An urgent message flew in front of my HUD while I was being ferried in my personal transport from Yángcōng city. The personal transport vehicle had received, processed, and had already altered its waypoint destination before my heart could even begin to beat into an adrenaline frenzy from the alert message covering the front of the vehicle. The PTV disconnected from the magnetic railway as I began to read."Urgent. Seek shelter. An amalgam of rogue nanorobotics, catalyzed by the kinetic energy of a nearby meteor shower, has begun to storm over our surface. All citizens seek shelter immediately and await further instruction."The hum of the impulse hover engine filled my body with a numbness that shook to my core. As the antiquated engine began to fade away and the PTV came to an idle, the sound of the klaxon alert filled my ears and the message finally settled in; it was at that moment, behind the flashing orange and red display, that I saw a shimmering cloud of chaotic metal, fire, and electricity begin to overtake Yángcōng city. A shimmering mist seemed to precede the swarming electric chaos, and disappear as the storm of energy reorganized the matter into self replicating nanorobotics.
I started with a general idea of the perspective and where I wanted to place the viewer in the environment. I wanted to block out the general shapes and color identity of the piece.
Once the light source, landscape, and other imagery are in place, I begin fleshing out the different textures of the glass super dome, the reflective metal on the PTV, the rocky landscape and the distant mesas.I find that at this point in the painting process my choices become automated and I no longer have to imagine what this world looks like; it is merely editing what is already there to match what I can see.During a second pass at the painting, I am trying to refine the shapes and resolve the perspective in the background. I am settled on the right side of the painting, but I am unsure of what I wanted to do on the left. I imagined an auxiliary city to the onion city; one with less protection and luxury than the bubble city but still advanced.
I am refining the look of the miasma of nano particulates and how they form into the smog of self replicating robots. The indigo smog flashes with algorithmic lights showing the process of demartiarialzation of matter and rebuilding into the viral robotics.
