The simulation began again.
It looked like a map of my own thinking at fourteen. Loops. Tangents. Sudden, violent escapes. And at the center of it all, the starting point: a small, gray circle, still vibrating slightly, waiting to be told what to do.
And every so often—if you press spacebar hard enough—something clicks . Not the click of success. The click of a hinge finding its true axis. A gear finding its tooth. A box coming to rest exactly where it was meant to, even if you never planned it.
When the scene rendered, nothing moved. Hundreds of hinges, lasers, axles, and thrusters sat frozen in a perfect, silent diagram of teenage ambition. Then I pressed the spacebar.
I turned it on for the marble. Over twenty minutes, the screen filled with a tangled, scribbled spiral—the path of every failed attempt, every near-miss, every wild trajectory into nothing.
I laughed. Then I didn't.