I woke up in a daze the next morning and depressurized into the overbearing morning light. Fleeting images, strange objects and places drifted out of my mind never to be seen again. Like a deep sea dive, reality slowly leaked in for me to adjust carefully. I layed in bed a few more minutes until I was completely reintegrated.

After wiping the sand from my eyes I got up and slumped into my computer chair. The jet black, glowing box I dubbed “HAL” was rendering test images overnight while I slept. He was still processing some tests for special effects I was trying to learn for my skill set. Sometimes he took days to compile a batch of frames that would only amount to a few seconds of actual footage. The complicated calculations manipulated hundreds of thousands of particles dancing in precise chaos, simulating organically flowing flames.

In my own perfect empire inside the computer, I was the King of Infinite Space. The virtual world of forms would make Plato proud. With complete, unlimited control the generated environment could become whatever I wanted. Everything that ends up on the screen comes from a single point, like a big bang. That point connects to a second point to form a line to another, and another until four make a square. These vertices build the squares together to make meshes. A simple cube is six-sided with eight vertices, and a human face can have thousands. They are all surface, no substance with nothing beneath, just empty space.

With a mouse in one hand and yesterday’s coffee mug in the other I opened a new window. The program started up with a cardinal cross and a primitive cube that sat on a flat field of infinite size. I knew that cube well. My mind was just as blank as the screen. I had to come up with something special to put in my showreel to build it up. The current version was being pushed around with my resume to no avail. I needed every minute of every day to work on animations to make something worthwhile. That was the only way to prove myself, but it felt like my time was running out. I checked the clock on the taskbar, it was.