You enter a room. The drywall is cracked, dry, crumbling, and the hardwood floors are covered in dust. There is a humming in your head, though the ruined house is cool you feel a vibrating warmth, and when you look towards the warmth you see a black box, chest height, humming. You draw closer, you’re drawn closer, and the warmth gets warmer, the hum gets louder.

The hum contains words, the hum contains music. The warmth reminds you of being back with your loved ones. The hum reminds you of distant insects on a Summer evening. The box reminds you of the obelisk from 2001: A Space Odyssey. You touch it. It feels nice. Smooth. You stroke it. It still feels nice this way too. The machine purrs. The purr reminds you of the warmth of something small and alive being near you. You remember being smaller. Remembering being smaller reminds you that you are bigger now, and are late For Things.

People are waiting for you. The people waiting for you are an anchor to your existence and confirmation of your relevance. Mysteries can come later. You leave the room. You know it’s here now, and it will wait for you to come back. The machine will keep humming. It will stay warm. This place will be here for you.

You opened the door whose outline you saw inscribed in the mortar of the bricks of the wall. You stroked the machine’s sleek black surface. You heard the words that weren’t there. And you can come back and do it again, whenever you can see the lines in the bricks, or the grain of the wood, or the cracks in the drywall, or in cobwebs, or in shadows.

There’s time enough for everything.

11 Comments

  1. Hi stumbled upon your LD entry evoworld while looking for games/sim based of evolution.I’m an aspiring gameartist and is recently looking at making a level using UDK or Unity engine.
    I want it to be like an exploration game with immersive and atmospheric setting.I’ve always been fascinated by evolution/natural selection and I thought what better way to make a level believable and alive than having a functioning ecosystem within it.Makes it a living breathing world.
    Now the plan was for me to concept and make up my own set of creatures and assign them distinct behaviors,thing is I know nothing about coding and basically thats half of what I’m trying to accomplish here.
    I was wondering if ever you would be interested in doing a collab,Me making the actual 3d level and you helping out incorporating your evolution sim,similar to what you have done with you Ludum dare entry.
    So basically a 3d world with a working simulation of an evolving ecosystem that the player can observe in 3rd person or 1st person view.And maybe be able to save certain species that would come out of the simulation and use them and place them on the map.Random terrain generation and weather could also be made so as to affect how the animal interact.
    So yeah I hope you would be interested in something like this.I got the art side of things covered so it would be cool if you have time to do a collab.If ever you could contact me here- nivram1124@yahoo.com or see some of my works here- pangahas.deviantart.com
    Looking forward to hearign from you, have a good day.

    • It sounds interesting but also super ambitious. It would be pretty awesome to get something like that up and running, but also tremendously demanding in terms of time and skill. It also raises a bunch of questions, IE would the look of the creatures be procedural as well or would they all be predetermined, if the latter then how many variations would there be, etcetera. I’m not experienced in 3d programming or in either of those development environments, so it would be a pretty huge time commitment.

      If you can figure out a way to make it work in spite of those problems, I’m all ears. You can email me at problem.machine@gmail.com if you’d like to discuss it further.

  4. Hi there! I wanted to let you know I’ve nominated you for the WordPress Family Award.

    No pressure, you can participate or not, but I’ve really enjoyed reading your posts and wanted to take this opportunity to let you know how much you rock! 🙂

    • Thanks! I hadn’t heard of this award thing, and after looking it up, to be honest, it doesn’t sound like the sort of thing I’d be too into, but I really appreciate the thought and I’m glad you’ve been enjoying my posts.

  6. In my opinion you have a good touch for analysis. What might be the icing on the cake could be the one or other suggestion for a proper counteraction (no hard feelings intended). 🙂

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