Leave Nothing Behind

Margot sat on a universe-black steamer trunk at the edge of the world, her feet dangling an inch above the polished stone floor of the port. She was staring at a ship likewise dangling off the edge, but she couldn’t see the bottom and her parents had implored her to keep away from the railing.

The ship consumed the sky. Like being too close to a screen, it stretched from left to right across her entire field of vision, an indistinct flattened ball of silver-gray clay. Hundreds of rows of windows pinstriped the sides, and their dark tint provided the only contrast against the silver-gray sky between Margot and the blackness of space eighteen miles above them through the atmosphere.

“They say it actually holds more people than a small city. To accommodate for growth over the next couple years,” Margot’s father prattled. He grabbed the open edges of his vest and tugged it down tight inside his long gray coat, standing straighter and taller.

Margot’s mother brushed the wild strings of hair out of her husband’s face. “Tomas, how do they even move something of this size? It’s impossible. It’d take more coal than exists on the entire planet.”

“Maybe there’s hidden sails,” Margot offered.

Tomas straightened her blue petticoat as well, and her tiny porkpie hat with flowers from their garden pinned haphazardly around the brim. He beamed.

“My darling Margot, my darling Margaret,” he said, “the Administration has been sending these ships into the sky for ten years. I don’t know how they do it, but we’ve seen them - they float like clouds. No steam, no fire, no sails, and no oars. We’ll be fine.”

Margaret cast a glance down the sea of people along the miles-long balcony of the port, most in similar states of excitement and nervousness, and most wearing the gray and blue Administration-issued coats like them. Most probably left hundreds of patches behind in the piles of clothing they’d traded in on their way through the port building. She looked up at the rows of balconies and gangways, a pincushion of connections to the ship, with the merchants and craftsmen above them and the glint of gilded robes catching the odd streaks of sunlight several rows up.

“It’s quantum tangling,” said a blue-petticoated boy walking the edge of a nearby steamer trunk like a circus highwire, his arms spread like wings for balance. He nestled the heel of his black plastic left shoe against the toe of his right, and alternated this way until he reached the end of the truck and hopped off with an actor’s bow.

“How do you know?” Margot asked.

“My dad’s a genius engineer.”

“No he’s not. You’d be up there.” She nodded upwards.

Tomas and Margaret shared a glance. They’d been excited about the journey precisely so Margot wouldn’t start life at the bottom of the class ladder. But apparently she’d already internalized it. Many of their friends had decided to take their chances with the status quo, remaining in the depths of the city and earth below.

The boy smiled wide and toothy. “Well he was a construction engineer. And now everything’s constructed. So now he’s a maintenance engineer.”

Tomas glanced at the boy’s steamer trunk, and saw a toolbelt leaning against it. A handyman, it would seem.

Margot, however, accepted his defence. “What’s wonton tangling?”

“Quantum tangling.”

“Quantum entanglement, actually, but pretty close, Lucas.” The boy’s father appeared from the crowd and mimed applause for his child’s theatrics.

Margot tucked her legs underneath her to sit cross-legged on the truck and stared wide-eyed at the man in coveralls.

“The power source is actually on our planet, not the ship. But we’ve connected that power to the ship across space and time, so when something happens here, it’ll also happen when we’re flying.”

Margaret sat next to her daughter. “But why? I’ve never heard of a train that didn’t have a furnace.”

“It’s much safer. This ship requires so much power that it’d be dangerous to have the source on board - imagine a train that was half furnace, burning as hot as you’ve ever felt a fire. The heat would melt the train, the tracks, and the trees it passed.”

“I don’t know if that makes me feel safer,” Margaret said.

“Tomas Miner!” A voice boomed from the nearest gangway, and with a nod to the handyman/engineer and a smile between Margot and the boy, Tomas led his wife and daughter into the massive ship. They were guided to a massive oblong room, cold and white as a hospital waiting room, where Margot sat once again on the trunk surrounded by a village’s worth of people. White-coated Administration officials handed out small plastic handles with a single raised button.

Margot watched out the pinstripe window as the last of the stragglers on the balconies of the port building disappeared into the ship, and a tinny voice came loud from the air all around her.

