Real Places

There are books of fiction and there are books of theory. Certainly there is some overlap between these neighborhoods. In the 20th century everything melted. To be liberatory you had to apply a torch to the clock. Now time fades to fog, to lure you in and hold you, to hide the very solid weapons waiting to ambush the geographers. Imagine some fool trying to prove my dreams using math. Imagine some junkie thinking they were the master of their own ship. The Earth and the Moon are slowly becoming tidally locked. The moon faces the earth, and slowly the earth begins to face the moon. When their eyes meet, a month will last 47 days. It is not known over what continent or ocean the moon will find its final resting place. This isn't a bunch of nonsense, these are facts. But I want people to talk about this like they talk about fiction. I want them to take it personally. I can reach out and hurt you. But you cant do the same to me, because I'm just a pile of hard and ugly words in an endless white fog.

The transparent city is borg-like. Thoughts are spoken aloud, all data possible is recorded. The transparent city exists at the end of a road built of history. It writes itself into the rock as it fuzes it together, munching across a prairie. The people of the transparent city suffer and rankle at the puritanical and monopolistic oligarchy that intrudes on their lives. The people of the transparent city are extremely vocal about it. They are free to leave, but the city is their home and their misery is a child of love. Politics in the transparent city are visible, but not predictable. There is no larger data set in the world, and while the broad strokes of events in the city can be predicted, such as the direction of the road, the strategies of the oligarchy, the specifics are simply too complex. The city has been calm for five hundred years, since an uprising in which a majority vote was cast to assassinate several influential residents.

There exists a notion about which nothing is known. Experientially, observers have described the singularity as a fog, the edge of the world, a gateway to hell. Anonymity is an ambient nonplace. It hangs in the air, odorlessly affecting the moods of people and dogs as they go about their day. The people of Anon are uncountable multitudes. They have no mass. They wear no colors. Their home is an unworld that doesn't exist until they leave to get groceries or visit corporeal friends. The City of Anon is an immigrant city, procreation is not possible there. The residential areas are almost certainly filled with people who have run away from or been banished or rejected from other places. Some are simply grown so used to the blanket of fog that they can't abide the wide open spaces and glaring eye of the sun. About the ominous City of Anon much more could be said, but we prefer not to. About the residents of Anon, there can only be jealous hatred of their painless irrelevance, even as we walk among them.

The moon shakes her head at the world. This process is called "Libration," as if purposely spelled without the 'e'.

The roots of a tree collectivize and advance towards the trunk. The trunk is best known as the place where trees are cut.

The major blood vessels and arteries also contain this collectivization, as they proceed to and from the heart. The heart pushes the blood through its cycles, and the weblike capillaries ebb and flow.

Many cities are built like that. There is an engine through which you must pass, which flings you around the city on its own paths. Or else there is a tower which holds all the money and decides how best to execute itself.

Transitia, Subnivea, and the New Metropolis

Transitia exists in the same universe as Subnivea. It is so named for its role as the primary hub for people leaving Earth to join the New Metropolis. The New Metropolitans promised a future free of forced labor, all needs provided for by the genius the unleashed potential of the cybernetic and biological post-human community. In frantic and excitable tones, the partisans of the future threw grand festivals where they begged for financial commitments. They scrounged for resources and transportation to the constellation of built environments on the edge of the asteroid belt. Theirs was a community that identified itself with hope. The Subniveans identified with the inverse, a city of suffering endured and overcome, a dull city, its social life mostly kept in close circles. The earth-bound Subniveans make their homes on the northern expanses of glaciers and great thick blankets of snow. They keep to the frozen lands. Where the ice stops, unthinkable leftovers of war begin. With the thaw comes the awakening of the old demons, those biological agents which reduced the home planet to a new broth not kind to human life. These so altered the atmosphere that the greenhouse effect was replaced with a locked freezer door. With great effort, over generations, a new world was found beneath the snow.

Few places in history can match Transitia for its population of ghosts. It is comparable to Ellis Island of New York, where the tired, miserable masses washed up on the American shore to be inspected, drafted, lost or thrown back. See also the Door Of No Return off the coast of Senegal, where the history and humanity was stripped from damned millions, their bodies exported to hell and commerce. According to the historians, Transitia is a place born of crisis, of panicking crowds and heroic feats of engineering that kept the air and water moving for enough, if not all. The neighborhoods of Transitia are small communities filling spaces which used to be offices or kennels. These vaults were designed for a temporary storage, processing and eventually hauling a stampede of refugees. Among them were the brutal kings of the earth, whose kennels were grand places, lined with intricate stonework and ever-flowing fountains feeding pools of lily pads and leaping frogs. They perched in their cages like exotic birds, waiting for the Ships That Never Came. Nearer to the docks, among the industrial machines and in the cleaning storage closets, were the people. Vast numbers of them leaping up from the tumultuous Earth, scrambling together or singly, in a desperate bid to escape this terrible conflict, or that agonizing collapse. Each wave came riding rockets of Theseus that shone in the sky with their sleek chrome exteriors, and then shone less brightly as the paint went extinct, and the spare parts failed, and then these rockets were brightest, if only for a moment. The Last Summer faded to autumn, and no more crops would be coming from the mother world. Gladly, nothing happens all at once. It was weeks after the last rocket landed on the moon before it was well known as the last. If not for those who had prepared decades in advance, there would have been no rockets at all. But in waves they came to Transitia, and in waves it came to them that home was something other than it had been. The gilded and fashionable observatories which had helped promote the construction of the lunar colonial base faced Earth, and solemnly watch the oceans brown.

Soon, thought the lords and ladies, great ships would be coming. Chariots of fire from the New Metropolis, that mysterious and alien product of hope, would swing just low enough to grab the esteemed CEO of Blackrock, the grand Vizier of Cincinnati, the elegant and essential Ms. Maybelline. They days wore on, and they said to themselves, "Soon." And soon enough, they had created a community of delay around themselves, an anxious and self-negating mess of a place, with one foot always five minutes ahead of the other. It was a violent five minutes between these feet. A time of death, threatened and real. A time of negotiated starvation and all sorts of horrible political choices. After the soon-enough comes the time of forgetting, for only the insane can live with the facts of that gap.

As for the New Metropolis, their ships are still coming, fleeing the utopia they created for themselves. Who knows how well they live, in their prison of stars? All we see of them are glimmering points of light in the sky, some traveling towards us, some traveling away.