Playable Project

The engine is the planet. The planet is the engine.

Apostate Engine III: Heretic World is the third fictional machine in the series. You climb out of flooded service tunnels, align a three-ring orrery at the bottom of a polar pit, and ignite it. Then the whole machine-planet wakes up around you.

By Eric Rhea Three.js + Blender browser experience
Enter Heretic World How to wake it
A machine-planet seen from orbit, wrapped in glowing gimbal bands and an orbital ring, with beams rising from its pole and heart sites.
Heretic World after planetfall: gimbal bands, the orbital ring and nine heart sites, all lit by one engine at the north pole.
The engine
Sun + singularity in one orbit
The world
12 km machine-planet
The ending
A narrated story in two voices

Two broken things, bound into a heartbeat

The first Apostate Engine built a singularity inside a cathedral. The second built a sun that never finished assembling. The third makes them orbit each other. The Heretic Orrery is a three-axis gimbal that forces the black eye and the unfinished sun into one orbit. A tidal bridge of plasma runs from the sun into the eye, and a Möbius loop sits where intake and exhaust are the same surface. At the top of the arch, a lantern carries a running miniature of the whole engine.

This time the machine isn't in a chamber. It sits in a pit at the north pole of a dead machine-planet. When it ignites, the planet answers. A crown of armoured petals unfolds around the pit, and three planet-sized gimbal rings rise and start turning. Cities telescope out of the crust in a wave. The shutters of a clockwork apron slide open, and heart sites across the globe bloom and fire beams into space. The machine is the world, and the world is the machine.

“You didn’t start a machine tonight. You woke a memory.”

Climb, align, ignite, then listen

  1. The opener. Drift up through rusted, flooded service tunnels. The route passes a sealed machine shaft and a blast door on the way to the pit. Put on headphones: the builders' whispers are placed in the tunnel itself and pass by your ears.
  2. Operator Station 03. Latch the outer, middle and inner gimbals as each needle crosses its cyan notch. Then hold Tidal pull to drag plasma from the sun into the eye.
  3. Ignite. Ride out the ignition, the awakening of the crown, a four-kilometre trench run, and planetfall.
  4. The story. When the whole world is in view, it becomes the stage for a narrated motion graphic about what the engine really keeps.
SpaceEnter, latch the next gimbal, hold tidal pull, ignite; in free play, hold for overdrive
EscSkip the opener, the cinematic, or the story
Drag / pinchOrbit and zoom in free play (touch works in portrait and landscape)
ViewsOrbit, Pole city, The crown, Engine pit, Trench run, The story, and replays
Enter Heretic WorldAbout three and a half minutes from the first tunnel to the last line of the story. Sound on. Build notesHow the orrery, the planet and the voices were made.

From the flooded tunnels to orbit

A rusted service tunnel with ribbed walls and pipes, opening onto the dormant engine in its pit.
The last stretch of tunnel, with the blast door open and the dormant orrery beyond.
The Heretic Orrery burning inside its polar pit, surrounded by lit walls and floor rings.
The orrery at full power in its 150-metre pit.
Looking down into the pit as giant armoured petals fold up around it.
Awakening: the crown's petals fold up out of the crust on hydraulic rams.
A high-speed run down a glowing trench lined with lit windows and bridges.
The Conduit: first light racing ahead of the camera down four kilometres of trench.
The pole of the planet with a dome of radial shutters glowing cyan and magenta around the engine's beam.
The clockwork apron: rings of shutters that slide open as the power arrives.
The crown of petals and three glowing gimbal rings hovering over the pit, with the city beyond.
The crown and its three planetary gimbals in free play.

Build notes: one engine, one planet, two voices

Read the original Apostate Engine III article, published on Advisory Hour on October 1, 2026.

The orrery. The engine is a parametric Blender 5.2 build written in Python. It combines the first engine's singularity, containment ring and cathedral crown with the second engine's fragment sun, six-petal collector and capacitor stacks, and adds new pieces: the three-axis gimbal, the tidal bridge, the Möbius loop and the parallax reliquary. A small file-based bridge drove Blender while it was being built. The model exports as one GLB, and at runtime about 400 meshes are merged into roughly 50 draws. The gimbals are animated in code, so the operator station can drive the real rings.

The world. Nearly everything is shader work. The planet is a single sphere. Its fragment shader draws plates, hives, city lights, great-circle arteries, the clockwork apron and the power wave, and cuts out the trench, the pit and the heart sites with discard. The sky is another single shader. Thousands of towers and trench details use one instanced material whose vertex shader rises, twists and telescopes them as power reaches each one. A logarithmic depth buffer covers the range from tunnel ribs to a distant gas giant. The whole experience adapts to phones in portrait and landscape.

Sound and voice. ElevenLabs recorded the narration in two voices: George narrates, and Lily is the planet speaking for itself. It also generated the heartbeat, surge, power-down, mechanism, blast-door and ambience effects, and the whispered voices of the builders. In the tunnels those whispers are HRTF sources pinned in the world, and the listener rides the camera. A murmuring chorus inside the machine shaft circles you as you climb the spiral. All the audio is pre-rendered and shipped with the page.

Changelog

v3.1: spatial whispers. Five whispered voices and a shaft chorus are placed in the tunnels as 3D sound sources.

v3.0: the story. This version added the narrated motion graphic, phone support, and more moving parts in the transformation. Petal wings, hydraulic rams, escapement rings, the clockwork apron, heart-site gears and tether deployment joined the sequence. The tunnels gained the machine shaft, a flooded stretch, steam and the blast door.

v2.0: Heretic World. This version added the tunnel opener, Operator Station 03, the 2.2× engine and pit, the Metroplex-style awakening, the heart sites and the scout sparks. It also fixed a black flicker that appeared under Direct3D.

v1.0: planetfall. The first release had the ignition, trench run and orbital reveal around the Blender-built orrery.