An Obsidian Sky
By
Ewan Sinclair
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(Copyright Ewan Sinclair 2011)
Covering Art by Daniel Zakrocki
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: A Faded Half Light
Chapter 2: Sephra
Chapter 3: The Broken Songs of Gaia
Chapter 4: A Red Sunrise
Chapter 5: The Forgotten Stars
Chapter 6: Arrival
Chapter 7: A Sleeping Dragon
Chapter 8: A Shadow Stirring
Chapter 9: An Eternal Dawn
Chapter 10: A Rising Foe
Chapter 11: The Voice of the Past
Chapter 12: An Obsidian Sky
Chapter 13: The Price of Paradise
Chapter 14: Crystal Starlight
Chapter 15: The Course of True Love
Chapter 16: In The Hands of the Gods
Epilogue
1
Month after month drifted by in the way smoke curls about a room. Each moment was stripped of its place and stretched from history to present without pause. Each movement of pleasure was scored deeply by the imposition of regret. Time had become simultaneously still and infinite. I would lie for hours on the cold wooden floor watching particles of dust dance for the sunlight shining through the half open blinds.
There was little distinction between morning and evening. No matter the time the white glare of the LEDs penetrated the soft light of the sun and watery luminescence of the moon. I could have been a caterpillar crawling silently along that cold wooden floor, wordlessly waiting for the comfort of a chrysalis or the sharp beak of a crow.
Occasionally the muffled calling of the streets was disturbed by the screams of gunshot. Once, around June, a flash made me lift my head from the bed. I watched its amber glow rise into the sky and flinched with surprise as the crashing of thunder shook the window.
The moment passed and I placed my head back on the pillow and closed my eyes.
The labour shortage had been around for a while. It had started with the people you never see. The one’s whose hands are scared by machinery. It wasn’t that they cluttered the streets begging for rations; it was that they disappeared from them entirely. The only thing I can remember about it would be the occasional comment of a friend or passer-by that they had never heard the streets so quite, or how nice it was that the chimneys of the factories stopped exhaling, or how the haze hanging over the skies was lifting.
Little by little all the small things began to force themselves into the foreground. Suits once perfectly pressed had become wrinkled. The smiles of the people you meet growing darker and wrinkled in the corners. The whites of the eyes of the customers in the cafés had become jaundiced and yellow. Soft skin hewn from silk made papery and rough. You could climb the stairs home and hear wheezing coming from the floors above.
Later, but not much later, it was the acquaintances you’d known so briefly, at a conference or a nightclub who had long since disappeared suddenly announcing their arrival in heaven by an automated social update. My phone was growing quieter. I received less and less calls and more and more marketing, but even the marketing had changed. Employment insurance must have been having the best year since the beginning of time.
Then it wasn’t somewhere out there in the distance anymore. It was your best friends. It was your paycheque. It was your health insurance, your recreation – even your food. Finally it had been my job. Even the insurance couldn’t hold out when all the underwriters moved their money into safer industries.
Now my days dragged themselves along like a serpent, slowing and with its belly rubbing against the floor. With at least four to five thousand applications per job I had lowered my expectations. I chuckled to myself at the thought that it was probable that the other four thousand applicants had done the same. It would be the one that aimed their sights the lowest that would rescue themselves from receding into eternity unnoticed.
No matter the state of the power grid, the reception on my phone or the promises of politicians – the world kept turning and the earth continued its march against the sun.
Then it was August. A job interview burgeoning had filled me with such promise. Ten days from now there’s a chance I’d be working again. Who knows, in a year I might actually be earning some money. Such things I knew were fantasies but who did it hurt to dream.
My excitement was rudely interrupted by a banal bleating. I had come to rely on the reception coming into service whenever it was least needed. I turned my head from one screen to another and saw the call ID said Matt. I answered grumpily. ‘What’s up?...Fine thanks…I’m not doing anything...yes, but I’m in the middle of some prep...cheers man…bye.’
The truth of it all was that at long last something was on the horizon. Today hadn’t folded itself into tomorrow it had become separate and distinct. I moved my hand up the input and in response music raised its voice over the distant road noise. My body rose and my mouth moved automatically to lyrics that floated sweetly over the bass tones and settled themselves in my conscious.
