The city was growing hungrier and hungrier, so the man from the Earth-Sydney Division of the Europan Infrastructure Committee had said.
Job found them, hauling great glistening slabs of raw red meat in squeaking wheelbarrows. There were gusty circles of charred litter blown away from where their ship had landed, black marks in the pavement, and their drones lazily whirred around, flicking glowing green eyes over a crack in the wall there, or down an alley, or boredly over Job.
‘Hungrier and hungrier. Lonelier and lonelier. All that and y’know,’ he had said, muffled slightly, through the side of his mouth, pushing the wheelbarrow along. There were four of them, all lean, sharp-looking, ragged, like they would be good at running and scurrying.
Their drones were battered, too, chassis decorated up and down with bite marks, claw marks. Job hadn’t seen an infrastructure drone in a while. Blocky and dull, little bland flashing lights. The whine of wind-projectors, the ozone stink of outer space. Legally speaking, they were omnipresent throughout Sydney, keeping it running, buildings from collapsing, thoroughly livable, infrastructurally stable. Realistically speaking, they had mostly been eaten, beaten down, sacrificed, so on. Nobody had complained loud enough for the Europan Admiralty to send more. Nobody really cared.
As they walked through that street the other infrastructure workers split up, flowered away, squeaking down different alleys or side streets. Cloudy white light gleamed on the sides of those fat slices of meat. Job hadn’t seen meat like that in a while.
The meat, of course, was for the city. It needed more and more each time.
And, no, Job was not allowed a chunk of meat. Not even a tiny cube.
The man from the Infrastructure Committee, who had been in the city, now, for up to five years, gave Job this advice:
- Always have an edible sacrifice
- Never go anywhere you can’t easily run from
- Do not enter strangely placed doors. Do not listen to the noises inside them, or smell the scents from beneath them. Do not look at the lights. Ignore them.
- Avoid sharp angles.
- Avoid buildings that loom.
- Avoid shadows that seem too dark.
- Don’t stay inside the buildings too long.
- When the city gets hungry, hide.
When Job asked him how he would know whether the city was hungry or not, all he said was;
‘You’ll know. Y’know?’
So on.
Litter danced and the skyscrapers cut through the air, cut holes in the clouds. And stretched long lines of windows or glass walls with warping distortions of the sky and streets swirling within, and the sturdy knotted trees breaking through cracks in the tarmac or growing through constructed holes, blasting out of their old pots, fences. Or the lines of storefronts in their cheap colours, red signs and ms comic sans, ramen for ten dollars or a chicken burger for nine, signs with dust in their LEDs.
You had a sense that you were inside great canyons with the wind blowing down on you, howling through the streets, battering on the walls and blasting against the hard earth, singing strange songs all the way along. A sense that these are dried rivers you walk on, this tarmac, or this pavement, that the abandoned cars with their wheels stolen, their sides scratched, their windows graffitied, are old fossils of some ancient, vibrant time, vivid with life flowing down the streets, breathing, alive.
And sometimes, at the height of midday, or at dusk, it came to life in the corner of your eyes. Not so much as in those strange lively inner suburbs, where the shades grew restless in the wake of godlings and other newborn sentients, but more cloistered. Shyer. So you’d glimpse barely behind you a wandering crowd, human beings shuffling forwards in groups, with bags waving, and elbows bumping, and a skirt creased and somebody fixing a tie. And sometimes it stunk of cigarette smoke, and sometimes you could see the curls of nicotine floating up until you turned to look at it and saw again empty grey pavement, and the wind spinning leaves in a tiny cyclone in a corner.
It was peaceful, usually. At least, Job never had to shoot anything. He, on one night, heard a great stomping, felt the vibrations quiver up his torso through the concrete. He saw, shaded in moonlight, far down a street, unfurling and swaying, a godling, blind, stumbling. It pressed itself against the buildings, which groaned and cracked, and sent sprinkles of shattered glass raining to the ground. And Job felt, then, deeper vibrations. He felt the whole ground ring, saw his tiny campfire swaying. A deep, sonorous vibration, that shook his entire body. And he felt the earth groan, heard a crunching–something far away like muffled screaming. And when he looked down the street, the godling had vanished.
