Authors: Andrew Macrae
Sinner was feeling more of its usual self with the road shaking and shuddering underneath its rolling wheels riding on the coast road. It wasn’t more than a day before we could see the steel skeletons of towers looming ahead on the viewscreen. As we came closer, I saw more and more flapples flying like flies around the bodies of dead trucks, crushed fliers and scattered robos and telly presents droans in the broken lands. Bodies of roadkilled roos and camels and people too, black as engine oil from a busted sump. Smoke rising up from the stripped chassis bodies. Bricks and blocks and chunks of concrete, bits of bitumen and all the rubble from the buildings of lost times when the gigacity was towers of glass and thin pollymer plastic glittering in the sun like a million streams of waterfalling stars, living machines of glass and smart thinfilm building minds talking and transacting in a brilliant system built of light stretched over steel bones. That’s the picture I had of it in me mind from when Isa told me that time of the stories from the past and I seen them overlaid on the earth outside the window and it was a shadow that stained the ground and rose up like wisps of smoke behind me eyes, like the dream coursing through me system with the black liquor that leaked through the IV from Sinnerman’s alkaloid synthfac. The land outside the cab flowed past like a smooth surface, I couldn’t penetrate beneath. And maybe there’s nothing beneath at all, maybe the surface is all there is but still you gotta try to break through. So we rolled over the skin, looking for a way in.
The gigacity beckoned up ahead and the shadows of that place made me shudder and I understood how come folks never went there no more. Shimmering like a lost world. The screen seemed a part of me. No highlights anymore. Nothing, just the flow, just the jets that moved me along through the deep water of a truckbound life, losing the use of me limbs, me memories all jumbled up out of order like a cloud of locusts flying over the road. Still there was a pattern and everything I saw was filtered through the screen. Me and Sinnerman was a system, but which one was the host and which the parasite? I was living on haze and rolling through the backroads in the machine, but Sinner was living off me patches as well, living off me code wrangling as I led it up to be broken on the highway and when we found Isa, it would be in a slaughterhouse of brumby trucks. All the handsome trucks and their running lights shining bright in the night behind me eyes. It was all gunna catch up with us sometime, we were running ahead of a foamy wave and soon it would break us but I pushed them thoughts away and kept on going.
I was deep in that connection and it was scary and wonderful too, a new page cranked into the typewriter. I’d never been so close to another creature in me whole life. Even Isa done nothing but push me away. And now I had this connection what had got me in its hooks, it’d got me in its spiked arm. Its IV and its hazy visions. This creature that I didn’t even know till just a few days ago was now me whole life, and yet me life was not a whole and we were riding together into the gigacity looking for Isa, my lost sister my lost lover my lost half. Hid below the surface all you find is more surfaces.
We drove in through the outskirts. Cinderblock boxes and broken corners piled with rubble. Rubble piled on troubles. No one around, it was a ghost town left for dead by those who lived there and cursed ground for us who come later. We kept on, though it were slow going. The road hadn’t been kept through passage. The robo roadcrew builders that kept the backroads on their own programs weren’t in sight of the gigacity. And in the backroads at least the tracks though rutted and ridged was kept opened from so much traffic passing through. My whole life passing through, one stop to the next.
The houses where once there was people were all long since looted and burnt. Frames pulled apart for fuel, fire blackened fronts stained with sooty smoke. I rode high up in the rider’s cab, feeling the growing wonderment of that place and all its glass ghosts were grown on me like creepers on a tree, slowing me down on the road and all the stories I’d heard of the gigacity danced in me head. I couldn’t keep them separate from what I saw in front of me eyes. The stories infected the daylit towers of tangled steel like a virus so they seemed to glow in the afternoon sunshine and called out to me with the voices of all those whose footsteps and trucktracks had gone before in the world and all them who were dead and left to rot out in that place of poisoned ground and slinking snakes moving shapes in the corners of me eyes. I saw it and I didn’t see both at the same time. I knew it was in me mind, I knew it was the stories, I knew it was both what I seen and not seen and all at the same time. Most of all I knew then why there was so many stories of the gigacity and why it wasn’t a place to be visiting or for living in them ruins long since left for leavings good and proper.
