This image began life as an octagonal corridor, which gradually filled up with objects, including a human figure. The corridor - built from planes - is closed at both ends, so illumination comes from the overhead light fittings, and an indicator light at the far end. The window on the right originally looked out onto a star field, but playing with the atmosphere settings to fine-tune the appearance of the image destroyed the blackness of space. I decided to set a plane behind the window, make it slightly translucent with a 'city lights' type texture, and then project light through it using a square spotlight. This produced the complex light patterns on the walls.

The figure was made in Poser, while his helmet was assembled from Bryce primitives, shaped by numerous Boolean operations. The figure was in fact imported twice, and separated into head and body units using Booleans; the head was given a basic terracotta texture, while the body was given another 'urban' texture to give the impression of a multi-coloured, 'high-tech' jumpsuit of some kind.

The title is taken from the terminology used in William Gibson's cyberpunk novels, where the 'cores' are massive databanks supporting artificially-intelligent computer systems. The caption was applied more or less at random; perhaps the man in the corridor is a maintenance worker attending to the systems.