Voxel

Voxel is a city of perfect cubes. There are no curves in Voxel, only an infinite accumulation of tiny, identical blocks. From a distance, the city appears smooth and organic, but as the traveler approaches, the illusion breaks down into jagged steps. The trees are made of green cubes, the water of blue cubes, and even the clouds are square, hanging in the sky like suspended dice.

The citizens are geometers who worship the X, Y, and Z axes. They view the world not as a continuous flow, but as a discrete dataset. A man is not a soul; he is a collection of volume elements, occupying a specific coordinate in space. They are constantly calculating the lighting of their city, casting rays from a theoretical sun to determine which face of which cube should be bright and which should be dark.

In the center of Voxel lies the GPU—the Great Processing Unit—a monolithic temple that hums with the effort of rendering the city into existence. The citizens fear the "Lag," a slowing of time that occurs when the city becomes too complex for the god to sustain. To prevent this, they constantly prune their world, removing unnecessary details, believing that a optimized life is a holy one.