It was a Tuesday and I decided to go into town, without a job there was little else to do. I lazily put on some clothes, drifting in and out of the tedium of putting together an ensemble. I moved with sluggish motions as though I was figuring out how to use them for the first time. In the darkness of the morning my eyes scanned the apartment to find my keys. Due to the cost of electricity I had become accustomed to keeping the lights off. I had avoided the light-switches and the touch panels for so long now I had become an expert at making out silhouettes. Even so it was some time before I found them.
I opened the door to my car. After so long inert in the bay it resisted a little before it swung clear. The flat card shape of my keys slid with less protest into the ignition. A long quiet dinging sound let me know that the engine was on. I pushed the button required to attach my retention belt to me and looked down at the screen on the wheel. It took a while before all the icons appeared clearly. I pushed the voice button and stated in a hoarse voice, ‘Downtown, Chana car park.’ The system struggled with the translation and resorted to a long period of buffering whilst it communicated with some distant and probably quite aged server for a second opinion before it resolved my request. Pressing the start route button I settled back and let the car do all the work.
In no time at all I was rapidly passing the central boulevard where row after row of gravity defying buildings brushed past. They were barely noticeable at this speed, they appeared quickly and shot away into the rear-view in no appreciable time. The world had dissolved into a blur, a dull hazy blur. They grey sky obscured the tops of the towers. There was nothing in this city that could stimulate the mind. It had been built procedurally by committee. As a consequence everything was just a slightly altered copy of everything else.
It wasn’t long before I had become bored of the glass and concrete scenery. I fumbled with the touchpad on the dash till I found the radio. A news report from one of the few stations still reporting warbled in from the car’s speakers.
‘Thanks to the impressive efforts of our emergency services the fire was put out before there were any casualties.
‘In other news,’ the narrator continued, ‘there is a demonstration taking place outside the Global Governmental Offices. This demonstration is in response to an increase in fuel duty due to come in later this year. Eyewitnesses have stated that the crowd remains calm in spite of a heavy police presence around the building. So far there are no reports of violence but protesters have been warned that non-peaceful protests will be met with force.’ There was a pause as the reported pulled up the next story.
‘Moving to the Waste Zones now for a breaking headline. Latest figures from the Pre
sidium Party state that there has been a forty percent increase in resistance to Western control. Our correspondent’s dispatch on the Waste Zone Crisis is available from 9pm Eastern Standard Time.
‘In other news the Machali tribe appears to be gaining momentum in its attempt to take over the Southern Region. The leader of the political movement, Walter Halerm, stated that the tribe would soon be in control of sixteen thousand square miles of territory, after undertaking its most ambitious land grab in nearly a decade. Our reports are waiting in the Presidium consulate for their statement due late today.
‘That’s all the headlines for now. I’m Iaevesa Hudson. Back to you Atifa with all the latest music and celebrity news.’
I hit the pad to silence the audio. Politics, war and strife were problems that only the rich could afford to worry about. I personally considered finding a hydrogen station with reasonable prices about as close to a political statement as I was able to make. Let the world do what it will. It didn’t bother me so long as the fuel prices went down and my equity went up.
The car buzzed the wheel to tell me it had made it to the vehicle storage facility. The distorted androgynous voice of my car began bleating repetitively, ‘Disembark. Disembark. Disembark.’ I did as I was told and unfolded my legs from the tiny car and breathed in the thick foggy air of Bataga. As I stepped away from the car and it was rolled away on an automated running track and into the darkness of the building. I took my ticket of validity and made my way forward. My body temperature soon began to climb.
After just a few yards I started to appreciate that the sun was baking down upon me. It was so hot. It was too hot and water was too expense to waste. Yet it flowed down my back from my pores at an alarming rate, every droplet another dollar wasted. I wished I had just stayed at home. It was far too hot for walking and far too expensive to get ill.
All around me Downtown was flung about in its huge, sprawling and poorly planned composition. A mixture of washed out colours blinded my vision. Vapour rose from the dusty tarmac throwing mirages over the vista. My head was compelled to look up and wonder what it must have been like when all this had been built. When it was all new and fresh, when everything was clean again, I’d take another walk here, and it would really mean something. Some buildings were so high it hurt your neck to even try and look at them, I couldn’t help but think of how they used to look, of how they would have commanded your eyesight upwards, of how much beauty there must have been. For all their cracked glass and faded façades there was still something ambitious about them, still something that hadn’t given up.
