50 instances of a city /2
#11 - Earth -- In the night, when the city rose up out of the ground, the whole mesa shook. Worse than with the storms. The animals came to find: the ground shook at sunset, thunder or no thunder, and with the dark came hiding and burrowing, for fear of everything.
For a very long time, it was believed that this was normal xenoform-animal behavior, as an instinctual reaction to the storms.
#08 - Doors -- She dipped into doorways, stopped off in skinny little alleys. Leaning buildings left labyrinths of lanes and backyards, and she almost always found a good place to sleep.
#14 - Fire -- One year, the city burned.
It was an accident. Always was, with a fire, but this one was a large and terrible gone-wrong. The gears and levers charred and crisped, the air-pumps melted; the thin blades of fans went up like curling paper.
All that was really left was the hydroponics - not greenhouses, like most places had, but long, low troughs open to the blaze of the sun, with metal lips that shut during hte worst storms, and lit stadium-bright at night. The troughs were metal, and unharmed; the rockwool still warm from the previous day.
The city was closed. Ships were called in from Home; survivors were shipped off to the nearest wherever. For several years, the city was a construction zone - slow, because you couldn't stay there long, not until the place was cleant out and they had new air pumps in. So nights they would work, and days they would retreat back up into orbit, and play cards and get drunk and fool around.
Most likely I was conceived then.
#32 - Pretty -- "Well, you're just not fukken gorgeous, is all I'm sayin."
"Oh, that's nice."
"It's all I'm sayin! Like you're fine, you're okay! Just you're no Wenchang Li, y'know?"
"Oh yeah, like you are?"
#42 - Strange -- Nanobots crawled and glistened on the hair round the buzzards' beaks. The buzzards crowded the pylon-tops, waiting while the terror-birds finished with the thistback carcass and loped off, and only then did they swoop down, rolling on long, brownback wings as the sun rolled toward the horizon.
#01 - Air -- The pumps were very popular. Of course, of course they were, but out of proportion to logic. They became like watering holes - an apt substitution, since there wasn't much aboveground water to congregate around.
So the city was built around the nooks and cracks of the air pumps. They tried fencing them away, but shanties would sprout within the space of a night - long enough for people to run for the greatwoods, grab what they could, and run back. Even that was controllable, but - well, after the crafts went online, it was all over. Too easy to dig up a good nest of wood, hide it for the day, and then fly out there first thing the city came back up and online.
So the houses got built. Strange-shaped rooms, crawled around the pumps like snakes. Thre were children whose first memories were the hissing and the humming, whose dailylight lullabies were the kachunk kachunk of machinery. Children would be found with their ears leant to the pipes, so they could hear what was going on.
It was only a matter of time til they developed the tapcode.
#09 - Drink -- Working docks, he got first dibs on most things. Kinda nice. Everyone knew, of course, that dockworkers did this, skimmed a little off the top, but hey, you gotta get some perks with your spine-grafts. Just think if you had that whole procedure done for nothing. You'd kill yourself, wouldn't you?
#15 - Flexible -- Out of the backyards and slip through the corners and scale the walls, grappling past root and knob til she could clamber up to the roofs, there, just under ground-level -
- and wait -
- and wait -
- and the horns sounded, piped through the whole city and amplified by the caves underneath, and then the shuddering underneath her and the city was moving, the buildings like fungus erupting into growth, grabbing her hands to the knuckles into fibertop roof and kneeling up and riding the city out into the open air of a rare clear eve, with the last glory of the sun in the west, and the first bright stars flicking on above her.
#47 - Water -- With the sun's return, there was safety, but only a little: by sunset the ponds that had gathered in the night would be dry, and anyway the Intruders would be out again. The flying animals griped and chattered; the running animals made no sound.
+ = When we went out at night, it was alive with noise until we reached the edge of the mesa. Then silence, that followed you wherever your craft flew.
We put some funds into research on hunting shelters back Home. Maybe that would help?
#30 - Peace -- Peace came when he plugged out - when he became not "he" anymore, but just floated in semiconsciousness. Surely there was a world around him, but with the tansin strong in his veins, it didn't matter much. They said how great the experiment was going, and how they were extracting exactly the memories they wanted, perfectly preserved, and he nodded agreeably and told them they looked stupid in those getups. They brought in students and novices to talk to him, since "this one's a fuckin riot when you get 'im high!" Somehow this translated into extra popbars and twenty more bits per hour than anyone else got, so he went along with it, agreeably insulting various people while they opened his nerves up and split his back down the middle.
Comedown next day was a bitch, but hey, that's why God invented grain alcohol, right?
#03 - Beginning -- Why (the Grade Three Science Packet began) did the pioneers choose this planet? Water, of course! Human beings always lived near water - go check out your Home Geography Packet for more! So the big reason we're on Februa is just because of this simple substance ^_^
Now, you're probably wondering: Where is all the water? How I never see any? Why do all the streams go away when the sun comes out?! All these questions have answers on pages 3-5, but the basic answer is: up here on the mesa, we hardly get any water ... because we're above the water table! What's a water table? See page 4 for details! There's plenty of water down among the roots of the greatwoods. There's plenty of animals there, too - just turn to page 6 to learn about what they are!
(Most of this was redundant and useless, of course. Third-graders had usually been been working at their parents' side for a year or two; some had gone hunting with their parents; others were scrap-collecting or learning the basics of mending and the proper respect for tools. Some had done junior work at the pineplast mill down at the pediment. A few had gotten to go up in orbit. These ones had usually gotten through this Packet already, and were reading the Fifth or Sixth-grade Packets to themselves, silently, at the back of the class.)
