FLATNESS

I stand at the point at which the river passes away from the ancient concrete walls designed to trap it in place as it winds its way through the metropolis. Turning my back on the rising spires of the cityscape and keeping the decaying industrial zone to my right, I look out towards the river as it laps the mud banks to the east. Laid out on the mud is a museum of artefacts, dripping, rotting, covered in years of dirt and algae, left to remain as the waters bay and retreat, dredged in a process of solipsist submission; each object becoming a vessel for the scum of history to travel within; each a conduit to the chemical make up of three hundred years of vicious unyielding growth, the birth of technologies and their death through progress.

Immediately to my right are the high walls of power station two; a mighty five-sided structure of concrete, clad with ribs of steel. The flatness of its northern face, the section closest to my position on the bank, is broken by three dark orifices five or six metres above the base of the riverbank, these pipe-ways once carried the effluence produced in the energy creation process which fed the older areas of the inner city. Once alive with a gaze of colourful spew, the portals are now more like the permanently closed eyes of some massive beast, shut fast, sealed by hydraulic shutter mechanisms and heavy-duty steel gates. Power is no longer needed for these parts of the city; the few that are scratching out an existence in those areas have to generate their own supplies now.

The population of the city has fallen by seventy percent in the previous four years; in the last year thousands more have fled to make their way in the regions beyond the rising concrete spires of the metropolis. After the first year of the migration there weren’t enough engineers left to maintain the crumbling roadways or creaking bridges, let alone men or women with the specific technical knowledge of high flux reactors to keep such generators alive. Power generation for the wealthier areas of the metropolis is now almost exclusively housed in locally situated substations. These electric oases provide around ten percent of those who remain with power enough for energy during the darker hours of the day. The substations, ramshackle in their construction, operation and output, generate charge through the burning of organic materials. In the early days they were piling up the unused detritus and the scraps of packaging abandoned by the citizens of the polis as they themselves moved out to safer areas of the country.

As with all resources, these supplies were limited. Of those who remained some consumed rapidly, bathing themselves in heat and light in the short term, others stockpiled their combustible assets waiting for a jump in their value as they became harder to come by. As throw-away-fuel became harder to come by, local energy stations developed different strategies to cope with the demand against the shortfall in fuel; some rationed what they had out amongst their consumers, others started to raid apartments, flats and houses, ripping out anything that would burn, torching one house so another hundred could remain. Finally, substations in communities where the denizens weren’t willing to destroy their habitats turned instead on municipal libraries burning books, magazines, pamphlets and records in exchange for heat and light.

The central grid is now dead and with it went many other tools that we had become so dependent upon. We now find ourselves in a period of learning. A re-enlightenment. The corporations that had inhabited the glass buildings to the west would have called it a re-skilling of the work force, it would have been an easier process had there been free access to what was left of the internet - that domain remains locked off from most of the world. I myself employ new strategies to pass time. I learn what I can about the environment that changes around us. I watch the people, chart the rise and fall of those who seek control of the various districts of the city. Constantly repositioning itself in ebb and flow, authority resides for one moment with an old family who are eventually dispossessed by some gang who are in turn crushed by a tidal wave of citizen action taking control of the area for a short period before some natural calamity robs them of this unity. I keep a journal of what I see and hear, I talk to citizens, listen to rumours, make recordings and keep an archive.

I aim to capture the world in its greatness and its horror.

By D N Charlesworth