On those nights the darkness resounded. In the shades of the buildings it was so black it grew solid form. It shouldered along the sharp edges of the buildings and sloughed down their sides, fat and heavy. It collected in heavy droplets pressing against your feet. And the lampposts, bent like mourners, laid in silent rows along the streets, lights like halos. Job would sit in their light in silence and though the buildings all loomed over him, shadowed, and invisible eyes crept in the alleys and strange sounds clattered behind doors in odd crooked places, he felt safe. That orange glow, deep, electric, and the cold dry wind flapping his coat, all washing onto him. They were content to chatter amongst themselves, in their electrical hums, or occasional grunts of metal. But that was enough for Job.
The air was pregnant with gods. There were many people in that city, and they hid themselves in obscure rooms in obscure buildings, or beneath, or so on. Job only ever saw them as slinking shapes, or in tiny clusters on huge streets. So many people thinking, so many people dreaming. So godlings were birthed, almost as fast as they could be eaten. There were gods for everything. There were gods, especially, for loneliness. Job heard them, like metal boots on stony slabs. He would hum, or sing, mutter stories to himself to keep them away.
The angles grew strange, at places. Angles sharpening and sharpening and sharpening, so roads might coil back into themselves, or Job, walking on a pavement, might look up and see his own footsteps lining the faintly sandy ceiling above himself. Or he might look up, gaze over the windy landscapes, the wide streets like dried streams, and see it bent vertical, himself hanging, sideways. Sometimes the buildings spread thin and long above his head, shooting this way and that, like spiderwebs, and when you tried looking at their angles, mathematically determining them, fathoming it, parts in your brain burnt away and left you with an aching headache for the whole day.
And sometimes, the city went into raging, hungering fits. The buildings seemed to sway, move like flapping fabric, or unfurling petals, to hang over Job, loom over him. And concrete grinded, grunted, like great gnashing teeth from beneath the earth. Job would shoot open a door (not as unnecessary as it might seem, as they sometimes bled. Those were the ones he avoided), rushed in. It was always dust and emptiness, beige carpets musky, with strains and marks on the walls. Fallen refrigerators, rotting sofas. Some places were more abandoned than others, nothing but beige bare walls, a strange wideness. They echoed. You could hear things scuttling in the walls. Others were packed with litter, acrid human stinks, piss and sweat, recently hidden in.
Sometimes, in those rooms, there was a coldness that clutched at the guts, made you feel numb all over. And things would fly around, suddenly fall over. Sometimes you’d hear footsteps upstairs, or, downstairs, hear the sink running, and come to it to find it dry, find that turning the faucet releases nothing but dust and air. On some walls, when you shone a light on it, you’d see, ingrained, human forms, sitting down, or sleeping, or standing, as if they were scorched in. Sometimes they burst and rattled and broke into wild sentience, gnashing teeth and rattling bones, roaring hissing shaking until Job finally fled out the door. And then, silence.
And, flocks of infrastructure drones, spidery limbs gleaming, clinking. Little blazing blowtorches and rattling tools, filling a pothole, or replacing a shattered window, or carrying dripping slabs of meat, or baskets of chalk or candles to obscure destinations. There they would be, in groups as many as seven, like little metal birds, clattering against each other, around a single crack in the pavement. While, stretching far around them, great gouges ran in the walls. And shattered glass lay, glittering. And a car was crushed, graffitied, groaning at night.
There was a disintegration occurring.
Job noticed it, offhandedly, the very moment he stepped off the train station, and his awareness of it grew and grew. Some streets were empty of lampposts. Those were the barren, the dead ones. Job hated those streets. Being in them choked him, like all the grey around him, that seeping concrete grey that had gotten even into the sunlight, was now gathering within himself, like a growth. Sliding over his eyes and brain and heart.