#05 - Coffee -- "So what're you up here for?"
"God, don't talk to me before I've had my goddamn coffee."
(a brief pause, in which coffee is gotten, sipped, and considered.)
"So - so uh. What're you -"
"Heard you the first time. I aaa-aaaugha!" (a yawn) "'san opportunity. They gimme work, a place to stay. It works out."
"Din' you wanna go go with like your family or something? Offplanet?"
"You're assuming I had one."
"...oh."
"Yeah."
"You mean they - I mean, the fire -"
"Nah. Long time before that. I'm two-eight down there."
"Oh. I'm uh. I'm sorry."
"Ehn. It is what it is."
"Yeah, but - shit. Nevermind. I'm just - I'm gonna, I'm gonna stop talking now."
"S'alright. A cyborg's gotta have someone to feel superior to, right?"
"Shit, I didn't mean -"
"I know."
(an extremely delicate silence ensues, and continues until the breakfast-done bell rings.)
#43 - Summer -- The earth cracked - heat in the sun til the thin layer of ground peeled off the rock beneath. Below, the mangue-swamps flourished, with vines twining up high and twirling in the sun above the treetops, trying to climb higher. The root-nests submerged entirely; animals jumped and scrabbled on the slippery roots, and fished and hunted from the stems of trees.
Up on the mesa, the Intruders dug deep. This planet and its lush bounty - well, they knew better than to settle in a place where who-knew-what would eat them. So they radioed in a drill-rig, and a drill-rig hurtled through space and time and landed on the top of the mesa, and dug its massive claws in to the greasy knuckles, and began to dig.
#25 - Light -- Three sleeps to sunrise, and then it was harder - when the city was underground, the floodlights came on, at every intersection. Usually she was in a hammock when they were underground, since it wasn't great sleeping on the trash and rubble at the bottom of the Pit. You could do it, sure, but not great. Also, there were rat-kind-of-things, and when you got a bite off those, you had to go to Medical, and they gave you all these great questions about how you were still 2-8 Vagrant Status and why didn't you just go back to your housing unit? Your stepbrother's still there. He'll take care of you.
(Right. Like he's been doing. He ever touches you again and you'll take care of him.)
#02 - Apples - I like growing things. Now we've got the systems back up, it's nice seeing actual plants - like not just planet-plants, which was great and all, but kind of terrifying. I mean like plants we humans actually know what to do with. Plants that don't melt your skin if you touch the wrong one. Plants that aren't infested, the bark covered in a hundred types of scale-insect, the wood pouring out mites when you cut it.
Nice plants. Safe plants. Tomatoes - high-yield. Peppers - same. Potatoes, happy to keep growing as you pile on new layers of earth. Carrots - so obliging! Onions. Sweet potatoes. Yucca. Cassava.
(I've considered trying to establish rice patties down in the flatlands, but that's years away - analysis, developing a strain that could handle the xenoformics, making sure it actually grows and doesn't just give up, etc. The usual.)
My favorite are the orchards, though. We've got some minigrow orchards in the West quad, trees about as tall as I am. Half of it experimental anyway, but I've got a strain of apples that actually grows. Bright pink and yellow, the tiniest things. I've seen pictures of how were larger at Home, but here you got three apples in the palm of a kid's hand. You're an adult, you cupped your hands: ten, twelve. Tiny, sour things. Good for keeping kids' teeth busy.
I always liked growing apples.
#33 - Rain -- The water poured down, just belted down from the sky. Huge, fantastic clouds: miles tall, miles wide, in huge rolls and roils that barreled in over the riverlands, picking up heat and puffing up high, and then bucketing down at dusk, as the air greyed and blued and finally blacked - but that didn't matter, because visibility was nil anyway.
By this time the city was usually up. Eventually the rainclouds moved on. The lights of hte city stopped wavering, became firm. The gardens' meal lids hummmed and clacked open, and the growlights burst on. Over the mountains, far to the north, Lightsning cracked, and low rumble reached the city every now and then - but above the city, the stars were out.
#04 - Bugs
#06 - Dark
#07 - Despair -- And even up here - even up here! it didn't make no nevermind, he was just an experiment hooked up to another experiment, making payball, sure, but what the hell good was money going to do you when all you were was floating along like a rootnest on a river of 160-proof and morphine? Just wander around online all day, just doing tests, filling out these stupid little games and then they check what gets in your blood and oh look, "he's performing far better than expected," yeah, well expect less, buckos, because that's all you'll get.
Just gotta stop this. Just gotta end it. Just done.
**
#12 - End -- When the fire came, he lay there. He could hear it in the city. Throught hte city. He could feel the city burning around him.
He lay there, and had his eyes shut, and smiled while he could.
**
#41 - Stable -- ...(back to ~life)
#10 - Duty
#13 - Fall -- 8-8. 7-8. ....2-8. 1-8.
#16 - Flying
#17 - Food
#18 - Foot
#19 - Grave
#20 - Green
#21 - Head
#22 - Hollow
#23 - Honor
#24 - Hope
#26 - Lost
#27 - Metal
#28 - New
#29 - Old
#31 - Poison
#34 - Regret
#35 - Roses
#36 - Secret
#37 - Snakes
#38 - Snow
#39 - Solid
#40 - Spring
#44 - Taboo
#45 - Ugly
#46 - War
#48 - Welcome
#49 - Winter
#50 - Wood
[WIP WIP WIP WIP WIP]