Limit

If you're really brave (or stupid) enough to dare a trip beyond the Limit with any hope of returning alive and (mostly) sane, there are three basic rules you must follow with a kind of religious fanaticism.

First: don't talk. Libraries ain't got shit on the Limit: this is a strict no talking zone. Okay, perhaps not strictly, but nobody who braves the Limit is ever really keen on finding out just how many syllables you can get away with before the Limit shuts you up for good. So silence it is. Good little lambs we are.

Second: move gently. In the eleven square kilometers encompassed by the Limit the rules of reality go a bit soft, and do so at random with little distinction between the familiar and the alien dangerous. Move too quickly and you may earn a front row seat to the dissolution of your own limbs into blinding flashes of light difficult to perceive with just three color receptors.

Third, and most importantly: do not, under circumstances, allow the music to stop.

From the top of this hill here you can see the Limit, little under a kilometer distant down a shallow incline to the west. Or, okay, allow me to be more accurate, you can see the industrial graveyard trapped out of time and in between space which it encompasses. I stand with my hands stowed in the pockets of this heavy jacket - the kind of jacket made with that really tough, green canvas like material - backpack hung snug against my shoulders. Oleg slouches to my left, much the same but a dozen centimeters taller.

It's a strange place.

A lot has happened in fifty some years.

Some dozen odd meters to my left are the crumbling foundations of what at one point had been a warehouse of some manner. Hard to tell any more, time and weather working their magic. When the Limit was instituted, everything for kilometers around was "remediated" by the military as part of the initial kneejerk containment effort, but, in the span of a few years, it was discovered that containment was unnecessary and all that work wasted. Too late though: this whole stretch of the Vaal River, once a thriving industrial zone, had been bulldozed under.

All that remains is just windswept grass.

Empty.

Cold fields beneath a cold iron sky. The Big Empty, population jack shit. Lone figures in an uncaring, unfeeling waving sea gone yellow with the season. The wind tugs at it, at us.

Oh well.

"Looks like rain, eh?" Oleg whispers, looking up.

I hold my fingers to my lips. Shh.

He snorts, half grinning and waving a hand. Давай.

We move purposefully, side stepping busted up concrete and twisted bits of forgotten shrapnel. In ten minutes we've crossed the Ditch and climbed the Hump, a long winding berm of dirt not far from the Limit with a great view into it, the sole remaining evidence of some long ago excavation project. What they were digging and why, I haven't a clue. Whatever it was, it was a significant undertaking - the Hump is fifteen meters high and several hundred long.

Past the Hump and some sixty meters short of the Limit is a barbed wire fence, four meters tall and fragile with rust. It was erected in those first panicked days after the advent of the Limit by the military, back when nobody had any idea what the damn thing was or what it could do. Broach the subject and the old timers will yammer on for hours about those first days and weeks, the panic and anxiety and queer fascination. The pragmatic fretted the loss of a job; the prismatic heralded a New Age. Either or, the fence was quickly found to be redundant and thus its maintenance lapsed.