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
It turned out that the vessel that Pool was passenger on was much further east than his mental correction. After about four hours a metalic voice, sounding like it had been spoken through a rotating electro-fan, alerted Pool and his fellow chattel that ship #9837 would be pausing in Jaipol to offload and onload cargo that he could not parse. Participants would be allowed a full half hour to stretch their legs and even leave the good ship #9837, but would be abandoned and penalized half a social nobility point if they did not return if their ticketed destination is further down the path of ship #9837.
Pool was hesitatant to leave his place and very unsure of how to come back onboard if he did. That though sat with him for thirty seconds before his curiousity got the better of him.
He only went to the gangway-boarding area, one in this case, that offered a view, albeit through grimy, abraded windows.
Below…not just below, but a dead drop from his observation point, there were shanties, if you could call them that: bits of urban flotsam and jetsam, what they call plastic, draped, in some cases over live people, in other cases, over what might even have been dead people.
Almost no one took any notice. The hovering disks, common to this era did not pause; they just flew by, belching commands “obey, obey, obey”. At least that is what Pool heard, muffled through the “glass” of the observation point, and in a language he was not familiar with. Something “pa-yo”.
Outside, hung the same acrid haze, the color of an alchemical sunset melting gold into lead. Pool turned in disgust back to the squalid interior of this “vessel”, this “ship” carrying disposable people to such places. Like me, he thought.
“Reboarding. Departure in ten minutes. Return to your seats,” blurted the grating recording from the ship, sounding like a tinty, scratched phonograph record. He looked out over the sickly men, women and children below, scrambling in the dust and debris and felt a tinge of sympathy, and wondered if modern Londbridge held masses in the same degree of poverty, or Singhopolis, his destination.
He hadn’t seen any in Londbridge. Sure, in his day, walking the streets and alleys (before things got interesting) there were people living in abject, desperate poverty. Dense slums and brimming flophouses were crammed into certain districts, rife with crime and malodorous miasma of the open air sewers. Cholora was endemic.
Pool could excuse it in his time, because his Londbridge sat on infrastructure that was never meant to support the population, and despite the lords and ladies of the aristocracy and the merchant barons on their estates, the wealth of the society, while not at all level, would have been insufficient even if it were leveled.
Here though, in his scant knowledge of the modern world of the 23rd century, while there were orders of magnitude more people–Pool could not even guess at how many millions lived in the empire of the World Congress, as they called it–the society seemed somehow more stratified.
The capacity of his time, if they had the engineering capablities, would not be able to costruct even one of these massive airships or one of these “archologies” (as they are called).
In his remaining moment before turning back into the dank air of the ship, Pool looked up at the towering megastructures in the distance, toward what I imagined was the center of this metropolis. The spires touched the clouds. Fleeting airships, some even bigger than this–his was just a passenger transport, a simple cargo hauler. The others loomed and cast shadows. He wondered at the people who lived in those spires, bejewled kings and queens, modern oligarchs, like princes, while the rabble scraped in squalor below.
Ion Fyr 