Dopecentury XXXI --- Cracks
This short fiction is part of Dopecentury, an experimental project where I attempt to channel the aural aesthetics of Dopesmoker into written text. (Dopesmoker is the legendary stoner-doom metal masterpiece by the band Sleep, of which it is said: “the monotony rarely becomes tedious.”) My plan is to listen to the single hour-long track of Dopesmoker while writing each of these “Dopecentury” entries. And repeat that 100 times. See the Dopecentury project page for more details.
The city is densely woven together: streets, buildings, blocks, neighborhoods; unbroken across nearly three hundred square miles; from the air it looks like a boundless mat of gray, slowly growing, slowly engulfing the green areas that ringed its borders; darker gray in the densest center, lightening to a pale color that ringed its edges; but unvarying in its determined grayness, unbroken by spots of green or blue or any other shade of color.
Crossing the city takes hours, feeling out a winding way through a nest of small streets that intersect at odd angles, that never ran for more than a few hundred yards in a straight line; hours of groping in near blindness, no map with a scale appropriate could be fit onto a single page; instead a whole book of maps was necessary — “continued on D3” (only to find the page with D3 and D4 had been ripped out by some scoundrel years ago that was likely to be the past version of oneself); it was only the old people who still used the paper maps of course, the modern way was electronic; unfortunately the route-finders inevitably manifested and led people to traffic that clogs whole neighborhoods; the locals complain, and the companies behind the route-finding software make adjustments; the preferred routes change, and the snarls moves to a different neighborhood to wait out the day when those locals would complain.
Like some perverse motivation was in effect, the neighborhood that takes longest to reach — the neighborhood most avoided by anyone trying to simply pass across the city — is the economic center of the metropolis: downtown; many need to be there; the commute times are brutal.
“Enough!” says the mayor one day when his limousine has crawled along into the center of the city at less than a walking pace; “something must be done!”; a committee is formed in the city council; studies are done; conclusions are reached; the recommendation: arteries need to be opened, the city must be bled.
Plans are drawn up; more committees are formed in the city council to review the plans; locals are brought in to give local color to the plans; conclusions are reached; the recommendation? the plans are no good; we cannot tear up whole blocks to put in arterial roads; “We will not have you flattening our homes for your own personal expressway just so you can shorten your commute to city hall mister mayor!”; “esteemed colleagues of the council; there must be a way! a city cannot compete on the world stage with a street plan that is frankly medieval! go back to the committee, go back to the master planners and their drafting tables, find a solution that will work!”
Top people are brought in from other elite coastal cities; considerations are made; experts hem and haw and weigh and strikethrough; new and futuristic technologies are considered: what about a train that floats on magnets? personal hovercars? more advanced wayfinding algorithms? “Unfortunate that this city lacks a river or parks, then we could have just paved those over and have all the room we need for arterial roads.”
More studies, and the conclusion is finally reached that the problem lies in the lack of land; or at least in the lack of land through the middle of the city; a tunnel, or a series of tunnels is proposed, and for a while the idea wins over a larger and larger share of the council member and their constituents; “we’ll market it as ‘The Huge Holes!’” says the mayor, to cheers from his aides and representatives from the council and community members; but then the costs are calculated; the bedrock is extremely hard under the city; much blasting and disruption would be required; “hell,” says one council member, “in my district they will have to tear down just as many building to dig the Huge Holes as they would if they just were putting in a surface-level arterial anyway! I’m voting ‘no’ on this plan” and her constituents cheered her decision; soon others joined her, and the Huge Holes plan was scrapped.
Finally, as usual, it came down to visionary engineering: if there’s a lack of land, we need to make more of it; most cities do that with landfill, sure, but we need more land linearly across the city; so we need to make linear land; the mad engineer who lived in a tower in Old Town says, “we’ll just crack the city open, and see what we find;” and he lays out a wild plan at the latest civic-input meeting; many suggest he’s a crank, but enough people are interested that his idea is passed to the city council committee and is studied as a possibility; the costs for his idea are tremendous, but far less than digging big holes; and far less disruptive to the neighborhoods (if nothing went wrong).
A vote is taken, and it’s close but the mad engineer’s plan is adopted; it takes years to prepare, since he insists it has to be done in one swift move; huge machines are brought in from all over the world, wrapped in giant gantries and moved gingerly through the twisting streets on trucks with wheels that rolled by at the height of the second floor windows, shaking the houses (but, crucially, not damaging them… for the most part).
Preparations are completed: six-hundred-foot tall machines, thousands of them aligned across the city, tracing paths where new land would be required: a ring-road, feeder ducts, a cross-town, and an linear park to boot; and all the residents are kept away by yellow tape and the national guard supporting the police force.
Since it was the mad engineer’s idea, he is given a ceremonial button to press to start the operation, and at precisely 9:23 am, he does.
The giant lines of machines roar to life, and the six-hundred-foot counter-weighted levers tip back like a row of a chorus line; the engines scream with the stress, and the earth slowly, slow splits and widens; great cracks open and slowly spread in a line along where the levers were prying the city apart.
Smoke suddenly pours up from the cracks; followed by liquid fire, glowing red molten rock, the rises and fills the gaps; a glowing flaming circle that cuts right across the gray mat of the city seen from the air, with intersecting feeder lines, and a cross-town, and a linear park to boot.
The molten rock flames, and cools, and blackens; and now there is a black circle cut across the city; fresh land, newly formed; open arteries that will finally let the city flow, and breath.