2025 Chapter Leviathan
A silvery leviathan swims into the searingly bright, mirroring wisps of vapor and distant fusion. [Patches of oxidation make the hull discernable] A gently articulating airship, humped at the center and tapering towards the front and back. Out of curving top, the tapered cables of neutrino sails arch up and away, drooping over at the ends. Along the midriff, mirrored motive pods sprout fantastic tangled flowers, slowly rotating, efficient and perfectly silent. Hanging below, a cargo of beige stair step stalactites contradict the biologic geometries of the ship.
A luminous cloudscape slides by below while the blue sky and blaring sun above seem quite immobile. Hours pass and the vignette spools out.
The stalactites fall away, and disassemble. Tens of thousands of discrete beige cubes, swarming as they fall, tumble into a new structure. A massive bird-like origami forms that catches and integrates the last of the falling cubes. A black band flows across the surface, and the bird glides down and away, tilting side to side, and finally snuggling under the blanket of clouds.
Unburdened, the leviathan pops up and gently turns around, heading back from whence it came.
Out of the overcast, a pale brown abundance is approaching. A vaguely pixelated bird, gradually growing in size but still so high, so far.
Thousands of feet above the ground, the bird becomes a blur, a sporified, former bird, broken into hundreds of spheres, translucent. The spheres reconfigure into parabolic domes, each moving in unique directions, away from their origin. The domes drop lazily, a few dipping nearer and many more drifting farther away. As one dome descends right close, the smooth arcs seen from a great distance are in actuality, not anti-aliased.
Tightly clustered cubes form apparent curves, the entire dome is comprised of hemp board boxes, hundreds of them, a massive minecraft apparition. The dome drapes the meadow below in deep shadow. Just as the edge of the dome is about to touch down, a great grid of light is overlaid on the grass and flowers, accompanied by a feint electronic pop and sizzle. All at once, the boxes disengage, each box pushing back from it's neighbor in a frenzy of separation. Boxes spin and scatter, each box repelling every other box until at last, the boxes fall to the ground, lightly nestled in the flora with flapped tops oriented up. Hundreds of beige boxes, uniformly distributed at an average distance of three meters.
No birds chirp.