Rainbow Road [Super Mario Bros.]

29

His first impression of Orbit City was...disappointment. There was a terminal beyond the city gate's pedestrian entryway, one about as scrubby as any back on Earth. It was also abnormally dark here: there didn't seem to be enough lights, and what lights there were were broken or flickering, setting deep shadows in corners and making the citizens sitting in the cafeteria or getting coffee at the cafe look suspicious. It was a less-than-welcoming ambience, to say the least.

They took an elevator up a couple of floors and entered Orbit City's Port Authority, a bustling hub of foot traffic and bad-mannered citizens trying to get to bus gates, the taxis stands, or queuing up to climb down into space shuttles headed down for the planet.

Dash led down a couple of halls, and the crowds quickly thinned and then disappeared altogether as they passed through a police gate that took them... Somewhere. Luigi couldn't tell if it was outside or not, it was so dark. The space was large, like a hangar deck, and at the north side there were sets of tracks heading into the darkness, six of them. Four of them had carriages sitting at their terminal ends, each one shaped like a giant Dr. Mario pill. Dash produced a key and flashed it over a pad at one end of the first one, and the side door slid open. Inside was a small, comfy-looking compartment with worn upholstery and enough space for two, maybe three people to sit comfortably.

"Take a seat," Dash invited as he sat on the north end. Luigi climbed inside, and the door hissed shut behind him. Dash began typing on a small keybound mounted on the wall, and the interior of the carriage started up with an electric purr. "The hoooooospital is about fifteen minutes ooooooooooout," the Hooski continued as the interior lights came on in a wave from front to back. "Want coooooooooffee?"

There was a coffee-maker built into the opposite wall, and as Luigi tried to get it working, the carriage suddenly jolted forward on the tracks, sending them straight into the darkness. He tensed for a moment, and peered out the wraparound window, but as of yet, there was nothing to see — just darkness, and their own troubling acceleration. Dash didn't seem too bothered by their speed, though, so Luigi tried to relax as he finally figured out how to put in an order for an espresso — this was probably how that OCPD Tubeway worked, no need to get anxious about it.

The coffeemaker began hissing and churning, and Luigi sat back and tried to relax.

Then the darkness disappeared, and all of his senses were abruptly assaulted by sight and sound.

The tracks, indeed, entered a long, transparent tube that took them up and out of the dark, and suddenly they were soaring up and over a glittering metropolis. Glass and blinding lights -- that's all Luigi could see at first. But as his eyes adjusted to all of the color, he was eventually able to make out forests of towering skyscrapers, delineated from each other by the black shadows between them.

The police tubeway took them high over these glowing towers before hitting an edge that plunged them straight down into the urban chaos.

Here were masses of smaller buildings built in stacks, each seemingly attached to the next in a neverending swath of housing, stores, garages, motels, schools, and shops. Kilometers of tubes and rail wound both above and beneath the structures, threaded through alleys, and sometimes plunged down and across streets packed with foot traffic and conventional vehicles. Tube carriages like theirs and high-speed trains sliced across the tracks, and as they swept down and through one busy street-level intersection, Luigi saw crowds of pedestrians walking down a lane glowing with advertisements and neon signs, purchasing hot dogs from street vendors, getting their hair cut by robots at hole-in-the-wall barber shops, or taking express elevators up to shoe stores located on the twenty or twenty-first floors of nearby buildings.

As a proud Italian from the suburbs of the Mushroom Kingdom, it was quite a lot to take in.

"I think yoooooooooour coooooooooffee is ready," Dash remarked.

Luigi managed to tear his eyes away from the amazing sights long enough to extract his coffee cup from the machine, and when he turned back to the window, the scene had completely changed -- suddenly they were zipping high again, speeding five, ten stories into the air in less than thirty seconds. When they leveled out, they passed through another intersection, this time one of stalled air traffic: a cluster of space scooters, galleons, and other gravity-drive-powered ships was waiting for them to pass by, directed by a floating machine glowing red for STOP. After they flashed by, the machine turned green, and the spaceships spurred forward, disappearing around the bend of a cluster of skyscrapers.

Air traffic, Luigi thought. Now wasn't that something! Were there special lanes they had to stay in? Did you get ticketed if you went below or above a certain altitude? Had anyone ever gotten hurt from someone's gravity drive shutting down, sending the vehicle hurtling towards the ground?

He wanted to ask, but suddenly they arrived -- they went out wide around another pointed tower of glass and steel, and Medical Center came into view, a hulking red and white building sitting heavily at the top of yet another skyscraper, looming far above them -- according to the giant signs, the lower floors held a pharmacy, a rehab clinic, and a small research center.

"Here we are," Dash said as they went up once again -- the tubeway hit a steep slope, and Luigi was suddenly pressed into the back of his chair, his coffee all but forgotten. "Hoooooooooold ooooooooooon when yoooooooooooou get ooooooooooout, Luigi -- it gets pretty windy up here."