2025 Chapter Leviathan
High, high up in the bright bitchin' blue of the upper atmosphere, between the cold hard vacuum far, far above and a ridiculously puffy cloudscape far, far below, the silvery leviathan shimmers in searing, brilliant light.
A mammoth air transport, reflective skin smeared by the glare of distant fusion and sizzling sky, abides. With a central hump tapering towards the front and back, the geometry of the transport implies growth rather than construction. Out of the hump, cables arc up and away, the tapered tips inscribing dangling parabolas. Along the midriff, motive pods sprout fantastic tangled flowers, slowly rotating, efficient and silent. In stark contradiction to the ship's sparkling curves and flourishes, a beige, stair stepped object, big and bomb-like, is suspended below.
After a brief gush of shortwave static,a whooping tone rises rapidly and fades. A radio transmission, distorted by atmospherics and infused with electromagnetic clutter from the birth of the universe. Despite the roaring echos of cosmic dawn, a more recent signal prevails. Labored breathing mimics the whistle and keen of high wind. A metallic clacking and whirring suggests machines. The warbling of song, while a voice croons "There's a future for two, me and you", in a vaguely eastern euro accent, hints at love and, perhaps, intelligence.
The airship's flowers turn languidly and the clouds unroll. The ship, sky and sun merge into a static vignette of inexorable light. Hours pass.
Abruptly, once again the airwaves burst open, and bobbing above the crash and jangle, more music. "all tomorrows we'll share cause we're already there, the future, our future for two."
The bomb thing disconnects and noses down. Unburdened, the leviathan pops up. Flashing distorted and trippy reflections, the ship performs a majestic uturn, heading back from whence ever it came.
The bomb-like object accelerates at 32 feet per second per second, though in the bright, empty air, no motion is discernible. The size is now also indeterminate, only by comparison to the massive leviathan was the bomb very, very big.
Starting at the tip, a band of black wraps around the bomb and slides back over the fins. The bomb is now translucent, then all at once disassembles into a spinning cloud of discrete cubes. The cubes swarm as they fall and tumble into a new shape, a massive bird-like origami. Snagging and integrating the last of the falling cubes, the bird glides down and away, stiffly tilting from side to side. Dropping and diminishing, becoming almost insubstantial against the brilliance below, the bird finally snuggles under the froth of creamy clouds and is gone.
The kitchy song abruptly ends.
Under the layer of clouds, the sky seems merely a mundane overcast, obscuring the stark shine of the local star and blazing blue. Out of that overcast, a jagged dot emerges, darkish against the backlight, then pale. A vaguely pixelated bird shape, growing in size but still so high, so far.
A band of black sweeps from head to tail and the bird becomes a blur, a former bird. The shape expands and fades, dissolving into a slow motion explosion of cubes. The cubes dance in kaleidoscopic patterns, seeming to tug together and skitter apart, eventually coalescing into blocky spherical spores that drift in every direction. A few spores drift and drop closer to the ground. One conglomeration grows huge as it approaches a meadow. When almost directly overhead, a black band transits the sphere and it blows apart into individual cubes. With dazzling choregraphy the cubes reconfigure into a jagged dome connected to a blocky tear drop by strings of contiguous cubes. The chunky, upside down bowl descends, obscuring the meadow below in deep shadow. The tear drop is tugged up tighter and the bowl widens out, becomes shallow. The descent slows, almost stops. The entire structure hangs over the meadow, blotting out the sky.
A grid of light bursts upon the grass and wild flowers, accompanied by a feint electronic pop and sizzle. All at once, each cube is pushing back from it's neighbors in a frenzy of separation. The cubes spin, scatter, fall to the ground and are still.
The top of each cube has flaps sealed with a single strip of clear packing tape. Uniformly distributed across a half mile of meadow are several thousand beige delivery boxes.
The blades of grass not bent under boxes sway gently in a light breeze, in contrast to the static edges and corners, drab and unremarkable.
The sides of every box erupt into slashes and blobs of black on beige. Each box now displays a bold label. One one side, English text with universal icons, and on the adjacent side Hanzi characters and identical icons. After about 15 seconds, the labels are replaced by advertisements for products, services and ideas. The labels never vary, but the ads constantly change, both in content and duration. As timings diverge, the entire meadow eventually becomes a flickering duochrome cacophony.
The flashing labels describe a crazy variety, from the mundane to the perhaps improbable, in any reality. A box purporting to contain a Solar Dehydrator is adjacent to a box that reads Megalith Kit, complete with a Stonehenge inspired graphic. Enigmatic labels like "Spiritual Resonator", "Non Lethal Immobilizer", and "Synthetic Companion" flicker cheek by jowl with the pragmatic "Water Purifier" and "Packable Shelter".
On one box, an ad for fetal growth medium containing patented "Magrovated Feldspar", and on another "Proslots 100", oscillates against a raunchy female silhouette. "Tiny Teeks Underchargers" is rendered in a cliche variant of Helvetica Uber Bold. Every icon and animation displays in black, with occasional grays simulated by dithering or halftone patterns.
As the clumpy overcast thins into swirls and wisps, color and detail begin to bloom over the land. The meadow is bounded by a distant stripe of emerald forest. Beyond the green, two blues mark the edge of the world. A tight band of nearly purple trypan and a broad swath of azure are water stretching to the horizon and wide open sky.
No birds chirp.