The Glory

An outsider to the end, Keaton sat slumped against a cold gray wall and did his best not to listen to the sound of hidden gears spinning inches away from his head, one miniscule fraction of the staggering whole that was formed by the citys unseen clockwork guts.

He reached into his pocket, felt the little plastic bottle, and held it tight.

The whirring machinery sounded like a dead forest, dry leaves rustling and becoming powder in the face of a patient but relentless wind. An image leapt to Keatons mind unbidden, and with inner sight he glimpsed the true core of the city, the endless maze of tunnels and cogs and thick black cables. It sunk its tangled roots deep into the earth, growing ever deeper and more complex as the city expanded, building itself without the need for human hands or human eyes.

Keaton brought his bottle out into the light. He unscrewed its shiny gray top  childproof  and distantly heard a dim popping noise, the sound of air rushing into a space where it had never before been allowed to venture. He shook a dozen or so square white sleeping pills into his hand, and dust billowed up around them, a thin and chalky powder that stuck to his fingers. Slowly, mechanically, Keaton brought his hand to his lips and began to chew. Intense bitterness coursed over his tongue, old expired drug in a fresh body. He squeezed his eyes shut tightly, trying to ignore the urgent need to spit, and began to chew on a second handful.

The brittle things became powder within a few seconds, stealing all moisture from his mouth. Swallowing, he could feel the hard clot of medicine all the way down on its long journey into his belly. He took another mouthful, and another, and when he found the bottle empty he opened a second one. Like termites nesting inside a computer mainframe, the people of the city swarmed all around him as they followed their frantic, mad schedules, and the bitter taste of the pills in his mouth mixed with the salt of his tears.

After a time, Keaton grew weary of waiting to die, for he knew long ago that he could not. He drew his brown woolen coat more tightly around him, more to ward off the loneliness than the cold, and looked at the sky.

Time belched, and went sideways. Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last. He believed, in fact, that neither one of those concepts were even possible anymore. Time itself had made it so. Its erratic periods were never the same from one outbreak to the next, and never any easier to take. The human mind is designed to process Time in a straight line, at a constant pace. It is not well-suited to dealing with circumstances such as the ones that Keaton found himself in. He wished that he could go insane. And how he had tried.

It was always night in the city, always illuminated by the frigid antiseptic glare of the streetlights that hung in the air like bright suns enslaved, and yet suddenly there were no stars in the sky. Instead, a matrix of fine white lines cut across the darkness above him, and he tried to connect the things with his suddenly-fading memory of the stars that used to be.

After a while, it came to him, and the explanation made as much sense as did anything around him. The bizarre streaks that cut across the sky were stars, after a fashion. Stars move through the heavens at their own glacial pace, and the constellations that they form are transformed into new groupings every hundred thousand years or so. The night sky above the city consisted of every possible position of every visible star.