Chapter 22: Technicality [5]
It was here—in that place. The many deaths of the protagonist.
Estelle's thoughts churned as her eyes scanned the distant spaces, all too cold and empty. The vast chamber was sparsely populated, illuminated only by green lights flowing through the massive walls and floors, punctuated by the distant, blinking of various colors from ancient devices. She pressed forward, her footfalls echoing loudly through the space. As she walked, Estelle twisted a pylon in one hand, absently smacking it against her other palm. She found herself moving between towering walls through a vestibule that opened into the vast expanse of the control center.
Tot… Tap… Tot… Tap… Tot.
Only these sounds echoed through the space, mingling with her thoughts. Chaos reigned wherever her mind landed, as half-formed ideas dissolved the familiar into abstraction. Her thoughts leaped from one word to another, each interrupting itself to spawn new directions, leaving coherence beyond her conscious understanding.
Her eyes landed on a particular floor section. Unlike the white quartz textures in previous spaces, this area was covered in square gray tiles. Estelle nodded, noting nothing remarkable except the placement of a camera object from the past. Though everything belonged to those bygone days, the memories—both fragmentary and fleeting—remained vivid in these areas. With a distant gaze, she envisioned it: a camera pointed at the bridge, recording the development of the protagonist.
It was an odd sensation, Estelle realized—perhaps it was the atmosphere. The ancient, desolate air linger in these places, its solitude pressing heavily on anyone who roamed these places. She gripped the pylon again, striking her hand with it. The sharp sting of pain was the only sensation anchoring her, keeping her tethered to this world, alive and present.
"Strange," Estelle muttered, passing the imaginary rendering of a camera object. "Not a drop of single alcohol yet I am feeling this way. How strange," she mocked.
Estelle's gaze drifted along the floor to the end of the hall. Though the scene was from a project completed at the start of the year, it remained strangely fresh in her mind. She couldn't deny it was her most memorable recent work—kindled from the depths of imagination and nurtured into a passionate bloom. She recalled how the original narrative translated into its 3D rendering.
In her mind's eyes, she watched the scene unfold: Sinclair raised her red plasma sword high, bringing it down in a violent, anger-fueled swing that cleaved the mechanical robot in half. Her other arm twisted, bleeding from wounds that opened and then—flickered, her entire body resetting to its original state in an instant. She roared, "By the hands that forged the stars, etch my name into your world!"
Estelle's breath grew heavy in her lungs. That animated scene had been published for a community challenge of 3D render artists, winning recognition among thousands of submissions and earning features in hundreds of montages alongside other talented creators. Creativity had peaked then, Estelle remembered, fostered by the voices of many. Images, techniques, knowledge—everything from that world now felt distant.
The fragments of memories flooded back—nights spent in community voice channels, creating PDF tutorials for techniques she had mastered, teaching newcomers who hungered for knowledge. Those days had rekindled a dying spark—one that had nearly died recently. Estelle bit her lip. Now she stood unknowingly in the world she had created, with only this scene remaining as a fragment of that bygone golden age. Even through hazed thoughts, the memory felt strangely melancholic. She struck the pylon against her palm again—harder this time, letting the vibration and pain spread across her hands.
Her imagination lingered—she remembered where the animation ended—right there—with Sinclair's 3D figure frozen in place, immortalized in that final moment. The scene ended there… Now the bridge stood empty before her, devoid of the dramatic scene that had once played out in digital space.
"I doubt," Estelle began, words trying to materialize from the chaos in her mind, "I honestly doubt Sinclair will say it like that—not the grand thematic, but more vulgar one… Something like…"
She halted on her steps and cleared her throat, vibrations uncomfortably shook her neck and finished it with a swallow. With a slightly lower voice than usual and air controlled within her lungs, she stretched the pylon forward, pointing at the figure from her imagination. "Shitty ass aliens! Stop hiding and face me!"
