Shattered Sky by David Colby

Author:David Colby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thinking Ink Press
Published: 2018-10-17T19:47:33+00:00

10

Balcony

4/27/2068

Chinese-American Alliance, China, Xin-Shanghai

T-Minus L-Day: 115

It was midnight in Shanghai and Jillian and I were holding hands. It wasn’t due to anything romantic, but rather, because to do anything else would mean getting dragged under and devoured by the crowds.

When leaving the defense base, this had seemed like a really good idea, but out here in the messy jumbled up press of humanity that was Xin-Shanghai’s four main arcologies, it didn’t seem like a bad idea. No, it seemed like the worst damn idea in the history of the universe.

Every step brought me into contact with things so far removed from space or Quebec that it stunned me, made me want to stand and just gawk. And if I had been allowed to do that, I’m pretty sure someone would have just stolen everything I owned and left me to die of exposure. Fortunately, Jillian’s hand and the pressure of the crowd kept me moving.

Kept me stepping.

Step.

Glowing neon holograms, showing a naked woman, writhing and dancing around a pole, with words in English and Mandarin, blurring into a confetti of meanings: HAPPY SUPER FUN TIME! Men, sitting around a cargo container that had been cut in half and put in the side of the corridor, like a gravity well in a stellar dust cloud, causing the crowd to flow around it. They were playing cards or dominoes or something. There were men and women leaning against walls in dead end alleyways that sprouted from each corridor like arterial veins. There were shops, hotels, brothels, factories, parlors, restaurants, musicians, street performers … it was all so much, all jammed into such a tight space that things overflowed and intermixed into each other: brothels that served food, places where you could get yourself tattooed and—if the sign was to be believed—modified with cybernetic prosthesis. Not that they came out and said that, but I spotted a few glittering arms and bald spots—the bald spots that showed where someone had gotten a brain implant of some kind—lurking around those stores.

It was madness.

Jillian and I got shoved—partially due to her instinct and partially due to the pressure of the crowds—from an interior area to an external area, where the hallway turned into a balcony, with a view at the co-urbanation and the other archologies and the steel sky and – through all that – the blackness of horizon and the distant promise of a currently invisible ocean. The sun had gone all the way down, and that just seemed to make the megacity even brighter.

We could actually talk now. The wind was fierce and the crowd noises were omnipresent, but they had faded just enough, and our ears had become just deadened enough, that we could hear something beyond the drone, the buzz, and the thrum. And, unlike in the possibly-bugged room we’d been given, this place was private; private thanks to the noise and private thanks to the comforting cloak of a dialect so different it might as well be a different language entirely.

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