The Altonevers (50 page)

Some of these supersized structures
and skyscrapers are made of naturally growing primordial vines
guided in their growth to form the floors and walls of elaborately
detailed dwelling’s and high rises. Side by side with enormous
mineral and crystal growths grown from the fluctuating protean
semi-fluid ground, and carved into buildings and skyscrapers that
form the bulk of the metropolis' endless mass. Others are made of
laid brick fashioned as archaic cathedrals and sacredly constructed
ancient stone structures. Oranges and blues and whites aglow in
abounding adularescence, beside lucidly labrodescent greens and
grays of lush and dull luster, and the palest patches of
spectralitic city, are all in a single pupil's fill of the
panoramic crystalline scene seen from high above. Appearing to her
as more opulent in their beauty then any sunset she’d ever seen.
Everything in Central is composed of spinning particles appearing
to be pulsating in place. Portraying every angle and aspect of the
mammoth metropolis' vibrating, shade shifting solid
surfaces.

Seeing every few hundred
blocks, thousands of the obsidian streets drawn into geometrically
symmetrical shapes resembling the electromagnetic force drawn
patterns of crop circles. Appearing as circular craters of
diffusing light between the otherwise endless grid of living and
constructed structures collectively forming colossal citified
canyons of mostly the fluorescent and crystalline Central.
A subway train appears and dives into a white
hole that opens in the orange sky. Elaborately decorated with
graffiti of algebra and calculus explaining the properties of the
train and what it's passing through at any given moment. The
arithmetic graffiti strongly resembles the footprints left by
pan-time pigeons, covering every train car to be seen, and is
spread to rogue walls and rooftops through the entire endless city.
They’re thought of as the hieroglyphs of one of Central’s longest
extinct cultures, supposedly explaining the complexity of the
ceaseless metropolis' nonsensical emergence and perpetually
persisting existence in imagined mathematical terms.

A skyscraper not far from the
suspended two snaps, instantly into and inky magma falling from its
gothic shape of crafted angles and cascading down to quake through
the liquescent ground. Flooding the street with millions of fluid
tons of raging fluorescence splashing tens of stories up the
structures around it, and is absorbed by them, enriching the
brilliance of their fluorescent and mineral facades like new washes
of similar energy in flux. The rest is re-assumed by the primordial
obsidian blacktop as an amorphous mass of lustrous fluid melting
like a pile of snow into the mellifluous ground well beneath them,
that the two are suddenly plummeting toward like a feather falling
next to a rock. Splatting against the ground with a painful splash
of pins and needles, while reverberating waves in the shapes of
their bodies outward and down the street for nearly a mile in
either direction, though further through the air.

“
Ouch,” she says as she
pulls her face from the floor, that's dripping sheer black from her
nose and cheeks. She's close enough to see the glittering gold
fluidly flowing particles visibly swimming in a vacuum to form the
fluctuating waves of the obsidian ground.

“
Which way is which?” she
asks.

“
Who knows.”

“
How?”

“
It's never the same, so
whichever way we go for now is where we're headed. Until we find
our footing anyway,” he says standing to his feet, and reaching for
his pockets and searching for his smokes.

“
Damn,” he says.

“
What? smokes?”

“
Lost 'em.”

“
Good, quit.”

“
Blah Blah,” Cider says
waving her off.

“
To cure yourself from the
stress of not having one?”

“
I'm immune.”

“
That's right like a
vampire or something.” she says.

“
Something,” he says and
the two stroll along the edge of the curb, on the fringe of the
people passing on the sidewalk. One after the other, she after he,
teetering inches over the drains and gutters, evading the clusters
and crowds like streetwise city people. The curb echoes each of her
footsteps, just as the ambient echoes even the slightest twitch of
her eyelash or flick of her finger. The surfaces and ambient of
Central illustrate even the slightest of physical movements. She’s
walking in the wake of his, and watching the passing pedestrians
often overflowing from the pavement onto the street. Thinking of
how much they resemble the spectral stream from the subterranean
catacombs, though they're opaque with barely vibrating faces, hats,
hands and clothes. Clothed in the celestial styles of Central,
where even the peasants and paupers are dressed more regally than
the royalty of all the known Altonevers. A collection of all beings
of all places and times and Altos to ever or will exist, are
physically persisting here at the eternal birth place of their
essential energy.

Particle people are native here from
forever ago to now, though they weren’t the first, are sometimes
vaporous, solid, or fluid humanoid figures that like everything
native to Central have a tendency of popping in and out of
existence as they please. And sometimes out of probability,
instantly teleporting out of place to return again seconds later
and a few paces ahead of themselves. Though most are tourists or
recent arrivals that consider themselves Centralers after their
first day here, and emulate the endlessly erupting culture’s of the
endless civilizations at the epicenter of existence, until they are
absorbed to become the emulated. A culture of cycles, repeatedly
regenerating over unknown revolutions of assumed
generations.

Murmurs of passing mouths are mixing
with the cityscape sounds blending into audible walls of static
with the chirps of birds chaotically compounding to envelope her
ears in a single volume of cosmic noise. Her ears are aware as a
scared hare's, in the random rhythms resounding all around her
resembling the sounds of a spring rain forest. All of structures
large and small are adorned with styles of architecture favoring
spirals, and are detailed by tiny to large carved people
accentuating the angles and of contours nearly everything from the
arches of bridges and halls, to where any one surface meets
another. Decorating countless rotunda's, Amphitheaters ,
skyscrapers, towers and spires and coloseums nestled next to types
of pyramids spread throughout the florescently dressed
Central.

