aether boot

A 9:16 phone power-on screen as one seamless 12-second loop, 1080 × 1920, on black. A thread of lavender light draws itself down the middle of the screen, flares and opens into a flame of soft fbm noise with a faint chromatic split, which settles into a matte black squircle logo tile: light rises inside it from the bottom, a halo breathes behind it, and the Aether wordmark, a SYSTEM 4.0 line in Geist Mono and a hairline progress bar with a glowing head fade up beneath. The flame sinks into a soft chevron of light, and the lock screen arrives: a padlock, Friday, 13 November, the clock 07:24 revealed digit by digit in a white-to-lavender gradient, Enter passcode, four passcode dots and a round glass keypad with letters, Emergency and Cancel. A finger taps 2, 5, 8, 0: each key wells up with light, a ring of light ripples out across the screen from it and a dot fills. On the last tap the dots gather into one, the padlock opens, the keys scatter outwards and blur away, the chevron surges upwards and folds into a single vertical thread that shrinks to nothing, and the loop starts again. The light is one WebGL fragment shader (thread, flame, chevron, tap ripples, tone map, vignette); the screens are HTML and CSS with React; Geist and Geist Mono are local, so it runs offline. Every frame is a pure function of time, with window.render(t), window.__render(t), window.__LOOP and a ?rec mode for frame-exact video export; reduced motion shows the lock screen as one still.