stories 🔮️
There’s the city. It’s not too far from where we began, about a day’s flight in the opposite direction.
It’s slightly mysterious. And very old -- nobody can remember it’s origins.
Over the centuries, the layers of the city accumulated, the material of each successive era worn down and compressed by use and age. Like a thick crepe cake of carbon and silicon.
In antiquity, archeologists would take core samples through this dense foundation. They would find rocky layers of limestone and marble, strata of petrified wood, and near the top, the compressed dust of rare earth minerals.
But nobody would think to do that today. They’d say it’s all one and the same.
From the air, the city looks like a thin glassy film draped over the landscape. This is a product of its people’s hunger for all things smooth. Polished surfaces, frictionless interactions, dragless motion, perfect reflectivity -- these became the indices of ultimate refinement in every aspect of life. Almost religiously, the people disavowed the idea of component parts in favor of ultimate contiguity.
The shape of the city follows suit. At the center is a vast dome, with a slope so gentle that it appears as a flat horizon to all who approach. It is completely edgeless, in geometry and construction, so that on a sunny day the dome appears to have vanished into the sky. This is the dignified heart of the city and produces spectacular, albeit disorienting, visual effects. There even exists a special guard to help those driven to fits of ecstasy in its overwhelming light and slipperiness, not an uncommon occurrence
Moving outwards, the city’s curvatures become steeper, progressively figural, until individual buildings and streets can be distinguished again. At the margin -- the outer edge of the city far away from the gleaming dome -- seams and shut lines begin to appear, remnants of outdated and unfashionable building methods.
Sidenote: the era of smoothness dawned gradually, through careful calibrations of public opinion and small tweaks in legal verbiage (often only one or two words at a time). This process might have taken thousands of years. As a result, the people of the city have adapted. Their feet are wider and fleshier, with new clusters of sweat glands around the foot’s perimeter to generate suction. Their eyes have become smaller and brow ridges deeper to minimize glare. Vocal cords atrophied as whispering replaced speaking -- otherwise the echoes would have been intolerable.
It’s also a smart city. Within the thick glassy layer is embedded a computational network, an emulsion of trillions of silicon flakes that record and process the people’s health, movements, and emotional states. The invisible power and speed of this network means that the city’s privileged go through life with their every need anticipated, spending their waking hours exchanging trinkets of amusement and affection. Their movements are facilitated by spherical crystalline carriages that dazzle while they roll across the city’s slopes, ringing.
You might ask, what about the fingerprints? The footprints and scuff marks, the cracks and chips -- all the wear and residue that the ancient layers of the city fell victim to? This is solved by the city’s crowning infrastructural achievement. At exactly 8 o’clock every night, when the residents are safely tucked away in their homes, the spouts open and thousands of tonnes of sand are spewn into the air, driven by massive mechanical lungs deep in the ground. The velocity of the sand is so high that any freestanding thing is instantly blown away. The sand scours every surface, erasing any damage caused during the day wholesale, so that when residents emerge in the morning the city is sparkling as if new.
The sand used in these nightly operations is stored in steel vaults under the city, protected by the highest security as this limited resource is key to repair. Because the people would shudder at the thought of scaffolding spoiling their creaseless splendor, the city expands downward. As the glass is sanded down from above, new layers are annealed from below. The effect is a metropolis incrementally sinking into the earth, being built inside inwards, like meristematic tissue growing in reverse.
This nightly sandstorm is pervasive but not thorough. The spouts rise out of the city center and it is the dome and its surroundings that are scrubbed the hardest. As one moves to the periphery, the ferocity of the storm declines, so much so that the edges of the city are barely touched. Thus, one popular way to organize the city is through concentric rings of grit. From the outside in, one walks through neighbourhood grits of fifty, one hundred, three hundred, one thousand and so forth.
Of course, day-to-day maintenance is needed. Despite the careful fluid modelling that determines the placement of chutes, sand accumulates around those parts of the city still with corners and edges. The maintenance workers wake up at midnight, long after the storm has subsided, to sweep the precious errant sand back underground. They must be careful to move hastily from their homes along the periphery for their work and back again before the morning dew makes the ground too slick to traverse.
As they return, they inevitably carry remnants of the storm in their coat pockets and jacket linings. Small traces of sand in hair and cusps of collarbones. When home, it has become a tradition for the workers to collect and store the sand they bring back. A large jar might sit on the kitchen counter, slowly growing fuller as the months go by. When the jar is full, a worker and their family will make a trip to the very edge of the city, where the core’s exhaust pipes spit tall flames into the sky. Here, the sand can be melted and cast using homemade molds. These times are always cause for celebration.
Amazing things are formed on these occasions: see-through bricks, vessels of all shapes and sizes, beautiful buttons and beads. These objects are quickly absorbed into the daily life of the margin’s residents. Their surfaces are usually mottled, finely spotted with flecks of ore and pigment. A tour through this part of town reveals buildings and streets repaired with glittering glassy seams, multicolored greenhouses in every backyard.
Despite the gravity of the city’s center, it is here at the edge where growth is felt most palpably. In the evenings, before the sandstorm starts, the residents will sit in the backyards and look out beyond the edge of the city into the far distance. Some have already begun to cut holes into their back walls, build solariums and porches. In time, these homes will have entirely new rooms, new views, and the smooth brilliance of the city center will only register as a reflection on their window panes.