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By William van Zyl

Published November 13, 2025.

At the end of this blog post, I’ll share my original acrylic painting: “Rappiddio – The True Rooster.” Acrylic on canvas. Completed on 12 Nov 2025.
It captures the warmth, spirit, and organic perfection of the natural rooster — before the squares, before the code, before the laboratory tried to redraw creation itself.

—0—

It was one of those crisp, silver mornings in Rinland — the kind where the frost clings to every blade of grass and even the air seems to hum with mystery. Rappiddio, a proud and curious rooster with feathers that shimmered like autumn fire, had wandered far from his coop that day. His bright red comb bobbed with each step as he followed a strange metallic scent through the birch trees.

The trail led him to an enormous building gleaming in the distance — a research lab. The sign read: “Avian Morphogenesis Institute: Future Forms Division.” Rappiddio tilted his head. The word future made his feathers bristle.

Inside, the air was cold and humming with machinery. Rows upon rows of glowing glass boxes lined the walls, each containing softly pulsing eggs. But these weren’t ordinary eggs. They shimmered with geometric perfection — edges slightly squared, corners faintly glowing. A card was taped to one of the glass boxes. Rappiddio squinted and read slowly:

Code: ISQY
Type: Square-headed. Square-Winged: Aligned. Form: Adobe-Enhanced.
Objective: Perfect Symmetry.

Rappiddio blinked, his beak dropping open.
“Square-headed?” he clucked aloud. “Adobe-enhanced? What in the name of cracked corn does that mean?”

Then he saw the display on the wall — a large digital screen showing animated prototypes. Future roosters strutted across the screen: cubic heads, blocky beaks, angular wings jutting out like folded paper. Their crow wasn’t a proud “Cock-a-doodle-squoo!” but a synthetic “Beep-bloop-bawk- plonk.”

Rappiddio’s comb quivered.
He’d seen something like this before — Minecraft! That was the online world the farmer’s children played in. They had square cows, square pigs, and, yes, square chickens! But this—this was no game. This was real.

As he moved down the aisle, he noticed more boxes labelled “Version 2.0 – Feather Algorithm Upgrade” and “Sound Patch 3.5 – Crow Optimisation.” He shuddered at the thought. Would his future children crow and cackle like computers? Would they trade the shimmer of natural feathers for glossy, hard-edged panels?

He approached one last tank, the largest of them all. Inside, a single egg sat on a pedestal — glowing faintly with a strange blue hue. The label read:

Project: Rappiddio-Next.

The rooster froze. His own name.
His feathers ruffled, and his reflection in the glass looked suddenly different — fractured, pixelated, like a living mosaic.

“Are they… redesigning me?” he whispered.

Somewhere deep in the lab, a machine clicked to life. A mechanical arm adjusted a dial marked ‘Morph Ratio.’ The humming grew louder. The future, it seemed, was hatching — one square egg at a time.

Rappiddio turned and ran, his claws clicking across the cold floor. As he burst out into the Rinnish dawn, his heart pounded with both fear and wonder.

Behind him, the lab lights flickered — and one egg cracked open.

A square-headed little chick, with rectangular wings, stretched, and stretched ….

The limbs were also square. Can you believe it? Actual square legs and square claws! What is going on??

………..

Sorry, no squares in my artwork below. Only some 90-degree angles. Can you see them?