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 2026
By the time he found the information kiosk, a library of sorts packed into a six sided booth near an intersection. The streets looked like they had been once dedicated to ground transports, but now they were thronged with pedestrians and scattered garbage. He found an empty booth, much the same size as a telephone booth back home. There was no stool, but a thin bench instead on one side that could be leaned on. The screen was much like the scrolls they used like books, glowing with an internal light and manipulated by touch.
He waved his hand in front of the credit symbol; it flashed some obscure and meaningless fraction of a credit, the cost for ten minutes of use.
Philoctetes had warned him that searches were monitored, so there would be no searching the names of his friends, even though he desperately wanted to contact them and let them know where he was.
The lower quarter of the screen showed a mix of characters, Sinese, Nipponic, Muskovite and Brethmanic. He tapped the latter one and a variety of keyboard appeared. It seemed intuitive, but the layout of the letters was much different from the one he knew from typewriters.
Along the top of the screen was a scrolling marquis. Again this was in a mix of scripts and he couldn’t read most of it, though he thought he saw the Muskovite words for criminal gangs. Nothing ever changes.
Pool stared at the screen and tried to pull a glimmer of information about world events from the screen, so disgusting and filthy that it would have been more hygienic to pull strips of public latrine paper, cut from the Londbridge Herald three days ago, and read those.
He had long since forgotten his task. He could not search for his distant friends and some sort of salvation, but was instead marooned, not just in a distant land, but one fully populated to overflowing, and even worse, a distant time that he was not at all familiar with.
When the timer of the machine announced with an irritating beep that his time had come to an end, Pool exited into a stinging drizzle.
After some time, on a meandering walk back to his hostile hostel, he came across one of the many jarringly massive structures that gave habitation to the teeming population.
He could not see the top and the broadside of the massif occupied half the sky. What did catch his eye, however, was the advert for some cinemagraphic production–how these things had changed since 1888!.
Occupying a screen many times more massive than anything the world had known (to his knowledge) was self-illuminated screen with hyperrealistic characters, heroes, waging a humiliating war on some obviously futuristic barbarian hordes…of the north, given the amount of snow in the background. The content was completely familiar to him, if not the rayguns and flying things. By the end of the vignette–it all happened in a few seconds–the hansom hero and star of the story had victory and his relevant lust slated.
The entire clip was in the Sinese tongue, but from the inconsistent subtitling, Pool got the impression that the hero was a commander of the reigning state’s noble army and the deplorable cave-dwellers (in rags even!) were some vile creatures worthy of scorn.
Nothing ever changes.
Pool, having lost his purpose for going to the kiosk, followed some rabbit holes on the screen as his remaining time ran down, finding himself advertised a “Romantic European Holiday for Two” multiple times.
He left the information kiosk, frustrated with himself, and wandered back in the direction of his hostel.
On the way there—it wasn’t a direct path back; he didn’t want to waste the rest of the day sitting around idle in his room—he turned toward a denser part of the city.
The towers all around him climbed to the sky out of the grubby depths. Taxis flew over, above the enclosed passages between the buildings. As he could see very few entrances at street level, just corroded metal rolling doors and gates, he guessed most people in the area moved around on the interior, perhaps connecting to the raised tramway he had seen elsewhere. There were people on the street, but they were like the destitute men and women he had seen before. Some wandering about in a stumbling, pained gait, others sitting slumped against the walls, or lying and dying under overhangs.
As he was stepping around a pile of stinking (and literally smoking) refuse that filled the entire left side of the street he caught movement above him.
An orb with four knobby protrusions flew by at a very high rate of speed. It was 10 meters or so above the surface and utterly silent, though there was a mechanical wailing distant, but approaching.
The street’s denizens heard it too. The ones that had been meandering and picking over debris suddenly and furtively made for the nearest alleyways and culverts, scattering like prey before a predator.
The oscillating wailing continued to approach. Pool looked toward the direction it was coming from only to have it fly over his head, screeching and flashing.
This vehicle was not like the first, which resembled the hovering unmanned security drone that had questioned him days ago. This one was long and aggressive looking, painted black with some official looking characters emblazoned on the side. (He had had only the briefest of glimpses.)
Up ahead, as the wailing ceased, that second vehicle slowed and dropped to the ground.
Something was going on. Something the locals feared. Pool’s constabular curiosity got the better of him, so he walked toward the activity.
Pool got to within 75 or so meters. He was on the opposite side of the street. There were no separated or even designated sides, in the way that in his home city, pedestrians were kept from the dangers of the road by barrier or raised platform, or even the barest of painted line along the edge. Here whatever ground vehicle traffic came along would have to navigate around human and other obstacles, and the human traffic would be at risk of death and injury. He saw no vehicle traffic other than the flying one, and had seen very few ground vehicles at all during his stay in Singhapolis.
Ion Fyr 