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During the day, Markov was a fairly dour place. For all of its energy, bustle and towering architecture, the hum of technology and progress, there was something very old about the city: a patina of dirt and fatigue that was bred in its steel bones, ground into the concrete. It had layers to it: there was the city with which most people interacted, the grid-pattern cross-streets, residential and commercial zoned, back-alleys, vendor-stalls and tenements, shops and glass-fronted skyscrapers down in the valleys between the truly massive towers that jutted like the vulgar fingers of a crowd of obscenely gesturing gods into the overcast sky. Overlayed upon that there was the city’s industry, foundries and factories spewing noxious gasses. Robotic mobile gantries and scaffolds a thousand feet high straddled monolithic corporate enclaves like the undead exoskeletons of titanic steel spiders. It all ran together, an almost organic tapestry. The megalithic corporate-industrial features, the very symbols of Markov’s drive towards progress merely enforced a sense of ancient weight, the largest and most venerable trees in the urban jungle holding dominion over all lesser architecture.
The city was a place treading water against the weight of its own history, literally mining the past for the resources to continue, but nonetheless clawing its way towards the future with the determined desperation of a man at sea who, after days afloat, has finally sighted land. In the light of day even the most casual observer could see the scars, could feel the strain of a society tuned to a precise fever-pitch by internal power-struggles and the endless war against a hostile planet.
At night, it was a different story.
In the dark, Markov glowed, a tapestry of deep shadows and blazing neon light. Every window of every tower shone forth like a star in a galaxy which, rather than being strewn across a rural sky, had been spilled across the landscape by some careless celestial being. The gantries and scaffolds loomed, great monstrous shadows lit by pin-prick warning lights. Sodium yellow, iodine-white and sickly faded green, emergency reds and warning blues, the electric tide cast an omnipresent scintillating haze, a dreamlike bloom which set the smog aglow. At ground-level it could be oppressive, the glare of the neon night almost predatory, as though the city were hunting its own citizens. It made what few shadows could survive even deeper, abandoned blocks, unlit alleyways and sheltered underpasses becoming wells of impenetrable black. From above, however, with just a touch of distance, with columnar searchlights lancing into the sky from the blazing dome of the space-port and every tower a solemn celestial grid of hazy electric wonder, it was a sight to fire the imagination and make a person believe in the future.
Jewels had never seen the city from this angle before. Growing up in the ruins, the sea of lights on the other side of the barrier had seemed impossibly distant – a challenge, accusing. ‘This place is not for you’ they said, and for much of her life she had listened. Now, riding above the neon hum of the night in the back of an unmarked corporate sky-car, looking out over the city through bulletproof tinted glass, it said something different: ‘I’m glad you’re back Jewels,’ buzzed the electric ocean. ‘Hope you don’t die.’
The city was a place treading water against the weight of its own history, literally mining the past for the resources to continue, but nonetheless clawing its way towards the future with the determined desperation of a man at sea who, after days afloat, has finally sighted land. In the light of day even the most casual observer could see the scars, could feel the strain of a society tuned to a precise fever-pitch by internal power-struggles and the endless war against a hostile planet.
At night, it was a different story.
In the dark, Markov glowed, a tapestry of deep shadows and blazing neon light. Every window of every tower shone forth like a star in a galaxy which, rather than being strewn across a rural sky, had been spilled across the landscape by some careless celestial being. The gantries and scaffolds loomed, great monstrous shadows lit by pin-prick warning lights. Sodium yellow, iodine-white and sickly faded green, emergency reds and warning blues, the electric tide cast an omnipresent scintillating haze, a dreamlike bloom which set the smog aglow. At ground-level it could be oppressive, the glare of the neon night almost predatory, as though the city were hunting its own citizens. It made what few shadows could survive even deeper, abandoned blocks, unlit alleyways and sheltered underpasses becoming wells of impenetrable black. From above, however, with just a touch of distance, with columnar searchlights lancing into the sky from the blazing dome of the space-port and every tower a solemn celestial grid of hazy electric wonder, it was a sight to fire the imagination and make a person believe in the future.
Jewels had never seen the city from this angle before. Growing up in the ruins, the sea of lights on the other side of the barrier had seemed impossibly distant – a challenge, accusing. ‘This place is not for you’ they said, and for much of her life she had listened. Now, riding above the neon hum of the night in the back of an unmarked corporate sky-car, looking out over the city through bulletproof tinted glass, it said something different: ‘I’m glad you’re back Jewels,’ buzzed the electric ocean. ‘Hope you don’t die.’