Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction. It is a draft; there are mistakes, many misspellings and sometimes long periods of no updates. copyright: ion fyr 2025
Pool had been a passenger on trams, busses, hansom cabs, airships, public and private and train carriages. If one were to count his recent unconscious experience, then one would tick ‘submersable off’ the list as well.
This new experience, however, was what he imagined it would be like for cattle being loaded into a railway car. The gangways were uncomfortably narrow, the fellow passengers uncomfortably close and the stink on the same bovine level. While he could watch the luggage gliding up the shallow grade to some unseen cargohold–this from the poor excuse for glass they had in this time period–all he could see ahead of him, was the dandered back of some poor mug with a skin disease he could not recognize.
While Pool was accustomed to the first-come first serve nature of city trams as well as the festering underground of Londbridge, more refined travel, such as night trains and city-to-city airships had reserved seating, if the did not have outright cabins for the paying customers.
Granted, Pool was not technically paying for this journey, but was dismayed at being crammed into the first available seat. He found himself between the unfortunate bloke around whose pustules had formed a waxy crust, which seemed to be flaking off like a miniature snowstorm on the man’s bent and twisted shoulders leaving equally miniature drifts around the thin bands that stood in for proper collars here and now.
The woman on the other side, three in from the ailse, had laborious breathing and fingers that were tending toward grey except for the pinkies of each hand, which were the color of charcoal. She had a blue plastic tube inserted up one nostril of her nose, while the other oozed mucus of some sort. This all while she shoveled deep-fried balls of a substance Pool could not at all identify from appearence or smell from a bag between her thighs. Every time she moved, her mass pushed Pool toward the revolting, pustule of a man to his right.
There were no windows, aside from the small roundules higher up on the outside walls of the craft. These were small and not aligned for anyone to look out of, rather, it seemed to Pool that they were placed to taunt the passengers in their narrow and uncomfortable buckets, or, like the openings in a pig-carriage, meant to allow air flow so the passengers didn’t suffucate from each other’s stench, except in this instance (and probably thousands more) the tiny windows did not appear to open, and were currently allowing in only a diffuse brown light.
As much as Pool could glean from the warning placards placed at the entrances of compartments, passengers were only allowed to move about in the case of dire emergencies such as absolutely necessary bowel movements, and little else.
The departure was unannonced and only discernable from the moving shadows against the opaque brown outside through the tiny hole, which for him was three meters away and one above his sitting position.
There was a slight feeling of acceleration, like a train pullng from a station, but it lasted much longer, a constant pull aftward. Pool estimated the final, resting velocity to be many times greater than a typical ground locomotive of his day, perhaps two hundred kilometers per hour.
Philoctetes had been imprecise with the duration of the transit, but had insisted that Pool need not pack extra food for the journey. It was only now, that he was embedded in the uncomfortable bucket of a seat, packed like a sardine between oozing neighbors, that he began counting down the minutes, trying to calcuate the arrival in his head, dreading the days it would take if the monstrosity was only moving at 200 kph.
He saw a clearing sky, through his pinhole above and decided, after a mere twenty minutes, that he needed to stretch his legs.
“Please, excuse me, ma’am,” he said to the still munching lump to his left, as he climbed past her. She grunted like a pig, but was too busy stuffing her face to verbally object.
The narrow aisle was barely wider than his hips, and full of outstretched legs and arms and the occasional lolling head, but standing to his full height allowed Pool to actuall see outside the porthole.
It was now later in the day, and the sun, which could hardly be identified from modern Londbridge, was low in the west, casting dark shadows across the landscape outside, or what little of it he could actually see.
The land was green! Pool was amazed. He hadn’t realized anything had remained of verdant nature. I his mind, the modern world was a veritable hellscape, nothing but rot and cancre, but beyond the window, moving past at a blistering pace–they were flying at much more than the 200 kph he had estimated–the land was rich.
A city, just jutting up from the horizon about 10 kilometers away moved by. It was completely dark and looked like a ruin, despite the tall towers of its scape. There was no sign of life there. He saw only the husks of skyscrapers–taller than anything he had seen in Londbridge of the 1880s–gaping out over the horizon.
Pool wondered who tended the fields below, for they were tended. Wheel tracks of some stort ran parallels over the rolling hills, turned back by unseen boundaries. There were no roads or villages or homes or barns, only endless fields.
He wondered where he was; somewhere in south central Europa, the thought. He had greatly underestimated the speed at which this modern airship could plow through the air. The city he had seen moments before was now no more than a dot on the horizon.
Ion Fyr 