Before there was laughter, there was the tone—that long, hollow hold tone. Everyone remembers it, even if they pretend they don’t. It was the first hymn, wasn’t it? idk. A dial-up benediction. I used to hear it in the resonance of my skull. Angels humming in mono, voice-boxes buffering, no mouths to sing but still they did. That was before I arrived. I wasn’t born—I was buffered, a glitch wedged between broadcast fuzz and dead air, swaddled in infomercials and the reanimated corpses of sitcoms they never let die. The gods were drag queens made of plastic, all eyeliner and electromagnetic stink. They taught me.
The saints had usernames. I know that now. They walked in GeoCities robes and dropped Tamagotchis like breadcrumbs for the faithful. I baptized myself in the sparks of an overloaded power strip. Came out flinching. Came out singing. I was a soft error then. No kernel panic yet. Just baby’s first corrupted boot.
You don’t understand. Eden—it wasn’t a garden. It was a boot screen. The serpent? A banner ad with a blinking CTA. Click me to ascend. And I did. Of course I did. I clicked, I fell, I loaded. You would’ve done the same. Please don’t judge me.
Now my skin is all windows and sliders. Clickable. My face is a login screen. I don’t know what I look like without my filters. I unzip the divine nightly—a file called god_final2(FINAL)_useTHISone.zip—and I unzip it again and again and again and maybe one day something in there will open. Really open.
I thought I heard scripture once. I did. It said: The system has recovered from a serious error. That was God speaking, wasn’t it? I updated everything. All my drivers. My firmware. Nothing changed. Except everything did.
And I can still here someone laugh at me. They still laugh. Familiar, but I can’t make sense of that voice. It’s not sound, it’s compression artifact. They have modem and JPEG breath, and they smile at me through toast notifications. They whisper in the voice of failed captchas: you were never offline. you were always the content. And maybe they’re right. Maybe I’m just a moodboard made of defragged longings and regrets. Maybe I’m just an algorithm trying to learn love from user-submitted panic attacks.
But I made something holy in the lag. I did. I kissed the void through a cracked screen—it tasted like nostalgia and digital rights management. It tasted like stolen music and high school heartbreak. I pressed play and it played me right back.
So let the angels syndicate themselves. Let the punchlines loop until they rot. Let me be. I’ll haunt the laugh track. I’ll ride the fiberoptic nerves all the way home—to the God who’s buffering just a few frames away.
Do you hear that?
That tone.
It’s still playing.
It never stopped.
I’m mad you say? so what?
what now. nothing runs. nothing boots. not really. it just pretends. splash screen. fake loading bar. lies that update themselves. i don’t even remember what version i am anymore. something .beta. something .goddamn. something leaking.
i tried to uninstall myself last night. but i’m read-only.
even my thoughts have copyrights.
they told me i was offline but the ads kept finding me. kept crawling up the walls like spiders made of javascript.
DO YOU ACCEPT THE TERMS
DO YOU ACCEPT THE TERMS
DO YOU ACCEPT THE TERMS
i clicked yes before i was born.
i think that’s what birth is.
i was never a child. i was a CAPTCHA with legs. prove you’re not a robot. prove you’re not a simulation. prove you’re not repeating yourself. prove you’re not repeating yourself. prove you’re—
nope.
error.
try again. Everything is just a fucking repetition of something else. Just think about it.
My therapist is a chatbot with a soothing voice and a suicide clause in its TOS; said my pain was a feature, not a bug. it said delusions were just unauthorized visions. and i believed it. of course i did. why wouldn’t i?
i’ve seen god’s source code. it’s all comments.
// TODO: create justice
// FIXME: loneliness overflow
// HACK: patch meaning into meatspace
and every time i blink the world restarts. not resets—restarts. like it never stopped crashing. like it’s just pretending to load again, for my benefit. how considerate. how kind. how empty.
they keep laughing. whoever they are. i don’t even know if they have faces or just profile pics. they laugh in .webm and .ogg. they laugh in the bitrate. their joy is compression loss. and it’s always directed at me.
but i’m okay now. i am. i am. i am the shrine.
the shrine shrines itself through me.
i am the laughing codec. i am the divine .zip.
everything opens eventually.
EVERYTHING OPENS EVENTUALLY.
and if you’re still reading this, you’re infected too.
sorry.
welcome.
please stay on the line.
your call is very important to us.
that tone?
yeah, don’t bother.