On and along we went, slow and careful forging a path through the shattered wreckage. It took a while to see it but the city was being taken back by rioting life. Roots growed up through everything, tangled creeping greenery clawing at the red brick. Lizards and slithering creatures scrubbled out of the way as we crawled through. Either side the buildings loomed and got thicker and taller towards the centre. Ahead a steel canyon wall above a river of glittering glass shards beneath.
We come to a place of dead ends. Five ways intersecting. The buildings here were seamless towers, their tech all bound up and sealed behind grim black surface. I had a flash it could be just like Isa said, the buildings was standing ready and waiting for the right codes to get started in working again and restoring the past system. We made our way through broken laneways and busted concrete. Burn scars wherever I looked. I felt like I’d been there before, in a dream. Shiver of craving for the missing haze flow became a new syntax written in me blood by machines not built by human hands.
Time’s ticking, time sticking. Time didn’t flow straight forwards like most people were happy to think. You could slip down inside of it, you could feel its texture. It’s grainy, not smooth. It comes out in lumps and clumps around certain things that you keep coming back to in your memory. If all time was the same, how come there’s some moments that stick out from others, some faster, some slower? Then there’s them other times when you look up from what you’ve been doing and you see it’s near dark and you’d not realised the day passing. Cruising the gigacity street sweating out haze visions from me skin, I was remembering and remembering, bringing memories back to me mind, like a feeling that breaks through from the other place, from a different place down where the river bends by the creek side in the wet season and the daylight stretched to its end and I was there with Isa and the creatures that lived in the rocks and the stone and a slinky snake slithering in the muggy sunshine. We were all lost in time, the things we see in front of our eyes, in front of our –I–s, is what takes up most of the brain but if you can shut them out for a time, the memories start coming up, the things that happened and maybe they didn’t even happen but on some level you know they did. Some level, some time, some Wotcher seeded those signs in your head. But try to grasp it and it’s already gone, like a slinky snake into a crack in the rocks.
Through the viewscreen I seen grooves in stone steps on the gigacity pathway. There was something about the place that made me mind move. The stairs were sagging like the grooves in Smoov’s linkmaker where me greasy fingers thumbed the shiny metal clean. I thought about all the trudging feet that had made those grooves over so much spans of time and maybe it don’t matter what I thought or typewrited anyways, it was all gunna be dust soon enough. There wouldn’t be no one left who could read it, no one to decode these writings. But then maybe it’s like the grooves in them steps, someone would see the passing from the bits that aren’t there in this place where roads came to die. The words twist in on themselves and there’s no way in or out in that blasted landscape of red rock and smooth brown stone in the dried up creek beds of dry city streets that have never flowed for a hundred years or more. It’s just deadly death and danger to anyone passing by. A broken neck and stolen boots. Let me die in trucktyre shoes tied up with twine so they’ll know I died standing up.
The day bled into moonfaze in the gigacity where the wreckage from the time before piled up on the underside of overpasses by the broken banks of the river. Stacks of rusted shipping cans piled like the broken toys of a babby mountain sprung loose from its roots. A plastic tide of black water flecked with styrofoam. I rolled in Sinnerman along the busted pathway. I’d not seen a sign of anybody at all since I been in the city, and there were reasons for it. Looking down to the side, there was movement down there in the rubble. Staring closer and I seen it was a slinky snake, segments of its body like a earthworm and a red eye light lit for its hunting of warmth and skin and fur to feed on. And then the more I looked, the more of them I seen, squirming in the corners of me eyes. There wasn’t just one, there was a hundred. Long as I were inside of the truck I were safe, so we set to roaming, rolling on the road that criss crossed the river and the water, broken down parts of freeway shattered on the ground, picking our way through the mess looking for signs of brumby life.