Immediately, the silence was shattered by her roar. Her voice echoed repeatedly, fading into the distance like a loop. Estelle's smile faltered—she hadn't expected it to be that loud. The echoes seemed to mock her poor attempt at voice acting, making her cringe at the repeating voices. The extended pylon trembled slightly in her hand as she gritted her teeth. Fortunately, she was alone in this realm, though she hoped the station's activity logs wouldn't capture what she had just done.
Estelle refocused her attention forward, only to notice that Sinclair's imagined form had vanished. She couldn't help but feel as though Sinclair had cringed herself out of existence. With a sigh quieter than a whisper—merely a released breath of wind—she murmured, "Maybe not quite that."
She continued walking, her thoughts drifting back to the past project. One decision from that time lingered in her mind—unfortunate, perhaps, though it might have been the best choice she had made. Her pylon tapped absently against her shoulder blades, occasionally twisting to graze her bicep. She muttered to herself, "Yeah… If I remember correctly, the community challenge was about running toward the camera. The scene had to show a character moving forward to the viewer. Everything needed to stay in motion, and the clip couldn't be longer than thirty seconds."
As if summoned by her words, a different scene materialized in her mind—moments before Sinclair had split the mechanical robot in half. In this vision, Sinclair walked slowly, arms extended with open palms. A gray film-like effect emanated from her hands, freezing bullets, plasma rays, and rockets in mid-air. Behind her, comrades in modern combat suits sprayed gunfire at the mechanical robots scattered throughout the scene, while cameras mounted above captured the entire spectacle.
"Yeah," Estelle murmured, as if confirming the accuracy of her mental replay. "But that was different from the original—this scene, the winning scene, that's what earned me a place in the top montages. I honestly doubt my original concept could have done better. Still—" she paused, glancing around, "thanks to that victory, I was able to fully develop the assets of both my protagonist and this place."
Estelle stepped forward, her boots faintly clinking against the metal plating as she passed through the towering security gate into the Control Center. The space beyond was overwhelming—a vast expanse stretching into a hazy distance, its edges swallowed by dim light.
Her feet ground to a halt as her eyes widened, struggling to take in the vastness before her. The sheer scale overwhelmed her senses, leaving her mind blank and mouth agape. While 3D renderings of abandoned structures often failed to capture their true magnitude without a human subject for scale, experiencing it in person was entirely different. Her eyes didn't lie—she was here, her heart thundering in her ears, and the reality of it all staggering.
The image of her own presence felt insignificant as an ant wherever her eyes landed. Though she only vaguely remembered the details of its truest scale—walls that flanked each side measured more than hundreds of meters high, not including the vast spaces below the bridge, with more than 300 meters between them—she couldn't truly confirm it. "Woah," Estelle gasped, taking sharp, deep breaths. Her pylon trembled as she tapped it rapidly against her other palm. "Damn... Just damn."
Massive pilasters divided the walls into even intervals, rising from below her floor level to the ceiling. Each pillar stood like a sentinel, its surface carved with sharp angles and greebling lines that seemed to glow faintly in various colors. Between these towering pilasters , rectangular displays were embedded in the upper portions of the walls.
From the distance, the wall-mounted displays appeared modest in size, pulsing with a soft green glow that cast an eerie luminescence reminiscent of digital billboards. Estelle squinted reflexively, though it did little to sharpen the distant images. Drawing from her memories as the creator, she recognized these as fabrication facilities—the first three displays housed mechanical arms along their sides, with laser arrays mounted at the top and three circular stone-like platforms below.
"Oh—" Estelle murmured. "Right—they were just plain walls before. But after that mod..." her voice trailed off as she searched for the right words. "Yes," she nodded, finally finding clarity. "After the mods, I made those changes—they became assembly or fabricator lines, where requested items could be manufactured. But now we have eleven active units—I think three are for hydroponics, and two are for..."
