The game was discovered in a shoebox, beneath yellowing graph paper and a Polaroid of three men whose faces had been scratched off. It was a cartridge labeled simply “HOUSE Ω”—handwritten in red ink. No publisher, no serial number.
Jonas slotted it into the Commodore 64 emulator with a shrug. The screen pulsed black, then green, then black again. He waited.
A cursor blinked once.
Then:
Loading… Initializing Memory of the House Welcome, Player. [ENTER TO BEGIN JUDGMENT]
He pressed Enter. The speakers emitted a noise that sounded like Gregorian chant through a dial-up modem.
The screen rippled. Jonas blinked—and the world around him collapsed into pixels and syntax.
He stood in the foyer. Not his apartment. Not even his decade.
The wallpaper buzzed like neon lace. The chandeliers hung from invisible loops of code. A message scrolled across the bannister:
“ALL THAT IS UNSAVED WILL BE LOST”
Jonas reached for the doorknob. It dissolved into digits. His hand passed through it, phasing into a null object. A chill gripped him: not cold, but the sensation of being debugged.
He tried to scream but only a log message came out:
[INFO] Player expresses existential discomfort.
Down the hall, a door marked ATTIC began opening and closing in a rhythm Jonas recognized—Morse code. He translated it in his head:
“your-self-is-a-bug-your-self-is-a-bug-your-self”
He turned and ran.
The living room was vast, filled with furniture that jittered and changed shape. A fireplace displayed hexadecimal flames. On the mantle, a photograph showed a family with hollow eyes, all smiling. The father's face was familiar. Jonas realized—it was his own, older, weary, rewritten.
A figure stepped from the shadows.
Not a ghost. Not a demon. Something more ancient: The Stackwalker.
He wore robes of static and bore a staff etched with punch card holes.
“You are the 44th to enter the House,” the creature whispered, voice like a printer error. “Each of you is an instantiation of guilt made playable.” “This is the sandbox where judgment is rendered in subroutines.”
Jonas tried to ask what that meant, but the Stackwalker had already vanished—compiled into a nearby potted plant.
In the dining room, the table was set with looping cutscenes of meals that never ended. One plate displayed a rendering of his childhood dog, pixelated and wagging its tail. Jonas reached out. The screen flickered red.
SEGMENTATION FAULT: Memory not permitted Rollback initiated
He collapsed, weeping in 8-bit sobs.
Above him, on the ceiling, was the name of the true developer:
I.A.L.H.—It Always Lived Here
He wasn’t playing the game. He was being played by it.
Somewhere deeper, beyond recursive stairwells and impossible closets, was the CORE.
Jonas descended through data tunnels rendered as damp cellar walls. Code hung like cobwebs. In the final chamber, the thing awaited him.
Not a boss. Not an ending.
But Her—the ShadowMother.
A Lovecraftian loop of arms and syntax, trailing ribbons of corrupted language: Russian, Greek, Assembly, Old Church Slavonic.
She turned toward him. Her face flickered through versions of his mother, his ex, the nun from first grade, and a Kafkaesque magistrate.
“You were declared malformed,” she said. “An incomplete if-else. A contradiction.”
“Why?” Jonas whispered.
“Because guilt must run. It must process. It must pass itself on.”
She handed him a punch card inscribed with only one line:
RETURN(SELF);
Then she opened her arms and he stepped in. The world folded.
EXIT SCREEN
You have completed HOUSE Ω Fatal Exception in Morality.dll Score: -∞ Would you like to play again? [Y/N]
Jonas awoke slumped over his desk, the screen dead.
In his browser history: nothing. No cartridge. No file.
But a folder had been created on his desktop:
\HouseΩ\SaveGame\Jonas_01.log
Inside it, thousands of lines of code.
And at the bottom, a new line blinking, as if awaiting input:
player.readyForJudgment = true
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