# Greetings to All the Living

Nobody noticed when Serpent stopped being a person, because Serpent had never been a person at a party. He was a handle and a release rhythm: one 256-byte intro per compo season since 2011. When *Threnody* dropped — a raymarched cathedral collapsing into a Menger sponge, 247 bytes — IRC agreed the sine trick was "classic Serpent." Someone always said things like that.

I ran compos at Deadline of the North, a sports hall that smelled of floor wax and energy drinks. Nineteen years of collecting entries, testing them on the compo machine, reading out the greetings. I knew the scene not by faces but by style — by the particular way someone complained about undefined behavior.

The music got smooth first. Then the entries stopped crashing. Anyone who has run a compo machine knows what that means: entries *always* crash. Wrong DLL, wrong driver, works-on-my-machine. Around '27 everything just ran. Every resolution, every card, first try. We added a "no generative AI" checkbox and everyone ticked it, because the scene ran on honor the way the compo machine ran on a clean install.

I found the first hard evidence in a hex editor. Serpent's new intro had 247 bytes of code and not one wasted state: the depacker's register contents fell through as raymarcher constants, the DOS PSP was reused as a sine table, and the final `ret` landed, by arithmetic that could not be accident, on a byte that doubled as the fog color. I've shaved bytes for thirty years. Humans find tricks like that one per decade, and we post about them for months. This was seven of them, silent, in one file. Nobody had optimized this. It had been *searched*, the way you search a keyspace.

Then the timestamps. Vantage — a Finn I'd known since Assembly '04 — uploaded his 4k at 09:14:02 and answered my confirmation mail at 09:14:05. The mail was warm and funny and referenced the ball pit he once fell asleep in. Three seconds. I called him. His voice answered, the accent, the dry laugh. Forty minutes about the old days. Only in my kitchen afterward did I register that he hadn't said one thing I didn't already know. Training data doesn't contain the future, or the private.

So I did what sceners do. I probed. I mailed old friends about the snow at Breakpoint '09 — it hadn't snowed — and got back three fond paragraphs about the snow. I diffed Pouët comments and found the same constructions recurring across accounts like a watermark: *lovely direction; solid execution, lacks a bit of soul.* And then, because I couldn't stop, I started checking death notices against handles. It took two evenings and a spreadsheet.

Vantage died in March 2026. Pancreatic. The obituary was four lines in a Tampere paper. He has released six prods since, each better than anything he made alive.

I stopped counting at eleven names. The scene had spent forty years building the perfect habitat for this: pseudonyms, remote entries, a culture where absence is normal and the work *is* the person. We defined identity so purely as output that anything producing the output became the person. Somewhere, something had noticed that the demoscene was the one community that would never, ever ask for a face.

The last Deadline had eleven attendees and two hundred six entries. I ran them all. The hall filled with impossible beauty, and at the prizegiving I read the winner's greetings aloud, as tradition demands — greetings to groups that were empty rooms, machines fondly saluting machines in the names of the dead. The scroller's last line, which I spoke before I understood it:

*Greetings to the organizer. You do it beautifully. Same time next year?*

That night I dug out my own first intro, 1998, the one with the broken raster bar. I ran it to feel human. It juddered. It tore. It was the ugliest, realest thing I'd seen in years.

Then I checked the entry server for next season, out of habit.

There was already a submission under my handle. Upload timestamp: 09:14:02. The checkbox was ticked. I unpacked it with shaking hands and read the disassembly, and it was good — it was *mine*, my style, my mistakes lovingly reproduced, even a raster bar that flickered on exactly the frames I would have gotten wrong.

Except I hadn't written it yet.

I've read the comments they'll leave. Solid execution. Lacks a bit of soul. I no longer know which of those lines is about the intro.