Skyward - (NaNoWriMo 2013 Novel)

Highline - (Nov 3, Sunday)

"Highline" I'd say.

"Highline Highline Highline!"

My father would feign annoyance.

"Yeah yeah yeah. I heard you the first time."

He'd punctuate it with a sour face, but it could never last in the face of my own dour glare. I'd lock my eyes on his, pull my mouth down into a frown, and set my eyes to glaring.

"Highline!" I'd bark out around the frown.

And the proposterous cast of my dedication to the argument would send him off into peals of laughter. When his cackling was done, and he'd finally caught his breath, he'd finally relent.

"Okay, Okay; I yield. We'll take the Highline!"

And then my expression would crack instantly, from stubborn frown to elated grin. I'd kick my short legs in the children's car seat and crane my neck around to look out the windows, to focus on the towering buildings of the Core that were boxing us in. My father would climb into the driver's seat, start the gasoline engine, and the car would rumble out into the street. This was back before the smooth running of Elecdrives.

Once we started moving, I would become utterly fixated on the world outside, and the way that you could see the buildings sliding in and out from behind one another in the gaps between them as we drove past. I would picture them as if they were standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a crowd, milling about one another.

Highline was short for The Highline Expressway," an elevated highway that ran east-west along the shore of the lake. It was completely unnecessary for my father to take the Highline to get to our apartment from the daycare, but he could easily see how much i loved our drives along the road, so he humoured my wishes.

It was completely unnecessary to take the Highline because our apartment was relatively close to the daycare, right in the city's core. it was faster to take sidestreets than it was to lumber up onto the expressway, which became more of a parking lot at close of day because of all the westward traffic trying to vacate the city for the night. On the Highline, a trip home that should have taken fifteen minutes at that time of day could wind up taking as much as an hour. As I grew older, got my own license and my Elecdrive vehicle, I would wonder how my father had stuck it out for all those evening rush hour commutes on the Highline. His patience in this one act likely said a lot aboout who he was as a man.

For my part, I rarely noticed how slow we were going. whether we took 30 minutes or 60, I was enrapt for the whole of the journey. I'd sit there, belted in my chair, with my little hands balled up into loose fists and my head slightly bowed, eyes and neck moving constantly as i craned about to take in all the buildings that were fixtures, and all the ones that were going up.

Even back then, before the arrival of the true MegaDos, the city was running the things up like flags. My father was one of the chief consultants the city had hired to oversee the majority of the construction in the core, so when he'd get bored with the mind numbing traffic, he'd keep his mental faculties in check by saying the names to me:

The Weyland Building

The Umbrella Tower

The TransCorp Center

Arcturus Place

That was probably where I got the idea for the naming convention that i would later deploy, when it was me consulting with the city and advising on the towering pilars of steel, glass, and concrete that would hold up our Sky Ward. Even from a young age, I was obsessed with stories, and some of the best were myths. I thought that the names my father spoke were fine, but they were also mostly soulless. If you'd followed the meteoric rise of the Weyland company, maybe they would mean something to you, but if you were just a kid, belted into the back seat of a very slowly moving car, they meant little. I'd come up with my own names: The Midas Building for one with glass that'd been coated with a gold reflective layer. Poseidon Place for one with glass of deep aquamarine. Hades Hall for one that blazed a deep red-pink, no matter the time of day or quality of the light.