The Way Home

Driving back on the long, straight causeway, he peered out through his windshield. Silhouetted by late evening sun, the city blurred at its edges, as if he couldn't quite catch focus. There was no surface to it, no clear figure to hold, leaving his vision to grasp aimlessly at its massive, amorphous form. As he approached, the sun was diffused then obscured, and he entered the city's long, trailing shadow. The face of it was punctuated by lights – an uncountable matrix of yellows and blues reaching far into the sky, surmounted at the upper edge by a bright strip of white marking the city's upper limit. Closer now, it filled his vision – the vast, chaotic face resolving into a near-endless field of built form: walls and windows, balconies and ledges in a colossal, open-weave mass of accumulated humanity. Playing across faceted surfaces in the darkening night, light spilled into clear air; as the city devoured him he glimpsed a solitary figure, staring out at the distant horizon.

The road, its path undeviating, was quickly subsumed; like diving headlong into a pool of warm water, he was embraced and surrounded. this was the oldest part of the laissez-faire city, built before air rights and connection permits, built out to saturation; the city was a tunnel around the straight-run expressway as it burrowed inwards. A kilometre deep, buried in the centre of the complex, was the spine around which the whole organism was built – the Core. As a child, this view had captured him – indeed, it captured him still; standing at the base of the Core, he crooked his neck and looked straight up the length of this city's main conduit. It was a thousand metres from earth to roof, a bundled tube of elevators, pipes and columns a hundred metres across. Beams splayed out from the core at regular intervals, disappearing into four walls of solid urbanity which defined the shaft's edge. From here it appeared the city was supporting the Core, when in fact the opposite was true: the beams and columns, designed to support the official city above, were the armature around which the vernacular city had grown.

It had been a long day, but he had a way to travel just yet. Walking into the arrival checkpointthe line snaked out in front of him – due to unspecified 'credible intelligence', security was tighter than usual: shoes off, through the metal detector, through the explosives detector, file past the pattern recognition surveillance cameras, scan your travel documents then wait in line for an elevator. As he queued he saw a couple – probably Topsiders - breeze past on their way to the express elevators; it seemed security was more concerned with the contents of your wallet than that of your luggage. Reaching the front of the line, he paused a moment before filing in – he always liked to watch the city slide past through the elevator's glass doors. The rhythm of it was hypnotic – gliding silently past, three storeys every second, the solid wall of humanity blurred and melded into itself - two minutes from bottom to top, stopping only at its final destination, a kilometre above the ground.

Stepping off the elevator, he set out towards his ride back down. The Core, the city's busiest transit system, was in truth nothing more than a shuttle between the ground floor Arrival Centre and the Topside Transit Hub, one level below the roof. The Transit Hub sprawled across the width and breadth of the city, connecting the Core with a panoply of second-order elevators, tendrils stretching downward into the flesh of the sub-city. He lived on the Edges, about four hundred metres below roof level, but this circuitous route was his only way home. He took no particular pleasure from his visits to the Transit Hub - access to the roof proper was strictly limited to Topside residents and their guests, and was protected by yet another layer of security and surveillance. In that context, the portals in the ceiling of the Transit Hub seemed more mocking than salutary – the glimpse of open sky a cruel Topside joke on those heading glumly to their own burial. He had heard once that there were other ways to get around - extra-legal routes up through the Under-city that bypassed the Core and its surveillance-state nosiness – but he had never looked into it closely; he was happy to leave such pursuits to the refugees and smugglers.

Descending alone in his second-order elevator, he felt a low, distant crack shudder through steel and concrete. The elevator, disturbed by the sudden movement, began to slow; red emergency lights flickering briefly to life before the shaking subsided and his journey continued. Grown away from the earth's stable foundation, the city shifted and settled - tension and release propagating through its structure in semi-chaotic cycles. Every day, the passage of the sun caused temperature differentials from East to West; similarly, it was typically ten degrees cooler at the summit than it was on the ground. Like a colossal set of lungs or a beating heart, the city expanded and contracted by design, but recently, failures had grown in both frequency and severity. It rattled him to dwell too long on the subject – the city's mortality and his own, tied up far too close for comfort.

Stepping off the elevator, he was comforted by the familiar scene. This was a typical middle-ring, third-order street – lined with small shops and offices, it formed a convenient thoroughfare for locals on the route home. Above, the city stretched out indefinitely, layers of built form crossing and recrossing in the depth. A left turn took him past a dental clinic, a delivery office and his local grocers, bustling with distracted-looking homecomers. A short way on he came to a familiar, wide passageway and made his way down three flights of stairs to a sliding swipe-card door in black glass. Swiping through he emerged into an enclosed corridor, one wall glazed from floor to ceiling and opening out to the long horizon. This development, a new one, was at the absolute Western edge: the long, straight corridor, joined at either end to a fourth-order thoroughfare, extended the armature of the city, providing the skeleton around which its next layer would grow. He and his wife had purchased a Connection Right from the developer just on a year ago, and had recently moved into their new home; she was from the inner sectors, and was put off by the long drop below them, but he was captivated by the view.

Sometimes, in the early morning, he would sit out on their balcony. As the sun rose, he would watch the shadow of the city appear, cast long and low across the shallow waters stretching out to the West. His breath would catch in his throat, and he would be seized by a paralysing fear – a fear of the monster they had created, two and a half million lives inextricably tangled, waiting for the day the beast would turn on them.