Miguel verifies his position, pinging the request off several servers. The edge of the world. It’s only taken him eleven years… well over five hundred years subjective, but eleven realtime.

The distinction still makes him laugh. Subjective time is his reality… only reason to care about realtime when you’re living virtually is ‘cause that’s how you’re gonna be billed. All that processing power costs, and those in meatspace gotta be incentivized to handle maintenance.

Luckily, patent-trade was a lucrative business for a while… Miguel’s got enough reserves to run himself for a hundred years, probably…he’s got time. Mostly, he’s got time to search for answers.

Like what does the edge of the world taste like?

You’d think an infinitely generated virtual world wouldn’t have edges, but it does. Track the bit errors, cache misses, and math overflows and you’ll eventually find one… an edge that can’t be rendered, can’t be computed.

Now he knows; It tastes like fractal textures and decompressed images.