The city was silent. It is not like this, the aftermath of a storm, a calm after the storm, the deafening silence between the earthquake, the roaring of life. This was an uncanny type of silence, a grand, absolute quiet that has descended on the city in the guise of a cloth.
The streets, once bustling with life, were now deserted. The towering skyscrapers, symbols of human ambition, stood empty and lifeless. Lush avenues were now empty, reduced to the bare lanes, and the creak of the wind the only clue to the emptiness from time to time.
One person walked through this ghostly town, a young woman, Anya. She was a survivor (among others who had survived the catstrophy which had destroyed the world). She was a wraith in her own town, a voiceless eyewitness to its demise.
Anya's search occurred in the urban core, in the 'old money' of finance. However, the history was an invincibly volatile minefield of jagged edges and flexed wires full of hidden razors and springs to catch us unawares. She moved very slowly, every footstep sinking through debris. However, noise was restricted to the physician's evocations of decorative elements by uttering ancient buildings into the audibly perceivable ear.
The more she ventured into the town, the more strange it became. The firmament painting, until now in such a beautiful blue sketch, became the horrible red. The sun, an evil sphere, glowered over the city. Air, once clean before being permeated by smells of life, now bore the offensive, almost metallic cloy.
Eventually Anya reached the city limits where the asphalt gave way to the wasteland. The green, was destroyed by a dead, inert land. On the horizon, beyond, she saw what looked like a tall building, a vestige of the very distant past. It was a laboratory, a site where the first science bent the code of the cosmos.
"The experiment has failed. We have unleashed something terrible."
Anya realized that there was no accident to the city's fall. It was the work of human vanity, a heavenly melody.
As soon as she left the building, she glanced one last time at the static city. It was a strange shaper of breakdown, of destabilization, in the built domain that is man's world. It was, too, a ray of hope and human existence.
Anya knew that she was not alone. These latter, and other, survivors who were also working on getting back to normality were also affected. They would come together for the common target not only in the realization of the strange and beautiful complexity of a strange new space, a new space from all points of view, now grown immutable.
[Being] as the sun went down and the dusk rolled along the deserted road, Anya took another step towards the abyss, her own feelings of fear and anticipation dancing in tension.
