Gazing up through the skylight, listening to the fury of the wind. A whistle so high it pierces fabric glass half a metre thick. Though I should not say it is furious, nothing can sustain anger for that long. Millenia. More. A perpetual, howling storm that has ravaged this planet since the unknown cataclysm that started it. The wind out there is strong enough to peel flesh from bone.
The city is shaped like a giant wedge. The wind rolls up and over its front point, nestled flush to the ground, because it only ever blows in one direction. At the rear, an area of negative pressure is made by the flat side of the wedge. From this slither of shelter, we launch the drones and occasional manned vehicles out into the blasted plains in search of the lifeblood of this place. Gold. Nothing special about it, but nearly every electronic component we use needs it.
Gold is the sole reason for the city's existence. Almost one-hundred thousand people living in a giant wedge, unable to ever step foot outside. Some were born here, meaning the still interior air is all they’ve ever felt on their faces. The only think of wind as something violent. They know what a breeze is, but they can’t understand it. In the past, this might have been a small mining outpost. Drones do nearly all the work. But for long projects you always need at least a few humans around to overrule protocols or write new ones when new challenges arise, and they always do. Problem with an outpost with a handful of engineers, which is all you need, is that with so few social links around, humans tend to go a bit nuts after enough time. Especially with the understanding that there are only eleven other people within several lightyears of you.
So engineers bring families along. Families need amenities, education, shelter, sustenance, luxury, and all the facilities, specialists, and labourers that create and sustain those needs. Trade is established to support this, as well as people to work the loading, the administration, and the accounting. And so the demands and supply grow and grow, until you have a full city on your hands. The Corp that set up this place skipped that natural accruement and built this place outright, filling it up with warm bodies as soon as it was done.
There’s some violent sliver of me that imagines the walls and windows of the city being stripped away by an unusual surge of energy. I would sit back and listen to the sound of the wind barrelling down the corridors of the city, making resonances low and high as it passes apertures large and small. I would feel the cold of it in my bones. The hot friction against my skin. All of this would be unmade. And it might. A report sits on my desk. The wind is slowing. It is starting to blow the other way.
Paddy Dobson
11th March 2021