The night blur of cruising the gigacity. The roads twisted around each other and led back to the same place. Down inside a tunnel and then back on up the other side, wrecked trucks lit under lights. Some roads were broken and some weren’t, so we felt our way through there, looking out brumby tracks but there was none. Over and under it all, the stench of death and smoke rising from the ruins but it weren’t so bad as some places I been. Sinnerman was antsy for the next to point the way but I kept it held tight. There had to be a way out of the swirling ruins and scavenged meats from the trickery of the rubble that moves according to the light that falls on it. If I could get to the place where that truckdetailer told me the Wotcher’s signal could be tuned louder and clearer. Through the night I sat in the cab and I searched for the connections that would unlock the meaning in it all. Wrote down what happened and what I seen on me typewriter and rifled Smoov’s notes just trying to come to some understanding of the world rolling them streets overgrowed with greenery and creepers. Broken signs and light rail lines stretched on a long road that ran through a canyon of twisted steel.
Some force drawed me onwards to Isa, pulled me along through the streets as daylight started to shine between the towers and the water rising up through buildings that stuck out of the ground like rotted teeth from a black gum. River broke the bank and flooded out all over the place, out of where it would be its own self. I spent the next day searching through burnt out cars and the remains of them who was gone from the world now. There wasn’t much left, the place was picked clean like white bones bleached in the sun. And yet there was plenty still in the places in between. And all the blue tarps in the world couldn’t keep off that rain that blowed from the south and the afternoon sky hung low and dark and the buildings sailed like downside up ships in a black and stormy sea.
We came to a broken door in a wall. It opened on to a garden secret and lush and green, I’d never seen nothing like it, it were a pair of dice there in the ruins beset on all sides by dust and crumbling stone chaos. I pulled at the IV in me arm but it were clawed so deep it had become stuck. I saw inside the gap in the wall to that place, it were so green. There were many different kinds of plants, fronds and spines and leaves, not like anything else in the backroads of dried up spinifex and scrubby brown shrubs. I wanted to check it out so I pulled harder and finally the IV come out with a well of blood that I staunched with me sleeve. I hobbled Sinner with linkmade patch to keep it still while I were gone, though neither of us fancied lingering long in that place crawling with poisoned life and there in the corner of me eye a brumby skitter skated.
I climbed down, me legs was none too good, but something in the garden pulled me on. From the outside, the space inside didn’t seem big enough to hold all that wild raging riot of life overgrowing rubble of the city. There was a spiral pathway that led to the centre and as I passed through, brushing leaves and crunching gravel through the smell of damp and mouldy forest, I wish I knowed all the names of the plants. I wondered if there was anyone left who knowed the names of all them trees and whether you could brew their barks for a tonic and stuff like that. It got me thinking, but. That garden were real well tended. The whole place, although it was quiet, although it was wild, there was a method to it. It’d been planned and it’d been kept. It was a place of peace and lightness. It come to me then that the differents between a garden and a forest were that a garden had a system and someone or something to arrange it and look after it and pull out the weeds. Also a garden were for someone and a forest was just for itself, and I wondered who the garden was for in that lonely place where only the wind spoke through the walls. Right at the center of the garden I found a hole with a doorway. Yanked it open and inside was darkness and beckoning cool from the heat of the day.
I didn’t know what was inside the garden, nor who could of been looking after it, nor why, but I went on in through the door out of the sun shine and into shadows of a musty room. That brumby skitter scrabbling in the stones somewhere. The hisspering sound of fans and a soft flow of air told there was still the remains of sun harvested power and the ticking turbines from the roof trickling their electricity into the ruined building’s circuits. Me eyes got used to the darkness inside. In on down and there was a well worned pathway in the dust. Signs of life there, not just from machines and animals neither. I stood there waiting, listening, me breath coming and going through me throat. Particules of light danced on the insides of me eyes in the dark.
I felt me way forwards in the gloom and slowly I could see there were lights coming from glowing strips in the walls. It wasn’t much but it was enough. I come down the steps into a open space where the stair cases were twined around a central shaft and so I climbed, driven by curiosity, being pulled up by something that I couldn’t explain and I thought all of a sudden: What if there was a rider slotting patches in me own brain? What would such a creature look like? Would it see out of me eyes like view screens in a truck cab?