And the stop signs would be bent over, dying, dented on the inside. Windows would be shattered. Litter would dance aside, sing to itself.
There would be signs of human abandonment. Abandonment in two layers–ruins rebuilt, then abandoned again. Job found a wide street with little shacks built into it, from makeshift slabs of metal and wood, collecting dust and cobwebs. And a small shrine, knee-height, with a tiny figure, battered and eroded and abandoned, quietly muttering nothings to Job. He found forgotten tools, too, makeshift things–something on a stick, for gathering–something wrought of a sign post and a chunk of iron for tearing down doors. And a single toy car, imported from Europa. Clean, refracting grey sunlight.
The train stations were bulbous pouches of human life, though raggedy, half-present life. People hunkering in torn cloth and glancing at him. And families, blank-eyed and swaying, and children dully grasping hands or toys, hanging sacks of belongings, in lines along those platforms, awaiting the next train. There were the people metres away from the train station, forming a crescent, gazing, empty, as if blocked by an invisible fence. Job pushed through, pushed on.
In one street, overhung with thick shadow from a bridge above, all graffiti and sounds of dancing litter and the wet stinks of water in gutters, Job found a long line of dry-faced folk. Crowsong rattled down the streets. And ragged-winged, eyes piercing, they flitted across, watched curiously the rows of people, their dangling valuables, the bags that might have had food in them
The crows were selling themselves out as guides, so a woman told Job. Guides, to where?
To away. To not here. Beyond the city. Beyond the grey pillars that gnashed teeth beneath the pavements, and the shattered glass panes where your reflections stared strangely at you. Beyond the puddles collecting leaves and litter growing in a pothole in the tarmac. And all the angles, creaking, looming.
And Job saw, far, far, to the end of the line, she was right. People stopped, where an unruly gathering of crows, wings flapping, chattered at them. They discussed for a bit, waving hands. And, eventually, they would reach into a bag, or a pocket, and drop something, gently, between a crow’s beak. Or they would crouch, and the crows would stop flapping, and one would approach, and a whisper would be exchanged. Or, even–one man stood by, nodded, and waited, calmly, as a crow bit his eye clean out. And then, recovered, bereft of–something–they would walk off, trailing a crow. Lively, almost chipper, though swaying strangely, as if drunk, and glancing occasionally.
They were city dwellers, city worshippers, no matter whatever adherency they claimed. The train stations slid aside and away from them, so that they turned around, down the same streets they had surely just been. Or that, by charm of paralysis, by uncanny powers of inertia, they would stop, certain metres from the station. Unable to leave.
So it was. Some people were paying in trinkets. Choicest things, and arbitrary. A shiny wrapper of some old chocolate bar, a smooth and unbroken lightbulb. And, if not those, they took secrets. Secrets snatched from anywhere, snatched from high places or low places, and about many things, many kinds of strange knowledge. Or they sold an eye, or a finger. And some people–the desperate, with nothing else to sell–sold their souls. You couldn’t go wrong with an extra soul. Everybody wanted one.
And the crows ate them, of course.
They tasted, so Job had heard, like syrupy, caffeinated air. And that you got drunk on sentience, for a while afterwards, and found your own uvula or oesophagus chatting back to you. And memories that weren’t yours flooded your eyes and neurons and battered you, and poetry and dreams, and bold ideas and ambitions sloughed around so that you’d wake up, hours later, tie undone, blushing, on the floor. Delicious. And their nutrient content, he had also heard, was surprisingly high, despite being so lacking in mass, so that for a whole day you would feel full, chunky, weighty.