“Welcome, all, to the Covenant. We have decided to make this journey together, and we invite everyone to likewise celebrate our departure together. You all have received a button to start the ship’s engines, which we will do on my count. It is simultaneously everyone’s responsibility, yet no one’s. Is everyone ready?”

Margot took her responsibility seriously, and stared at her button, waiting. The voice started a slow countdown from 10.

“3.”

“2.”

“1.”

“Now!” Excitement crept into the thin voice for the first time, and Margot jabbed her thumb hard into the button and everyone around her did the same. Instantly, they heard a loud and low rumble, like a mile-wide cannon being fired, and the ship rose quickly, first to the side away from the port, then straight up through the eighteen miles of sky into space.

The voice returned. “Let me be the first to congratulate you on a new beginning. Remember, this is a decision that we have made together, and a journey that we will continue together.”

Someone gasped, and Tomas put his hand over Margot’s eyes. Father and mother watched through the window as explosions popped like hot oil across the surface of their planet, dinner-plate sized and getting smaller as the ship sped away. Crevices split the ball into eighths, then quarters, then with a surgical silence split their home world in two, consumed in flames, and the lights on the ship grew brighter as the quantum generator became fully charged.

“Everything will be explained in time.” The loudspeaker cracked off, and the silence of space fell over the room and every other room on the city-sized ship.

Elegy for a Dying City

There’s rusting metal rebar sticking out where the concrete has crumbled from the end of a sewer pipe, spilling dirty water and discarded plastic into an equally crumbled concrete ditch, splashing once as it exits the pipe and again a few meters away as two eight-year olds jump and stomp, playing.

Me, I can remember when the drainage ditch and pipe were built, perfectly formed and invincible, and I overlay that image on top of the real thing, filling the gaps. I added the crystal-clear blue water from the contractor’s concept art on top of that, mentally replacing the current brackish stream. But those kids didn’t know what it was supposed to look like. This was their normal, so it seemed like a fine play to jump and stomp.

It’s a fascinating thing to walk through a city, where you’ve lived your entire life, and know that it is dying.

And that’s the only word for it. I could say that there’s a prolonged economic decline, or that working-age people are moving away faster than they’re moving in, or that the city bureaucracy has been ineffective for so long that there’s an insurmountable governance deficit. And elements of each would be true. But the city’s not dying for those reasons. It’s the other way around.

I should add that the metaphor stops there. It’d be equally inappropriate to say that the city ever had the vibrancy of youth, or the steady industrial nature of middle age, before declining into old age. For as long as it existed, it was pure artefact, no soul. It was concrete, steel, copper, rubber, plastic. It was a machine, and the only time it could ever be said to be alive was when it started dying.

I was elected Mayor almost three years ago. Since, my office has operated like a team of doctors, ordering tests and reports, sending people out to do research, experimenting with treatments, and nothing has taken. I get a monthly report of all of our major indicators - housing starts, business registrations, corporate tax revenue (which lets us know how much money is being spent), traffic in the core. We struck weekly committees to discuss each of those indicators. It all amounts to defibrillation: the heartbeat graph line jumps, but always returns to a flatline.

You could compare our experience to other cities, I suppose. Detroit declined because of the recession, and because its growth over the last four decades had been too sporadic, in fits and starts - entire communities required replacement all at once, instead of constantly flowing new businesses and residents through. Ideally, people would move into the aging buildings as inhabitants became wealthier and moved into new ones, like crabs trading up shells. Simultaneously, the inhabitants moving into those buildings would start naming their children with the popular names of those who’d moved out, who themselves would have to find more pretentious names. And so on. It wasn’t the wealth or pretension that kept cities alive, it was the constant cycle of wealth and pretension. Cities can’t fast like camels then drink their fill.

Chernobyl is an obvious one. A bullet hole in the chest. Case closed.

The two children start splashing off down the canal. In my head, I chasten the kids for missing the point. There are 27 parks in the city to play in. Now alone, I run my finger along the exposed rebar, feeling the ribbing underneath my skin, uneven with specks of rust.

How tragic, that no matter what I do, it can’t live, because it has no will to live. And there is nothing I can do to save it.