Skyward - (NaNoWriMo 2013 Novel)

The Fall - (Nov 1st, Friday)

There will come a time when you and i are gone; when all we've known, all we did, and all we've loved has gone away. I envision it sometimes, in the night, when all this sky and all this light begins to feel too much for me.

These vertical empires that we thrust into sky shall be barren. Carved out from within. Punched through by potent beams of energy, long-since-silenced. The wars that prompted those assaults will have been forgotten. The men who fought them will rest in tombs so long gone that they've been moved to dust on the breeze.

And this thing that we called The Wild: the natural world that we shut outside when we sealed ourselves up in these towers. It will be all to survive.

In every crack, it will flourish. The rains we worked for years to poison will wash down through the porous structures that all our concrete and glass has now come to, and those constructs will be the ones to filter it. Down through loosened synthetic stone and glass that's been pulverized back to sand, it will flow. It will take with it all that remains of value from us: the last organic traces of left over food and flesh. It will leave behind all we wrought that was synthetic: the chemical and polutants and engineered compounds, leaving it all to rot where our corpses long since did.

What flows out of the improvised, complicated vertical waterways that the ruins have come to will be free of us, will be clear and cold.

It will be the water that nourishes The Wild to twine its way into the foundations of our buildings. It will be the water that serves as microscopic miner, taking its pickaxe to structural columns until cracks become fisures, and at last it begins.

The thing that none of our oldest ancestors ever wanted to consider when first they lay brick on brick and piled towers into the sky.

The fall.
The big comedown that is your end reward for denying gravity, for trying to build better than your god.

Picturing it, I remember something Benedict pressed upon me, when our distance from The Core and its draconian information defence architecture freed him up to take deep dives into segments of his history protocols that had long ago been locked away. A po-em, I believe he called it, but he also called it ozeeman-d-us.

"Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair..."

"...But around the vast and trunkless legs, naught but sand remained."

All that rises shall also fall, Benedict summarized. The fall will come, too, to the skyscrapers and the megados, he had cautioned.

And he was right; and it will; and I can see it now. Colossal headstones left after our long-gone race blaspheming their titanic, stony crashes in an otherwise silent world as our structures finally give in to centuries (or, perhaps as little as decades) of water running down through them and carving out their sterner stuff.

These skytrees will fall from the forest, and only The Wild will be around to hear the sound, to see the tsunami of debris, to feel the momentary earth shakes of the fall. The mutant animals that flourish in our shadows--the things that were once animals that we pushed to the verge of mythic beasts with our genetic tinkerings--they will stampede before the wave of stone and pulverized glass, their 4, 6, 8 feet making them fleet-footed and sure on the combination of buckled asphalt and moss that was once the streets.

They will vault fallen overpasses and lighting systems in single bounds as flocks of pidgeons and mourning doves, grown once again wild and raptor-like in their decades of scavenging, fill the skyward paths, looking for new roosts further distant from the sudden dissonance.

From those skyward paths, the falls will resemble carefully orchestrated implosions. The husks of our fortress will not list menacingly before coming down. They will not domino dramatically into each other, causing cinematic chain reactions flattening full blocks. The years of silent, methodical erosion will have done their work with an art only nature and gravity can manage. Each edifice that falls will fall alone: directly in on itself with walls folding in and down toward a hollow core. They will be marionettes with strings cut; aloft one moment and gone the next. They will be sandcastles with substrate washed away. When the time comes, what took months, sometimes years to raise, will fall neatly inside of a minute. It will take a further few moments for the expanding cloud of debris to play itself out and fall as another layer of dust on the streets around.