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everest
@everest

soft corruptor
when i was in the 3rd grade
 i convinced my friend's older sister to loan me her gameboy color 
  with pokemon blue 
  on the one condition  
   that i never save over her file.     
    this was contraband; my parents couldn't know   
    i smuggled that gameboy home and kept it inside my pillowcase, turning it on   
     at an almost imperceptible volume    
     after i’d been put to bed for the night.    
      i would play until the batteries died or i fell asleep or it was time for school     whatever came first.    
    
   
   
   
    because of my promise to never save, i had, generally, somewhere between 6 and 10 hours to beat the game   
     that year, the margins of my schoolwork filled with (what i would later learn were) 'speedrun strats'    
     i wrote down what patch of grass would come up with a pikachu    
      traced my routes through the caves     
      memorized the dialog,     
       then the buttons to skip through it      
       learned i could invert the screen and navigate dark caverns without teaching my pokemon "flash"      
        eventually, i didn't need to invert anything       i just knew where to walk, in the dark.      
      
     
     
    
    
   
   
     i was angling for the elite four, the ostensible win condition of pokemon    
     but i often stopped at cinnabar island    
      this is because if you surfed up and down the coastline off cinnabar     
      you might meet MissingNo.     
       missingno is a data buffer glitch, and a famous one at that      
       it appears when the game mistakenly substitutes the player's name as a pokemon id      
        forming a scrambled, glitchy block described as a "bird/normal" pokemon       
        (although occasionally appearing as a ghost or a fossil unseen elsewhere in the game)               
      
      
     
     
       summoning a ghost was reason enough to try for missingno, but it also came with side-effects      
       (including a useful error that would copy an item 128 times over)      
        but rumor was, catching missingno was dangerous-       
        it could softlock the game.       
        destroy your save file.        delete pokemon out of your party.       
       
       
        none of this was true, but we traded these stories around the playground, whispered about our angry ghosts       
         and there were other phantoms;        
         invisible computers        
          a teleporting man stuck on roof         
          swapped overworld tiles         
           a trick to catch the most elusive pokemon of all, mew          
           a way to visit glitch city          
            glitch city was a place made of scrambled sprites           
            where menu items and objects and sections of buildings melted into one another           
             forming an ornate, broken map            
             you could stand in glitch city, but you couldn't move            
              i tried everything, every button press order and screen inversion and quit-restart scenario             
              stuck on a single tile, the character walked morosely as if into a wall             
               but it was still, materially there              
               i could see it              
                just beyond my reach                             
              
             
             
            
            
           
           
          
          
         
         
        
        
       
       
       
        although i eventually had to give back the gameboy       
         i did have one friend with a playstation and spyro the dragon        
         unlike pokemon, which uses memory manipulation to step out of bounds        
          spyro is 3d, with simulated physics and barriers         
          this means that you can see outside         
           it is right there          
           over an invisible wall that rings the world          
            see me: 9 years old,           
            inviting myself for a playdate,           
             insisting we play spyro,            
             and then,            
              over and over again,             
              trying to bump my way out into the blue.             
               recently, i found a video of someone doing exactly this;              
               making a sort of hopskip into the atmosphere              
                one-sided, the geometry of the world turns transparent               
                as the dragon spirals down, gliding under the level               
                 you can see the architecture unstitch itself at the seams                
                 one purple dragon                
                  soaring through glitch city                                  
                
               
               
              
              
             
             
            
            
           
           
          
          
         
         
        
        
       
       
      
      
     
     
    
    
   
   
   
    the house we lived in was old   
     the driveway was long    
     it was sandwiched between a few family graveyards; my friends loved to come over, but wouldn't spend the night    
      sometimes we'd get out the ouija board and try to contact the beyond     
      generally unsuccessfully     
       once, a friend told me ghosts walk through walls because they remember the house different      
       like, after a remodel or renovation      
        they run a logic of memories and can't see that the door got moved       and this is why they respect the rules of floors but not of walls      
      
     
     
    
    
   
   
    around this time, we learned in school about the structure of atoms    
     how 99.9999999999996% of an atom is empty air    
      i took this to mean that surely two atoms could be slotted together, if you tried hard enough     
      if you angled them right, probably you could put your hand right through the table     
       if you believed hard enough      
       if you weren't watching       if your eyes were closed      
     
     
    
    
      my teacher tried to explain that air wasn't the right way to think about it     
      it wasn't air in atoms, because air was made of atoms     
       it was just nothing      
       forces, void       like in space      
     
     
     
      atoms never even touch each other, our teacher said     
       they have a layer of repulsion      
       our bodies are like a house made of unmortared stones      
        no matter how well they fit together       
        no mater how they are locked in place       
         it isn't forever        the wind still gets in       
       
      
      
      
       i had a schoolyard crush on a kid who sat three desks ahead of me      
        i remember thinking, how romantic       
        if maybe       
         if we held hands        
         if we closed our eyes        
          if we really focused         
          we would phase a little closer         
           then stop          
           surely with all that empty space, we could get our fingers aligned in just the right way          
            and actually touch one another.           
            some years later, i learned there is a name for just that           
             for when atoms touch and it is called radiation poisoning.           
           
          
          
         
         
        
        
       
       
      
      
     
     
     
      same year as the atoms, i was gifted a history of the world-type book     
       one of those aspirational encyclopedias given to children at birthdays      
       i can't remember reading more than a page or two      
        but on the cover was a print of the flammarion engraving       
        i faced to it me so i could see it from my bed       
         i still remember the caption;        
         "A traveller puts his head under the edge of the firmament"        
                   
          the traveller had found a way through         
           i puzzled at this in the margins of my schoolwork          
           dreamed about it nights          
            tried to apply it to glitch city           
            sometimes the games and the dreams bled into one another           
             a pushing and floating space where the walls yielded            
             where my character passed through the barrier            
              where i saw what was just beyond the edge of the surface             
              or the firmament              or both             
            
            
           
           
          
          
         
         
        
        
       
       
      
      
     
     
     
      eventually we got the internet at home     
      and i discovered other kinds of games      
       the resplendent wealth of roleplaying forums      
       webrings       
        diaries       
        blogs        
         flash games         neopets        
       
       
      
      
      
       as well as another kind of invisible wall, the view source      
        for all that i'd been grasping at the internal structure of the games i played       
        attempting to get under or around their surface       
         and access what was caught inside        
         i had been stuck moving a body to do so-        
          the memory manipulation in pokemon         
          the determination to scale the world wall in spyro         
           even the summoning of ghosts with the ouija board          
           had been done by navigating a world with a character and asking it to break           like putting your hand against the wall and willing the atoms to let you in          
         
         
        
        
          but view source-         
          it was all there         
           like picking up the shell and seeing the hermit crab          
           i could read it          
            i could see how it was put together           
            and most importantly           
             i could break it into pieces            and let myself in           
           
          
          
         
         
        
        
       
       
      
      
     
     
    
    
   
   
  
  
 
 


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