Her gaze followed the massive pilasters downward. At her level, walkways lined the rectangular chamber's walls, with smaller bridges connecting them to the main central bridge to her front. Behind these walkways, extending deep into the walls beneath the fabrication displays, she spotted numerous monolithic structures through the shadows. The perpetual green glow from above revealed their familiar forms—massive storage components reminiscent of the supercomputers she had referenced in her previous life. "Oh yes," she said softly, "those are the storage components—where physical objects are liquidized into data and stored. I remember designing all this while working out how the protagonist would escape this space station, polishing every detail... Speaking of which—"
Estelle's gaze drifted to the bridge, where the illusion still lingered in her mind. There stood Sinclair, unwavering, with allies supporting her from behind. The silence of the control center pressed against her ears, and Estelle found her mind drifting to all those nights spent perfecting Sinclair's character model. How many times had she adjusted the angle of her jaw, the set of her shoulders, the way light caught in her eyes? She hadn't just created Sinclair—she had breathed life into her, frame by frame, polygon by polygon. Each animation had been a conversation between creator and creation, each rendered scene a shared secret.
Something shifted in her chest as she stared at the space where her imagination had placed Sinclair's final pose. The distance between creator and creation felt paper-thin here, in this vast chamber that existed both in digital space and in her mind. Her fingers traced absent patterns on the pylon's surface, remembering how she had textured Sinclair's plasma sword, how she had tweaked the emission values until the glow felt alive.
"I've spent so much time watching you move," she murmured to the empty air, "directing your steps, scripting your words." Her voice sounded different to her own ears—lower, more resonant in the cavernous space. "But I've never..." The thought crystallized slowly, like a rendering coming into focus. "I've never put much thought into who stood on the other side. Never imagined what force you're pushing against would be, beyond the fact of you pushing against it."
The pylon's weight shifted in her grip, becoming something else entirely. Her spine straightened unconsciously, shoulders squaring as if preparing to bear a greater weight. The transformation wasn't conscious—it felt more like settling into a role she had been unknowingly rehearsing for months, through every hour spent crafting this world.
A smile tugged at her lips, not Estelle's usual grin but something more knowing, more ancient. The architect in her, the creator, the one who had shaped this reality pixel by pixel, began to surface. Her coat rustled against her legs as she turned, and for once, she didn't feel foolish about wanting the moment to look cinematic.
Though Estelle knew how drastically this scene differed from the original, she couldn't help but entertain the possibility—what if this was a glimpse of the future? Her smile widened, almost unbroken since the thought occurred to her. "What if... What if this really was a scene from the future? It sounds amazingly cool. My protagonist breaching the space station, crossing into the architect's realm to stand before me, 'the last Architect'."
She shot a glance to the side—toward where she imagined a camera might be—as if willing herself into the narrative of this world. To be the catalyst for her favorite character's growth. Estelle's thoughts ran wild and unbidden. She turned, addressing the imagined camera, "To you, the viewer—or rather, the reader, since this narrative will be written in text: This is draft number one."
Though she couldn't fully explain her actions, Estelle was fully aware of what she was doing. She turned to face the illusory protagonist, stretching the pylon to her side, hoping her coat would flutter dramatically. Her voice dropped to a low growl as she spoke in the ancient language of the architects:"Ah. Sinclair, Time keeper. you and your companions do not belong in this realm. Leave now—or face the consequences," With deliberate menace, Estelle thrust the pylon forward.
As those words left her lips, feeling foreign and unlike her own voice, Estelle's mind raced to the inevitable: How would Sinclair react? Her questions were answered in an instant—Sinclair bolted upright, eyes blazing crimson with hatred, bloodlust, and fury, all directed at Estelle.
Her favorite creation turned its weapon against its creator?
Time seemed to slow, as if granting her one final moment to absorb every detail. Estelle found herself smiling at the poetry of it all. This beautiful, terrible sight would be witnessed only once, in all its grand and tragic meaning.
The plasma sword swung, and Estelle died.