Project: Title Pending
The city. Tall and soot-cloaked, a glorifying testament to the new age of construction and productivity.
Chimneys fumigate, bells ring, clocks turn and the city runs on profit day after day. With diseases growing ever more rampant, skin conditions are common, along with viruses that affect the mind, making people in the slums think and feel in queer ways.
From high The City looked alike a giant highly-mechanized series of rods and pipes striking at defiance to the heavens. From low The City was a scattering of barrios, block-built terraces of black brick homes, all interminced with mines, factories, pits and construction sites.
All around swam pipes and tubes transmitting information, letters, demands, materials, and order. The pipes traversed from the tallest tower to the very deepest of the mines, but most tubing worked its way around the bottom of the city, with very little concern for those who had to live with them in such awkward proximity. The pipes punctured through churches and buildings, through the roofs and rooms of people's homes, often huge sectors of the system would lie dormant for decades, never to be touched by ordinary people or to face punishment.
The base of the city looked alike a shanty town being swallowed by a perverse underground aluminum octopus. There were always more pipes being built.
"It's everyman for himself in the city" they say. A maxim that was closely regarded by all. Particularly the male demographic who wished to survive the week. Women still held onto some form of union and solidarity, they congregated together in secret and in darkness. In brothels and in tea rooms; behind closed doors. They were the only form of organized power left that could so much as dream challenging the ever maddening enforcers of "modernization". But woman in The City were fragmented and divided and there was no mutual reason for union in the first place. For some women sat at dinner with the pasty faces of the status quo, some sat at dinner with cholera and tetanus.
It was the III-rd of April, the year X. Like the smog and fumes, affluenza was growing ever more thick and omniscient. You could see it in the way people spoke, walked, talked and thought. Something was rotten in the state.
To any idle passer-through it was an invisible process. They wouldn't have noticed. Somewhere, something, would have felt not quite right, but it would have taken a good few days of living and working in The City till the simplistic facade peeled back, and the mental crisis that so many citizens faced could be seen.
But understanding the social unrest was another matter, problems weren't skin-deep. Fools and simpletons simply saw the skin and conceded at that, but the problem was far beneath the skin, the skin was as thick as tissue paper and the blood beneath the skin was boiling and bubbling up a whirlpool of discontent.
At the top of the tallest tower, a secretary was found dead. A thick ice-axe was lodged perfectly between her eyes, an act of violence unheard of from the top, the top never committed violence (tirectly).
There were no suspicions, it was the mayor himself who committed the act. There were only desperate and growing theories of denial circulating throughout the media and security forces. Stories of crude fabrication fluttered like wildfire throughout the lower levels of the tower. It was the ultimate Catch 22. No one could be seen to lie, yet no one could be seen to be accusing the Mayor of murder. Both offenses were heresy of the worst kind.
The town's main newspaper 'The Herald' had its journalists and legal staff working around the clock. It seemed that it wouldn't be possible to deny the murder, but it would be possible to reduce the accusers to a minimum amount of the workload as possible. The head-chief of the inspector police force and Herald editor had come to a compromise. They would work together to reduce the execution toll and keep both their own necks at all costs. In the end negotiations came down to two names, one journalist and one detective; a fair trade off between the two forces.
"Poor buggers," the Head-chief muttered unsympathetically, "I'd hate to be in their shoes..."
Chimneys fumigate, bells ring, clocks turn and the city runs on profit day after day. With diseases growing ever more rampant, skin conditions are common, along with viruses that affect the mind, making people in the slums think and feel in queer ways.
From high The City looked alike a giant highly-mechanized series of rods and pipes striking at defiance to the heavens. From low The City was a scattering of barrios, block-built terraces of black brick homes, all interminced with mines, factories, pits and construction sites.
All around swam pipes and tubes transmitting information, letters, demands, materials, and order. The pipes traversed from the tallest tower to the very deepest of the mines, but most tubing worked its way around the bottom of the city, with very little concern for those who had to live with them in such awkward proximity. The pipes punctured through churches and buildings, through the roofs and rooms of people's homes, often huge sectors of the system would lie dormant for decades, never to be touched by ordinary people or to face punishment.
The base of the city looked alike a shanty town being swallowed by a perverse underground aluminum octopus. There were always more pipes being built.
"It's everyman for himself in the city" they say. A maxim that was closely regarded by all. Particularly the male demographic who wished to survive the week. Women still held onto some form of union and solidarity, they congregated together in secret and in darkness. In brothels and in tea rooms; behind closed doors. They were the only form of organized power left that could so much as dream challenging the ever maddening enforcers of "modernization". But woman in The City were fragmented and divided and there was no mutual reason for union in the first place. For some women sat at dinner with the pasty faces of the status quo, some sat at dinner with cholera and tetanus.
It was the III-rd of April, the year X. Like the smog and fumes, affluenza was growing ever more thick and omniscient. You could see it in the way people spoke, walked, talked and thought. Something was rotten in the state.
To any idle passer-through it was an invisible process. They wouldn't have noticed. Somewhere, something, would have felt not quite right, but it would have taken a good few days of living and working in The City till the simplistic facade peeled back, and the mental crisis that so many citizens faced could be seen.
But understanding the social unrest was another matter, problems weren't skin-deep. Fools and simpletons simply saw the skin and conceded at that, but the problem was far beneath the skin, the skin was as thick as tissue paper and the blood beneath the skin was boiling and bubbling up a whirlpool of discontent.
At the top of the tallest tower, a secretary was found dead. A thick ice-axe was lodged perfectly between her eyes, an act of violence unheard of from the top, the top never committed violence (tirectly).
There were no suspicions, it was the mayor himself who committed the act. There were only desperate and growing theories of denial circulating throughout the media and security forces. Stories of crude fabrication fluttered like wildfire throughout the lower levels of the tower. It was the ultimate Catch 22. No one could be seen to lie, yet no one could be seen to be accusing the Mayor of murder. Both offenses were heresy of the worst kind.
The town's main newspaper 'The Herald' had its journalists and legal staff working around the clock. It seemed that it wouldn't be possible to deny the murder, but it would be possible to reduce the accusers to a minimum amount of the workload as possible. The head-chief of the inspector police force and Herald editor had come to a compromise. They would work together to reduce the execution toll and keep both their own necks at all costs. In the end negotiations came down to two names, one journalist and one detective; a fair trade off between the two forces.
"Poor buggers," the Head-chief muttered unsympathetically, "I'd hate to be in their shoes..."
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