“This must be the place,” I told them, setting down my pack. “This is where you’ll build it.”
The investors looked around, bemused. After days of travel through inhospitable terrain, why here? Why this bleak spot? But that was where I felt it, and that was where I knew it would exist.
This is why they hired me – those rich builders, with their big science – for the concrete knowledge I possessed. The steely certainty. Sensitivity, they called it. A feeling. A seeing. A knowing of the things yet to become.
I closed my eyes and saw it all, perspective floating high above and staring down. Glass towers, shining golden, bathed in dawn’s first light, sprouted in aggressive clumps. This would be the financial district. This would be their playground, these speculators and venturists. I proclaimed it aloud, waved a hand to indicate the place.
There, that will be the manufacturing zone. I pointed to the west, eyes still closed. Low brick buildings sprung up all around, thrumming with industry, their vibrations reached the pit of my stomach.
High rise residences came next, grey concrete towers packed with willing hands and arms to drive the factory machines. Small boxes for stunted lives. Again I told them, pointing at the lowlands to the south.
Quickly, the sun rose higher, to its noonday zenith. I spun beneath its glare. Linking all these zones, I felt the pulsing rush of energy, the transit arteries, dragging my senses with their ebb and flow. I pointed here and there, sensing their surveyors working quickly to keep up, to map the city only I could see.
As I watched, the vision changed, the shadows growing longer as the sun began to mark its path through afternoon to night. Those grand glass towers rose higher still, impossibly sky-scraping, shining brighter than before, all clad in liquid gold. Meanwhile the factories fell dumb, dust-settling and padlock-bound. Their windows cracked by vandal stones, abandoned bricks tattooed with words. “Every man for himself.” “Anything goes.” And as I drifted high above, those humble buildings crumbled down to nought.
The concrete towers too, where the workers made their dwelling, they dulled and dampened in the sinking sun, inhabitants evicted as their earnings dwindled out. The empty flats fell gutted, dank and reeking – skeletons without the pulsing organs that gave life.
I felt bones chilled, chatter-shaking in the underpass at night. Mattresses of cardboard on the damp, cold ground. Bellies ringing hollow like the factories and flats. The day’s last blood-red light was fading fast. Yet still the towers grew above it all. Monuments of splendour that no pyramids or palaces could match. Glossy surfaces, so smooth. Doorless. Impenetrable. Obscene among the wasteland that remained. Champagne corks like firing squads – pop-pop-popping through the night, the money sloshing back and forth, yet never leaking out.
I described this all aloud. They knew it all already. The wealthy knew the misery and death their plans would bring. And they would build it anyway, create it in their image. These vultures hungered for my gift for truth, but their big science had no space for qualms or consequence.
Notes:
Song:
Big Science, by Laurie Anderson (hadn’t heard this before, absolutely LOVE it)
My thoughts:
This city doesn’t exist yet (“just take a right where they’re going to build that new shopping mall, go straight past where they’re going to put in the freeway”). But when it does, it will be a sprawling metropolis, modern and purpose-built, designed from the ground up to make the rich richer, housing the wealthy in shining towers (“golden cities”) and their workforce in concrete flats.
Money runs the city. All the power resides in the glassy edifice. The vast majority work in soulless brick factories, live in soulless concrete flats. The tension here is inequality. The city provides little for the have-nots (“Coo, coo, it’s cold outside”), frictionless comfort for those within.
Through the visions of a seer, we see the rise and fall of this city, the entire lifecycle played out, from the foundation of the first buildings to the end, as the workforce tumbles away, suddenly unneeded – the factories ignored, the poor forced out to the streets by joblessness – as the money makers find they’re able to multiply their wealth without the populace after all.
It’s a Randian wet dream/hellscape (“Every man, every man for himself”). Our protagonist sees it all, she warns them of the consequences, the horrific injustices that will follow, but those with wealth are not phased by her vision. They will build it anyway.
NB: The title, and a few choice phrases inside my story are adapted from some of Ayn Rand’s most obnoxious quotes.
Mathew Gostelow (he/him) is the author of two collections; See My Breath Dance Ghostly, a book of speculative short stories (Alien Buddha Press) and Connections, a flash fiction chapbook (Naked Cat Publishing). He was nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2022 and Best of the Net in 2023. @MatGost