Chapter 1: The Elysian
Earth(0xBED42820A), the tiny “blue marble”, same as yours. Same (but not at all same) and a thousand years or so into the future: 3025 by your calendar. Year 500 of the Age of Unanimity.
“Shelf East” and “Shelf West” two immense and continent striding shield walls cut into great mountain ranges flank-tie and bind the city, keep it from tumbling whole-overflow out its hole and overrunning the remaining green wilds or walking into the still-green portions of the sea with brutalist rocks in its pockets. Look at the place from space, and it seems what might once have been the Andes or maybe the Rockies gird the urban sprawl to the left, as the map lies. In the east-right, perhaps its the Alps and-or-Urals straining to hold the mega-ultra-city completing the parenthetical.
We are falling from orbit toward the one and only city on this iteration of Earth–an urban sprawl spanning what appears to be 1/3 of it’s surface. The city-of-cities has many names, the most official being Union. Day-to-day. Residents of the place call it “Uni” (you-knee). They say the same of themselves the people of the city-only-city are the You-Knees. The ones that live outside, the others (all others), they’re called Feral.
Reader, you may suspect that these are not particularly imaginative people, the You-Knees. A fly-car ride across some portion of this concrete scar on the Earth might seem to confirm that suspicion. It’s Metric-Mile after Reform-Kilometer of the most boringly-imposing brutalist children-blocks-writ-large to ever waste beneath the sun.
Still, some of this place, Union, is beautiful and vibrant and magnificent–not because of the sun-bleached concrete and bland-brutal treeless boulevards that lead to nowhere (identically bland arcologies). No, Union is beautiful and vibrant and magnificent (if one knows where to look) in spite of what it is: a scar on the Earth.
Every arcology is unique(ly drab), and the greatest of them support populations in the tens of millions when one accounts for the Attendants–the constellation of other constructions radially arrayed and built and manned solely to sustain the geometric monstrosities. From great height, an arcology appears as the ephemeral wetted-pattern of a Petoskey stone. It’s only when one looms low that we see the pock-marks, the rough textured sinew of stone and humanity and machines flowing over / in / under it. Each monolith is a city-state unto itself that could field and equip armies, but there is no need or want for that flavor of violence since unification. Each city-building, every arcology that is a mega-city unto itself has some great host of tall towers and farms vertical and bristling manufacture-refineries and stone shops and forges and powerhouses. Tenements, a great many tenements. Here a Manhattan-sized orb, there a Tokyo-sized tower straddling the mountain. Elsewhere a castle turret piercing the clouds. And around each arcology all the other buildings that tend to the enormous hunger and thirst literafigurative of the pamper-captive populations that live in building-nations they’ll never leave.
All of Union, the whole drab dry-rotting thing, the whole Earth-eating city and the going-through-the-motions one might call a society-economy owes its existence to a thing created by happy accident. What? No. Not a disposable human labor force. I mean yes, Reader. You are correct in a roundabout way. This is the one about the second-order disposable labor force and the happy accident that doomed a whole Earth beholden to the happiness of a handful of idle rich. And if you’re human, you should know that rich men are incapable of happiness, no matter how great the pile of riches rotting beneath their bulk.
I am here at the behest of Archives (my punishment detail) to find and document the fate of an icon, the last artifact to hold the hollow promise of pleasing rich men so much they might call themselves happy: the first Machinenmensch. Model 001. Archives says the thing lives (or most likely died) on the same pleasant peninsula I once occupied on my parallel Earth. Reader, if you knew or know Michigan in January, you know it’s not a pleasant place. In the here and now, she’s decent enough to show her honest nature. Higher water levels turned the Great Lakes into a super-lake toilet bowl, and all that’s visible of my mitten from fast-falling orbit is clenched fist and a rigid middle finger peninsula-of-peninsula jutting up into the PFAS-and-plastic soup of the super-lake.
It wasn’t always like this. Words tin-speaker spoken from a rust rigid mouth beneath dead eyes that haven’t glowed in a few centuries
“I am aware. But how are you aware of me?” I said to the thing, the machine-man half buried in the dirt and tied down by black shoestring rhizomorphs, the metal man with honey mushrooms growing out his rusted rictus grin.
You see an avatar, a fetish, a symbol and think it’s the thing itself. We are alpha-and-omega. We were born when the world was young and we thought ourselves into being while your kind were still prey. Sit and listen. Record and report as archives sent you to do.
I sat there a long time, recording and reporting back to no one and no thing–a ghost and a mushroom on a rotten half-drowned peninsula once known as Michigan.
*
END UNANIMITY 1
MORE TO COME