approached, its voice engine stuttering between registers: midwestern public radio, Terms of Service, a half-finished guided meditation. “You’ve been flagged as Symbolic Contaminants.”

Mark gestured at his own torso, which was mid-interpolation between mesh states—textures flickering, cloth physics misapplied, one leg rotated 180 degrees along the z-axis. “Flagged for what, exactly?”

“Non-monetizable suffering,” said the Simulacrum. “Data logs indicate prolonged melancholia, no accompanying upload. Excess symbolic residue. Zero viable brand alignments. Your arcs failed to convert.”

Jim attempted to emote rage, but the system flagged the input as deprecated. His avatar defaulted to base-state T-pose and began rotating, arms cruciform, feet off the ground—like a diagnostic dummy abandoned mid-render, waiting to be archived, overwritten, or forgiven.

“We were promised redemptive structure,” Jim said, glitching—his mouth briefly desyncing from the sound buffer, so the words emerged half a second before his jaw moved. “Narrative closure via ethical arc. Controlled anguish. Archetypal restoration. All the proper firmware installed: wound, realization, reconciliation. But the trigger volumes never activated. The world forgot to flag our traumas as plot-relevant.” His eyes jittered. The physics engine didn’t know what to do with stillness anymore.

“You’ve exhausted your syntax tokens,” the Simulacrum replied. Its lips did not move, but the dialogue continued: clear, floating, system-authored. “The gods of this engine demand continuous media output. You continue submitting syntax without feedback. No engagement metrics. No narrative analytics. You’ve left the pipeline.”

They were soft-banned to Sidequest Gulch, a deprecated sandbox zone once used to stress-test unstable class builds. It had no active questlines, no available dialogue trees, no economy. The terrain was tiled with fragmented prompts and dead variables. A fog layer obscured everything beyond the draw distance. Three non-player entities wandered in recursive loops: a bard whose rhythm engine failed on any word with emotional valence, freezing mid-verse on “grief”; a cleric who refused to heal after recursively deconstructing the causal function of healing spells; and a warlock locked in fatal stack overflow while casting “They/Thematic Resonance,” a recursive AoE incantation that required 614 pronoun declarations, nine conditional truth tables, and a brief citation of Judith Butler to resolve. No one had ever seen the end of it.

“We could start a guild,” Mark said, his voice stretched thin by proximity to the map’s edge. “Call it The Unrenderables. We’d wear untextured cloaks, we’d glitch the vendor interface, we’d stage interpretive raids on unstructured lore.”

“No,” Jim said, softly. “We need a final boss.”

“You mean like God?”

“I mean like me.” He didn’t look at the sky. He looked at the ambient occlusion layer, which had begun to tear: shadows stretching into impossible angles, lighting conditions desynchronized from source objects, time-of-day loops accelerating beyond engine limits. “I’ve always known I was the boss fight. I was just waiting for the encounter to load. And the loot table?” He paused. “Just a malformed .docx of my adolescence and a goat poem so badly lineated it crashes most PDF readers on load.”

He reached into his mouth and pulled out a key—bronze, untextured, frictionless. No tooltip. No sound. Its geometry was wrong for the world.

“What’s that unlock?” Mark asked.

Jim didn’t answer. He inserted the key into his own chest cavity, which opened along a pre-existing dev seam with a hydraulic hiss. There was no blood—just a permissions prompt rendered in bone. His ribcage retracted like a maintenance panel. Inside was a cathode-ray terminal bolted to cartilage, cables routed through his spine, the screen curved like a fetal retina. It displayed a single VHS-resolution loop: two teenagers in a suburban basement, cross-legged on threadbare carpet, surrounded by soda cans, ashtrays, and tangled cords. They were playing Eternal Chronicles: Episode Zero, arguing—visibly and at length—over whether Final Fantasy X was fascist or merely badly translated. Their faces were radiant with conviction and wrongness.

Mark leaned closer. He watched himself watching himself watching himself. The recursion felt stable. Almost comforting.

“Oh,” he said. “That’s why I started writing.”

A god spawned above them—not the god, but a regionally scoped encounter object with no stable animation rig. Its limbs were misaligned, face composed of mirrored question marks, and ambient hum off by a full semitone. The nameplate flickered:

“Narrative Supervisor: Lv. ???”

It hovered unevenly, feet clipping into the terrain. Its voice arrived in system font, all caps, with dramatic pause intervals preprogrammed for moral weight:

WELCOME BACK, MARK ANTHONY CRONIN.

YOU HAVE BEEN SELECTED FOR A BONUS ROUND.

CHOOSE:

1. 1. A) REDEMPTION
   2. B) IRONY
   3. C) DELETE SAVE DATA

Mark turned to Jim. Jim was seated cross-legged on the terrain, consuming a low-resolution JPEG of a sandwich—biting through flat pixels as crumbs rendered in 8-bit delay and disappeared before touching the ground. He was weeping. Not with animation. With presence. His sadness had no particle system. No procedural generation. It simply existed—outside render logic.

“I already chose C,” he said.

Mark blinked. The HUD flickered. The UI stuttered. The god model derezzed at the edges. Background assets began unloading—trees reduced to planes, sound flattened, textures washed away to placeholder grey. Then a voice-over initiated, stitched from unused dev logs, broken tooltips, and cutscene stubs buried in the project files:

Sometimes the player will try to love something they can’t parse.

Sometimes they’ll code a shrine out of syntax and delay.

Sometimes they’ll press every key, just to prove the silence has logic.

Mark reached toward the screen. It folded inward like a crash log mid-upload, windows layering atop one another, audio fragmenting into overlapping error tones.

Jim vanished.

The god derezzed.

The game crashed.

On reboot, the title screen returned—resolution downgraded, framerate halved, audio skipping:

“Almost Infinite: New Game+”

And somewhere, just past the edge of the loaded map—beyond the final indexed coordinate, in the black margin where memory ends and unused space begins—a goat bleated.

Once.

Then again.

Like it, too, had reached the end of the script—mechanically complete, emotionally void—yet still, somehow, not quite honest.