Having no soul wasn’t so bad, anyway. It wasn’t inconvenient, at least, to Job, and convenience was all he really looked for, nowadays. He did not give the to-be soulless any advice, that day, but if he did, it would have been along these lines:
‘Don’t get philosophical about it. Philosophy is for poets and rich people and the Ancient Greeks and it hasn’t helped anyone ever. Focus, instead, on function and convenience. Functionally, all the loss of a soul means is the loss of a decent trading item. Convenience-wise, there is no effect it has on you. And, therefore, the loss of your immortal soul is equivalent to the loss of nothing at all, or, at least, some very expensive air.’
He would have shortened it, then, to:
‘Don’t think about it. You’ll be fine.’
And onwards he walked. In between gaseous blips of humanity, and great craggy stretches of emptiness. The trees were kept corralled by the city streets. They were huge, coiling like trapped snakes. Colossal roots cracking through pavements. But the concrete seemed to be coiling right back around them, in response, choking them out. They were caged, frozen monstrosities, branches thick as a head, struggling pointlessly.
One street he passed seemed thoroughly scorched. The buildings seemed made from ash. The air stunk like burnt wood, and he left little black footsteps in his wake.
On another, buildings were vanished, replaced with blocks of air. The innards of their supports glimmered, exposed, in the air. Rusted pipes carried water up to bathrooms that weren’t there.
And, travelling down another, he spied drones feeding slabs of meat into potholes. And he felt a warmth in the earth. Something gulping beneath.
He heard the flapping of leathery wings behind dark streets where the sun was blocked by skyscrapers, a whumping, air passing. And he would awake, sometimes, to find his bag fiddled with–a pouch open, or something torn. On cold mornings when the pavement was covered in a thin sheet of moisture he’d see shapes like footprints.
He was approaching the heart of the city. He knew this for certain, though he was unsure where the information came from. It dropped into his brain out of its own will. Or, perhaps, the signs had built up, of their own volition, and he had noticed them unconsciously. Like grains of sand, the pattern in the bricks on that building, the flow of the cracks in the tarmac. The way the wind rang out over the rooftops.
The city grew stranger, so that Job came upon places where the concrete flowed like syrup, seeped down from orifices in apartment buildings. They were solid to walk on, though hilly, with nonsensical turns and minds of their own. He walked, jogged, scuttled, and avoided street corners or roundabouts where the flowing oozing earth spiralled into itself like a whirlpools.
And he walked in the long shadows of a dark place where the buildings roared above, interconnecting and flitting wildly around like the strands of a spider web. Water dripped in those places, and the wind howled and echoed off the walls.
Another place, where all form, all structure, seemed broken down, melded together into the formation of earth, hill, mountain. Job trekked over the craggy form of buildings melting into one another, moulded like cliffs, mountains. Peaks rose up, sharp pointed, and in the evening, silhouetted, it was as if gazing upon real peaks, but when the sun rose it glinted off the half buried windows here and there. And you could see the corners of the architecture, the piping, or an air conditioning unit.
And this landscape scaled down into a great wide flat area, battered by the winds, screeching of seagulls. It was sunny, endlessly wide after those dark alleys, like a drained lake. Though the ground was built from yet more concrete, and Job, occasionally, found himself walking on a shut door, or a storefront, or an advertisement wiped away by erosion, or a cracked window.
The buildings seemed to pulsate with life. At night, lights in the windows came on, though Job knew, for certain, that they were empty, that he had heard no sounds from within during the day, that, even, he had fled into them at the sound of flapping, or a rumbling from under the pavement. The pipes had fat distended bulges, and the stormdrains hissed with hot, stinking sentience.
And Job came to a place that dipped down into the earth, a great clean bowl. Scooped out by some stainless steel implement wielded by a giant, nothing but concrete, sliced supports and the exposed faces of opened basements. And the air stunk like rotting flesh, sticky, sweet, feeling all syrupy and bloody. Dried spatters of blood laid around, and the windows were charred. The sun bore down, the black spear in its gut gazing. Death, death. Like he had stumbled into a great grave, with the wind blowing litter and little particulates and gravel.
And onwards Job went.
Meat Girls Dot Org 