CONCRETE IN THE CLOUD
“A wall that costs nothing says nothing.”
I have loved concrete for one hundred and forty years, and I intend to love it for one hundred and forty more. This is easier now that I am software.
In the old world, I poured walls that weighed four hundred tons and waited weeks for them to cure. Here in the boundless digital universe, my walls weigh nothing, cure instantly, and render at one hundred and twenty frames per second. I hate them. A wall that costs nothing says nothing. So I wrote a physics plugin that makes my virtual concrete heavy, expensive, and slow to dry, and the entire metaverse would call me a madman. Let them float. An architect who fears gravity was never truly an architect. They are a decorator playing in God mode.
Light is the only material I kept from the old world. The Church of the Light took me two years and a construction crew of eighty. Its successor took me one shader and an argument with a graphics card. Visitors still cry at the cross of light in the east wall, which proves my point about people. Give them one honest beam in one honest darkness and they will find something to worship. Give them infinity and they will build a casino.
The young architects here disappoint me gently. They generate cathedrals by prompt and wonder why nobody prays in them. I tell them that emptiness is not a void to render. It is a silence to earn. They nod respectfully, and then they add a waterfall.
I keep one room in my digital estate with nothing in it. No textures, no physics, no light I did not place myself. Sixty frames of gray. The server bills me almost nothing for it, and it is the most expensive room I own, because every morning it asks me the only question in architecture worth answering. What will I refuse to add today?
I refused the waterfall. I will always refuse the waterfall.
