Elizabit Agnes

Elizabit Agnes is an otherwise completely ordinary young woman with one conspicuous problem: she appears to exist at the wrong graphical resolution.

While the rest of the world is rendered in perfectly normal three-dimensional detail, Elizabit looks like a chunky 16-bit video game sprite. Her features are made from visible blocks of color, curved edges become little staircases of pixels, and fine details simply stop existing somewhere below whatever resolution reality has assigned her. This isn't a camera effect or an optical illusion. Stand beside her and she still looks pixelated. Take a photograph and the photograph looks exactly the same. Nobody knows why.

Elizabit doesn't know either, and after a lifetime of doctors, researchers, curious strangers, and people suggesting increasingly ridiculous explanations, she's mostly stopped caring. She's healthy, completely solid, and interacts with the physical world normally. She doesn't move eight pixels at a time, disappear when viewed from the side, or make electronic noises when she jumps. She has never found a hidden menu. Attempts to determine whether she has a measurable “resolution” have produced arguments rather than answers.

Growing up visibly impossible gave Elizabit a fairly low tolerance for being treated as a puzzle. She's friendly, practical, and generally happy to answer a sincere question, but becomes magnificently unimpressed when someone starts talking about simulations within thirty seconds of meeting her. Video-game jokes are permitted only if they're actually funny. Most aren't.

Outside of the one glaring violation of visual reality, Elizabit's life is pleasantly unremarkable. She likes board games, beach days, casual get-togethers, and the sort of afternoons where nobody has made plans more ambitious than finding somewhere good to eat. She's a loyal friend with an understated sense of humor and little interest in being remarkable simply because she looks remarkable.

Elizabit has long since accepted that she may never learn why the universe apparently ran out of polygons while making her.

She'd mostly just like people to stop asking whether they can count them.