It wasn’t more than a day before we could see the steel skeletons of towers looming ahead on the viewscreen. As we came closer, I saw more and more flapples flying like flies around the bodies of dead trucks, crushed fliers and scattered robos and telly presents droans in the broken lands. Bodies of roadkilled roos and camels and people too, black as engine oil from a busted sump. Smoke rising up from the stripped chassis bodies. Bricks and blocks and chunks of concrete, bits of bitumen and all the rubble from the buildings of lost times when the gigacity was towers of glass and thin pollymer plastic glittering in the sun like a million streams of waterfalling stars, living machines of glass and smart thinfilm building minds talking and transacting in a brilliant system built of light stretched over steel bones. That’s the picture I had of it in me mind from when Isa told me that time of the stories from the past and I seen them overlaid on the earth outside the window and it was a shadow that stained the ground and rose up like wisps of smoke behind me eyes, like the dream coursing through me system with the black liquor that leaked through the IV from Sinnerman’s alkaloid synthfac.