I started coughing, the air was nauseating. They told us in school that it had been like this even since the war. Mrs Greeves had explained, in the way she had of explaining things, that the earth had been so intensively soaked in chemicals in the Reclamation that it was quite likely even my grandchildren would be suffering from it. ‘Clean up,’ they had called it back then. To me it seemed more like systematic poisoning. The dust that was choking me right now was a consequence of the soil being so toxic it would be unable to host life for as long as anyone cared to measure time. Still, I thought, it was probably better than risking sickness from all the biologicals that had been thrown at the city during The Fall.
After a short walk I came across the emporium I was looking for. The sign above the huge curved glass entrance said Washington Emporium. It was the latest vogue for the wealthy to exercise their expensive educations by naming their creations after dead cities long consigned to the university libraries. I was quite amazed that I had managed to get the reference at all, it seemed like the kind of unimportant thing you forget shortly after learning it. History had been such a drag. I can remember watching the dust as Mr Calvin would sit slumped in his chair warbling about one cataclysm after another. All I seemed to hear was how various nations had been compelled to steal the world from others. Back then I couldn’t wait for it to be over, the past was barely worth remembering.
My thoughts were brought to an abrupt conclusion as the refreshing cool and clean air provided by the building’s environmental systems greeted me. Too much outdoor air was bad for you the broadcasts said. I wholeheartedly agreed them.
I began my ascent in one of the glass-encased lifts contemplating how long it would take for the air to be clean again. It was the kind of time period you can appreciate but not really understand. It’s like knowing the number of grains of sand in world, you can appreciate the size of the digits but you can’t really picture it.
The elevator closed around me and I grew wings of glass as I soared from floor to floor like a bird released from a cage. Soaring. What a wonderful word. I was soaring so high that the people on the ground floor were almost reduced to the size of bacteria, all clumped together like the space between them had disappeared. Maybe that was how God saw the world, so high up, where the spaces between us don’t exist. Up here, a better world.
I emerged from the lift and into a large open-planned marble space where the store of my dreams resided. It was a flagship, like the kind you see everywhere today but with a twist. This was the Eternis Systems flagship store and it was intense. I remembered the promotions they’d placed all over the broadcasts when I was a child that claimed it provided the most sublime collection of technology in the whole word. It biggest store of its kind. So big in fact that it took up a whole thirteen floors of the emporium itself and every inch of space seemed to have been put into use.
Carousing the aisles of the store would take a lifetime without the store’s indexing system which, like everything in this city, was currently out of order. Fortunately I was quite the professional at these things and found the stand I was looking for in under and hour. It housed the hottest product on the market right now - the new Compass(R) handhelds, the thinnest and most advanced handhelds in the world and, thanks to the labour crisis, they were also the rarest. This store had the last unsold batch from the previous year’s production cycle. A consequence of an accidental mismatch of WaveIDs in a depot they had been labelled for refit, and rescued from the furnaces by an astute office manager who’d, quite by accident, become lost inside the facility after taking several wrong turns and had found himself on the recycling floor where, just in front of him, he happened upon the mislabeled crates and immediately had them shipped to the store. Or so story went.
As with most rare and important objects I couldn’t help but to pick it up and marvelled at its flatness, its shimmer, and its elegance. It was like something from an art exhibition, as though by some act of divine intervention a single ingot of gold had wrapped itself around a single panel of sapphire lens.
I noticed that everybody around me was holding the display models intently and purposely as though it had suddenly become some inalienable right exclusive to them. Each an emperor of some tiny mobile island.
Of course it was way too much money for me, so long as I wanted to continue to eat and breathe. Yet somehow the simple action of placing the device in my palm had the curious effect of becoming a certainty that I couldn’t afford not to buy it. Besides if the interview went well, then I could afford one or more a year. I figured I could just about squeeze it into the gap between my credit limit and total bankruptcy. If I was careful, I could have it paid off by the end of the next decade.
Yes, I thought, I’m gonna get it.
And that was that. Shopping trip over. Time to go home and unwrap my tiny chest of treasure.
I descended in the elevator.
2