✴

“I almost let us both get isolated there, we can’t let that happen. Take us to Zeta,” you say.

ÆON opens a gate on the surface of the enclosing wall. Looking inside, you see a storm of angular fractal shapes, all black and white, spinning chaotically on several axes. Keeping your grasp on ÆON’s hand, you let Ær pull you through.

The music takes hold of you from all sides as you step into the middle of the waveform with no context. It takes a moment to orient yourself in time and sync your thoughts back into the rhythm.

Track 06 - PIXELSTIM

The title flashes across your vision, in a classical bitmap font, before dissolving into discrete pixel shapes, getting lost in the noise.

You try to sort out your visual input and make sense of this soundscape. The music is primitive--the sound of an analog synthesizer just like synthgirls of the 20th century would play in secret, you’re pretty sure it was illegal on Old Earth.

You try to read the constellations in the sky--also formed of low resolution pixelated shapes. As you thought, it looks like a very old circuit diagram of a simple analog device--a voltage controlled oscillator, resistors, potentiometers, a simple kind of sequencer, all emulated upon the underlying soundscape, a song tuning a virtual machine playing a song.

Warm triangle waves and cold square waves dance in layers upon your avatar’s edge. It takes some uncountable lapse of time, lost in the repetitive vibrations of the wave, to decide what you could think of as up or down. You find some solid ground to stand on. The constructed terrain around you glows in a limited color palette, a very minimalistic projection. Above you is another flat piece of ground, as if mirroring your own, and on it you sight the avatar of Zeta, waving to you across a flowing pixel stream in between.

Its avatar looks different--simplified, rendered in only a few hundred pixels. You look at yourself and find the same distortion has reshaped your avatar, and ÆON’s form as well.

As you try to speak, an impassable barrier prevents an auditory idea as complex as a humanoid voice from taking shape--the æther renders all your communication in a simple visual format instead.