Darker Worlds by Jeffrey Thomas

Author:Jeffrey Thomas [Thomas, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Forma Street Press
Published: 2019-07-30T04:00:00+00:00

THE MAYOR OF EPHEMERA

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Time is meat. At first its carcass is the bright red of dawn, accented with clouds of fat, offering seemingly boundless promise. It is sliced into fractions, and consumed in increments. But gradually it is depleted, and the portions that are not used are wasted, blacken and decay and become nothing.

Time needed no face before there was anyone to observe and chart its coming and goings. Since there has been, often Time has come boldly and undisguised, its head a gold stopwatch framing a disk of raw red meat. Yet at times Time is masked, and passes on its way unrecognized on unfathomable errands.

The people of Ephemera had long lain oblivious to the stealthy doings of Time. Long ago, they had become dissatisfied with their imposed and primitive biological existence. The dictates of belly and genitalia. They had devised methods of experiencing life and interacting with one-another in what they considered loftier and more meaningful ways, through the use of increasingly clever technology. They had supplemented and circumvented the body. Ultimately they had superseded the body altogether.

The citizens of Ephemera had rid themselves of their obsolete husks of transient flesh, preserving only the most vital of organs – the thinking organ – in mechanical bodies, either cosmetically designed by themselves or by others whose specialty it was. No longer imprisoned in some random conglomeration of cells they had had no choice over, the citizens expressed their innermost beings, celebrated the beauty of artifice, and all this satisfied them for quite some time.

Eventually, however, they again became disenchanted with existence. As their mechanized environment required less and less that they work, they spent more and more time idle, relaxing…resting…sleeping. Sleeping for longer and longer periods.

Dreaming became their main source of entertainment, of comfort, of sustenance. Dreaming transported them beyond even their synthetic bodies, and relieved them of their frustratingly and perplexingly unsatisfying interactions with each other in the waking world.

In time, the people no longer chose to wake, and what little needed to run in Ephemera ran itself.

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