You get home from work and lump yourself on the couch for a few minutes. Today the United States government, with Columbia University's enthusiastic participation, disappeared a permanent resident with a green card for protesting Israel's genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. European tourists are being detained in ICE facilities.
Your cat slowly pads onto your lap and purrs. It's a welcome distraction, but it's unseasonably warm today and the extra heat is uncomfortable. It's a beautiful day out, though.
You get on your computer and turn on some Chicago house. A notification pops up, interrupting your train of thought. Microsoft wants to sell you a program that tells lies and creates slop on demand. You close the advertisement and remind yourself to look up Mint.
You open Blender and start a new project. On a whim you decide to model a landscape: your mind turns to a densely forested hillside, steep, under an overcast sky. You quickly sketch up the terrain, some crude trees and bushes to block out the scene, and add a sky dome. You slap some flat colors into the scene; the sky dome gets a light grey.
To inspect some geometry better you switch into wireframe mode, changing the view from one of flat shapes and faces to a black void filled with networks of white points and edges.
That's when you notice the tunnels.
One by one, tiny lines begin drawing themselves all over the part of the screen below the terrain. They progress slowly but steadily. You zoom in on one and discover it's a miniscule tunnel, almost perfectly circular and extending at one end in slow, methodical steps. It's as if a worm were eating its way through the digital earth, but no worm is visible. Just the tunnel.
They're all tunnels. Dozens of them and more forming every few seconds. Some have extended several meters already and come near intersecting each other.
As if this weren't strange enough, the tunnels aren't made of vertices and edges. They're perfect in their detail, as if you were seeing a neon-edge representation of real worm tunnels underground. Except there is no 'ground' to be under or tunnel through -- as far as Blender is concerned there is no substance at all down there.
'The Whistle Song' by Frankie Knuckles comes on. The beat sustains itself as you watch the invisible worms tunnel. Can they hear it? It's as if you're watching a psychedelic nature documentary, like that one about fungi you saw in your high school biology class. You imagine the worms wiggling and dancing to the beat as they carve their infinite-sided tunnels bite by bite through the empty dirt-space.
You don't know how long you watch them tunnel. You harbor some vague hope that more signs of life will manifest: points of moss, edges of lichen, surface normal arrows popping up like mushrooms. But nothing else appears.
Eventually you zone back in and notice that the tunneling has stopped. You pan around the underground scene; the tunnels are still there, but none are being extended and no new ones are begun anymore.
Then you pitch the camera up.
The worms have moved to the sky dome. They're tunneling vertically into and through it. From below, the worm tunnels pockmarking the dome look like stars.
You switch wireframe mode off. The worm tunnels are gone. Terrified, you switch back. To your relief, the tunnels persist.
You switch back and continue working. But every once in a while you check the wireframe night just to make sure the worms and their work haven't been lost.
