a suburb, on the last evening
Play: https://the-imminence.netlify.app
Everyone in Fairhill grew up knowing it would come — the way you know about winter. Nobody moved away over it. This week, the whole town knew which evening. Over one real-time evening (~10 minutes, and it cannot be paused), a vast presence arrives over the town (pop. 1,214) while the sun goes down on the other side of the sky — one light replacing another. Nothing is asked of anyone. But it is the custom, on the last evening, to see the small things once more, before they are gathered.
The whole world is silkscreened: three inks on cream stock, and a fourth — a gold the world's inks don't have — that belongs only to what is arriving. Light is the paper showing through. Over the evening the gold stops being ink and becomes leaf, and then it begins to infiltrate the town's own print, field by field, from the ground up.
The end is not news here, and nobody sent a notice. Fairhill has always known the world would end within living memory, the way any town knows winter is coming; only the date was open, and it arrived like weather-sense. That is why nobody argues, why Mr. Delgado finishes the lawn, why the streetlight schedule is kept to the end, and why seeing the small things is a custom rather than an instruction. The evening is a lifetime at 60×: you spend it paying attention, and at the end the attention is returned. You saw. And were seen.
- WASD walk · mouse look · hold E to see · Q to sit down · M sound
- On touch: the left half of the screen is a floating stick (it appears under your thumb), the right half looks, and you hold SEE.
- You begin facing the sun going down. The other light is behind you.
- Seeing is a dialogue: witnessed people look back; sprinklers bend their water upward; the car radio harmonizes with your bell note; the presence pulses in answer as your count grows — and the town's hum opens its mouth a little each time.
- Every thing has an early line and a late line — the same mailbox has stranger facts to report once the other light is up.
- The hum is a chord being assembled all evening: bare octaves, then the fifth at dusk, then the F that streetlight no. 212 has held for thirty years, a major third once every head has turned, a ninth near the end — and the whole chord drifts up a half-step, which is why the lamp reports F sharp at the close.
- From the floating-things hour, the loose things of the world — kickballs, dropped bikes, the plastic flamingo — go light before they go up.
- The ending is the Regard: the world holds still, a ring of light finds you on the ground, exactly like your own reticle, and completes. Seen. Then the constellation — every star a thing you named, in the order you named them, plus one more at the end.
Plain ES modules + three.js 0.169 from a CDN importmap (no build step). Procedural
everything: seeded town generation (?seed=N), an evening light director, and a
single-pass silkscreen post pipeline — scene and depth render to one target, a
separate gold "spot plate" renders against the same depth, and one fragment shader
does the ink separation: flat quantized coverage per plate (no halftone screens — any
fine periodic pattern shimmers in a moving 3D view), depth keylines, misregistration
that grows as the evening deepens and snaps true when you witness, paper grain, and
the Klimt-leaf gold with its infiltration into the warm plate. WebAudio-synthesized
cicadas, crickets, wind, the evolving hum, radio, footsteps, FM bells.
python serve.py→ http://localhost:8871 (a no-store static server; module caching is the enemy)?fast=8— 8× evening ·?seed=123— a different Fairhill ·?t=0.5— start at evening-fraction 0.5 ·?touch— force touch controls on desktop- Console:
EM.state() / .skipTo(f) / .tp(x,z) / .look(azDeg,elDeg) / .witness(n) / .pulse() / .endfast() / .bench() / .shot(w,h,name) EM.shotPOSTs a PNG tohttp://localhost:8798/saveif a receiver is listening.
IMMINENCE is the second edition of EMINENCE — the same town and the same evening, in a different medium.