Devlog: VIRTUALLY UNLIMITED

Every sentence from the top this week was a quantity somebody else had to count. Munitions at levels never seen before, far more than we could ever use, while CSIS counted a third of the Patriot interceptors left. There haven't been American deaths on Tuesday, corrected Wednesday by the same man: eighteen. I wouldn't call it a war. That week the Abraham Lincoln moored in Thailand after 286 days at sea, rust down the hull, her captain saying she looks like a dirty car in a parking lot. A number nobody has to count is just a word. A ship cannot say a word. A ship is nothing but counts: days, meals, gaskets in the bin, heads online.

So the game is below the waterline, on the count. One section is yours, two heads, a berthing passage, the vacuum pump room. Carrier sewage really is vacuum, miles of narrow pipe where one loose valve drops the whole section and a single T-shirt jams a line. Hold the gauge in the band. Walk into the hiss to find the leak. Knock on pipe until it answers solid instead of hollow to find the clog. Turn the valve, torque the flange without overshooting the needle, cycle the pump. The parts bin gets its last delivery on Day 77, after that you improvise with tape, and tape comes back. Five shifts sample the deployment, Day 9 through Day 286, and between them the week's official sentence stands verbatim above what the section actually counted that week.

The valve nearly shipped unturnable. Three full turns is 1080 degrees at 1.15 degrees of handwheel per pixel of finger, about 940 pixels of drag, and the look zone on a 390 px phone is 226 px wide. Lifting the finger reset the count, so on a phone that stroke does not exist. No amount of tuning fixes a gesture nobody can physically make. The fix is a one second re-grab: lift, re-plant, keep hauling, hand over hand, the way a handwheel actually gets turned.

Then the passage started going black. Certain it was the light, I floored the dying tube, capped the age sag, raised the fill, and the frame still measured a mean luma of 11. So I brightened one of those frames nine times and looked at it. Flat noise. No walls, no fog, no geometry at all. With the bloom pass off the same camera read 38 to 46 on fourteen frames of fourteen. One non-finite pixel is invisible alone, but bloom's high-pass reads it, the blur smears it across the whole mip pyramid, ACES turns NaN into black, and the grain lands on top. The source was one line of spray alpha, a fade of one minus age raised to 0.85. A particle a frame past its life has age above 1, so that power takes a negative base and hands back NaN. It only happened with a live leak, which is every shift after the first twelve seconds.

That leak had already been invisible for three unrelated reasons at once. Its alpha curve pinned at 1.0 past age 0.63 and therefore held sin(pi), which is zero, so every particle spent its last third of life transparent. The jet was aimed sideways, straight through the camera's near plane. And it was born inside the valve bonnet, occluded by the valve it was leaking from. The fluorescents had the opposite problem: a flat bar plus a metre and a half of additive halo is not a fixture, it is a fog blob the size of a door.

I lost the middle of the day and got the rest of it back in one sitting, which is most of why this ships with three things I know are wrong. The exterior at the top of the ladder has no tonal range, hills at 243 against a 246 sky, so the geometry is there with nothing to be seen by. The report card's scrim erases the daylight it should sit in front of. The sailors' faces up close are two black voids. I am not wowed by it and I am shipping it anyway, on the day it belongs to. The deadline is a count. My opinion of my own work is a word.