The two pass twisting light poles that
are holding up globes of glowing plasma lighting illegibly
scribbled street signs leading to equally scribbled paths of the
primordial city planners indecipherable design. Passing runic trees
whose green and other color leaves drain, dwindling in drops of wax
into semicircular shapes encircling the tree's trunk while melting
slowly into the ebbing protean pavement perpetually undulating
underfoot. The bare branches replenish their leaves in seconds,
only to drip and shed them by the drop in a continual cycle of loss
and renewal.

She’s overcome with a sensation that's
strange to her, of her mind overflowing from her head and washing
through her body. Thinking for a second that her psyche is
breathing heavy heaving breathes and superseding her five senses in
perceiving the reality of pulsating particles she is presently
immersed in. Feeling as though she feels each passing speck of the
lightening yellow breeze washing through her as though she’s only a
filter, with no skin, flesh or bones of her own. Striding behind
Cider, the two continue tip toeing along the edge of the curb,
around the bustling crowds of Central's famously fashionable
particle people. The people are particle popping tens at a time,
from a simple stroll down the sidewalk to then instantly
dispersing, disappearing from their places mid stride, popping out
of persistence and reconstituting anywhere across the entirety of
Centrals endless eternity. Re-appearing, though a few seconds
later, and a few steps along their previous paths.

A wind brimming with tiny droplets of
glimmering space-time sweeping in whipping swells whips through
valleys of vibrant often vitreous fluorescent facades, crosses
their squinting faces while strolling along the rivers of passing
opaque pedestrians. A soccer ball sized white sphere flying a
hundred feet above, is cleaving through the yellowing orange
ambient like thrown boulder. Pushing and bending light and matter
around it, leaving a cylindrical wake of refraction spreading to a
thousand foot wide trail through the ambient behind it. to Anna and
Cider the windows and walls and sky blur through the cylindrical
wake like their looking at a slowly spraying burst of
water.

Proceeding a series of long
transparent swarming streaks diagonally descending through the
blurring ambient, following miniature asteroids whose mass and
trails of burning energy, only visible at certain angles, of pink
contrails skipping in and out of the now yellow atmosphere. Coming
in and out of view while streaking across the sky to collide,
exploding as only blast waves, into the sides of skyscrapers
throwing continually fracturing chunk of mineral. Sometimes
skidding across rooftops like stones over water while forcefully
shattering the megalithic lattice of the structures, and rumbling
holographic echoes through the ether. Raining their faces as debris
splashing into the ground as ripples and larger reverberations
reaching amplitudes of tens, to hundreds of yards high and low. The
people usually glide about their day undisturbed by the massive
array of undulations passing almost unnoticed under their
feet.

Anna’s admiring the look of
a twenty story pale blue brick constructed Cathedral at the end of
a street, that’s edging a large geometrically intricate
intersection, when a holographic comet crashes through its upper
floors, blowing the whole side to a bursts of pulverized stone and
rubble. The scene blinks in and out of visibility with every other
blink of her fluttering awestruck eyes. Exploding outward and
meeting a white sphere standing at the other side of the street
that eagerly absorbs while bending, blurring and blending the burst
of blue rubble into splashing patterns orbiting around it's matter
devouring spherical sphere. Saving the building beside it from a
battery of form shattering blue stone pulverulance and
shrapnel.
The long silver poles of the
next intersection's traffic lights are stretching a mile into the
air. Suspending six red, green and yellow lights converging into
the shape of a spider whose feet step, stomping lightly around the
passing crowds of pedestrians and cars. Anna looks around, eye
shopping and window watching the passersby in the rows of the
glowing glass storefronts lining all of the undulating street. Each
row of stores is an amalgam of cultures from all the Altonevers
over, converging into just one city block of Central's forever
undulating, endless avenues.

At the next crosswalk is a horizon
park to their right with light gray arches and pillars in sluggish
rotation around its distant center. Spanning a few square mile
chunk of what once was sprawling city, now reduced and reducing
into flat disks of dust and debris interlaced with freely suspended
cobblestone paths lined with trees. Lit by plasma percolating gas
lamps that are skipping along the many different rings of dust
spiraling around in the gravitational grasp of an active, slowly
churning ice cream truck sized gravity well.

“
What's going on there?”
she asks.

“
That, that’s some kind of
singularity suspending a park that it will eventually be washing
out of existence. So they made some pathways and planted some
trees, then called it a washing park. Standard really, unless it
gets rezoned.”

“
A washing park?” she
asks.

“
Yeah all that stuff will
be eaten, devoured by a gravity well. Here they call it a washing,
if you haven't noticed there fairly common,” he says.

“
Yes. I have”.

“
First time in the big
city, with its big billboards, bustling with beautiful people,
popping in and out, and being vapor, liquid or crystal. It must be
very exciting,” he says.

“
I didn't see anyone that
is the three,” she says.

“
Look around, and closer,
they all are,” he says, and she looks, seeing the swathes of people
shifting through phase around her line of sight and peripheral, and
with even the most subtle twitch of her pupil. She takes to swiping
her eyes rapidly back and forth for fun, rolling through the crowds
of quickly shifting phases. Then spinning her eyes in her head,
trying to get a glimpse of a single person as a mix of four phases
at the same time, until she blinks. Resting her eyes for a split
second at a time, refreshing the way she's conceiving what's around
her each time she opens them feeling as though she's leaping to a
different vantage of the reality around her, even when standing in
the same place. The colors seem slightly different and the shapes
more or less crisp, she can't really tell, though the ever present
presence of pulsating particles enveloping her in what is
perceivable remains regardless of her perspective. The two continue
along Central’s massive pathways of mellifluously undulating
pavement heading to nowhere in particular.

The two become peckish, peeking
through the front windows of shops, sniffing about for a suitable
place to eat with their eyes. Feasting on the different sensual
pleasures presented through each new pane of glass, until
eventually coming to a bakery. The daylight bakery, with shapes and
colors of cookies and pastries that all look little suns and
celestial things.