We built this dream

We Built This Dream

The Engineer's Lament and the Birth of Vers3Dynamics

"A ship is not built with rivets and steel alone, but with the blood of ambition and the tears of those who dare to defy the sea."

—Hesketh, Logbook Entry #13, 1912

I. Belfast: Forging a God of Steel

Belfast, 1909

Christ, it was a slag-heap of a city. The air itself wanted to kill you — iron-laced, coal-soaked, thick enough to slice. Hammers beat like the heart of some iron deity, and the furnaces coughed like dying dragons. A symphony of soot and madness. This wasn't a city. It was an altar of fire, trying to outcreate the cosmos.

And there she was — the Titanic. Not born. Summoned. A steel skeleton rising from the filth of Harland & Wolff like a leviathan shaking off the mud of Eden. They called her a cathedral. Screw that. She was a war cry in steel. A middle finger cast in rivets, aimed straight at the cold indifference of the universe.

Blueprints? Mathematics? No. This was alchemy. Blood, obsession, and a whisper of madness. I was her chief engineer — not a title, a vow. I walked her before she had decks, when she was nothing but ribs and ambition arching toward the Belfast sky. My engines — raw kinetic poetry — would become the heartbeat of that defiant monster. I didn't help build a ship. I poured myself into an exoskeleton of human will, daring the gods to take a swing.

We weren't building a vessel. We were trying to bend fate into a hull.

II. Afloat: The Illusion of Perfection

Southampton to the Atlantic, 1912

When she sliced through the water on her maiden voyage, the Titanic was a living myth. Her decks echoed with the laughter of the elites, her salons dripping in gilt and gaslight. But my sanctuary was belowdecks, where the engines roared like something ancient and barely restrained. I walked her arteries every evening, tracing the pulse of her mechanical soul, hands brushing brass fittings that still bore the ghost of my own grip from the shipyard.

Yet even then, a shadow lingered.

A steward — wide-eyed, young, the kind of boy who asked things the others wouldn't — once asked me if she were truly unsinkable. I laughed. But the question didn't leave. It followed me down to the engine room that night and sat beside me in the dark. Nothing is invincible, I told the pipes and the pistons. But she is exceptional.

That was the lie we were all living. The beautiful, necessary lie that lets men build impossible things. You have to believe before the ocean reminds you what believing costs.

III. The Night the Ocean Remembered

April 14, 1912

Midnight crept like a curse.

And then it came — the mountain of frozen vengeance. Not a specter. A fact. The Atlantic raised its ancient blade, and the Titanic walked into it like a man who hadn't seen the knife.

The impact wasn't loud. That was the worst of it. Not a crash — a groan. A soul-deep shudder, like the earth remembering some old betrayal. I felt it before I heard it, felt it in the soles of my feet and the marrow of my knees. I knew. The way a surgeon knows when something has gone wrong beneath the hands. This wasn't a scrape. This was evisceration.

The officer said minor damage. I walked past him without a word, because I already knew what the water was doing down in the forward compartments — I had designed the tolerances, I had run the calculations, I understood exactly how much time we had and what that time meant. I went to find Bell. His face confirmed everything. The beast was mortally wounded, and the sea had no interest in mercy.

We slammed doors. Twisted valves. Screamed prayers at machinery that had already decided. But the Atlantic had time. And hunger. And three million years of patience against which our two hours meant nothing at all.

Upstairs, rockets began to pop like party favors. Hope fluttered in paper wings. Passengers stood on deck and talked about rescue ships, about morning, about breakfast. Down here, we fed the boilers as long as we could — not to escape, because there was no escaping — but to keep the lights on. To give those people on the deck above one more minute to find a boat. One more minute of not knowing what we knew.

That was the last thing my engines did. They died keeping the lights on for other people.

When the power finally went, the silence settled like judgment. And then the tearing — steel screaming as the hull fractured, that terrible longitudinal split running through her like a broken spine. The belly of the beast opened wide. Our miracle drowned.

IV. Into the Abyssal Embrace

April 15, 1912

Cold like punishment. Cold like a verdict rendered without trial.

I grabbed Fred's arm in the dark and we moved — not with dignity, not with plan — just moved, because the body refuses to stop before the mind does. The stern rose against the sky like an accusing finger pointed at God, and then the ocean took her. Not violently. That was the thing no one tells you. The Titanic didn't scream. She exhaled. The sea accepted her the way it accepts everything — quietly, completely, with all the time in the world.

I swam. No style. Just desperation and the fading command of a nervous system losing the argument with the cold. The water didn't bite — it consumed, pulling warmth and will and future out through the skin. I saw a collapsible boat. I moved toward it the way a dreaming man moves toward something — slow, certain it was there, wrong about reaching it.

The water closed over me.

And in that suspended dark, with the pressure building and the light above growing distant, my mind went back — not to family, not to God — but to Belfast. To the first morning I ever stood inside her hull when she was still just steel ribs against a grey sky. To the feeling of running my hand along a plate still warm from the forge and thinking: we are making something that has never existed before. The pure, terrifying joy of that.

We thought we were building a future. We were building a lesson.

Epilogue: What the Abyss Returns

I didn't survive the water. I survived the idea of the water — what it taught me as it took everything else.

A ship isn't steel. It's a need made physical. Dreams with teeth and a keel. It's the human refusal to accept that the ocean is larger than we are, dressed up in rivets and ambition and launched with champagne. The Titanic was all of that. And she was also proof that the dream and the disaster are not opposites. They are the same thing, seen from different ends of the timeline.

You build. You believe. The sea reminds you of what you missed. And then — if you are the kind of person who builds things — you go back to the drawing board with colder eyes and steadier hands, and you build again. Not despite the wreck. Because of it.

That is the fire that made Vers3Dynamics.

Fueled by failure. Tempered by cold truth. Forged in the understanding that the gap between a great idea and a great outcome is not brilliance — it's the willingness to drown, surface, and return to the work.

Out of the abyss. We build again.