Dreams in Monochrome - A New Elysium Story [ongoing - hiatus]

Vices

Year 2516, Eos, Phaeton's Fall

Eos - the name of the city seemed like a mockery of the ancient goddess of dawn that it had been derived from. Because there was no dawn on the planet Phaeton's Fall. Eos was the planet's very own sunrise and sunset.

Even during the day, the glow of the neon illuminated skyline drowned out the meek light that reached the planet from the distant star that it orbited. Under a perpetually black sky, the lights painted colorful images and movies on the faces of buildings, ran down along the tall towers in ripples that made it look like the walls themselves were trembling and shifting, and danced in the air between them as enormous holograms. The dazzling display of color and shifting lights turned the entire city into a kaleidoscope, as the luminous images scattered back from the glass and steel of high rise towers, and were warped and twisted through their reflections.

Many who visited Eos for the first time would get dizzy simply walking the streets. But that was just one of the reasons why many who walked the streets of the city chose to stick to the dark corners and shady side alleys, where the light wouldn't reach. There were many such corners and alleys in Eos, for there can never be light without darkness, and the darkest shadows tend to be cast by the brightest of lights.

And so Eos was not just its own sunrise and sunset, but also its own perpetual day and its own unending night, and that was why Eos was also known as the Timeless City. For the inhabitants of Eos, the constant exposure to artificial light had become the norm. Day and night cycles of the planet mattered little to the Timeless Citizens. And yet, just as on any other colony, people clung to the same routines, the same schedules, and the same laws governed their lives.

Every morning the streets would flood with well-dressed people, hurrying on their way to work in the offices and labs of the glistening and glowing spires that dominated the skyline of Alba District, the center of the city. And as Alba awoke, the outer districts seemed to sleep – the tall, pristine apartment complexes in Midori lay quiet and empty as their inhabitants went out to work or school. In Rouge, the noisy street vendors retreated to their shady nooks and crannies to resupply their stocks, and nocturnal ladies and gentlemen rested from their duties. Only Amarillo never seemed to sleep – a constant supply of workers was streaming to and from the factories that puffed their pollution into the dark skies in twenty-four hour shifts.

Like in an elaborate choreography, practiced well enough that the flow of movements was not impeded by the absence of music, the people of Eos followed the natural cycle of the planet without any celestial indicators of time: morning, midday, evening, night, without a sun or stars to guide them. Perhaps it was a desperate uprising of their natural instincts, as the last functioning remainders of their inner circadian clocks clung to any sense and sanity. Perhaps it was an innate quality of mankind – a mad desire to control, to dominate through scheduling and planning the one thing that would forever elude their grasp: time.

Either way, the inhabitants of Eos lives their lives following that pale illusion of a natural law, illuminated only by the artificial lights of the city. Because with schedules came order, and with order came a feeling of security. The people of Eos valued their security, and their order, and their laws, as much as their perfectly choreographed schedules.

But just like the darkest shadows are cast by the brightest of lights, chaos only becomes apparent where perfect order had previously prevailed. And for some, all it took to derail a well-ordered life and lead it on a mad descent into absolute anarchy, was a single night spent in a daring dance with disorder.

~ ~ ~

A dazzling orb of yellow light was hurled through the air.

It bounced off the sleek, darkened windows of a high-rise building, and back towards the other side of the street. There, it hit the wall of an apartment complex and exploded into millions of glistening fragments like a firework. The sparks cascaded down along the wall, condensing into a shape and finally forming the logo of a popular brand of sparkling wine that remained hovering in the air.