The Fall of the City of Steel

The Hallowed City

Underneath my blankets, I shuffled unconsciously, my body trying to settle me further in while my mind continued to sleep. Just minutes later, however, my alarm clock sounded, at the same time it always did, messily extracting me from my sleep. With muscle memory sharpened by repetition, my arms shot to the button on my mechanical alarm clock and silenced it. For just a few moments after, the clock's bells continued to reverberate from the strikes of the hammer between them.

Rubbing the stubborn dreams from my eyes, I hoisted myself out from my bed and onto the rug next to it, which was all that lied between my bare feet and the cold steel of our apartment suite's floor and walls. After taking a few seconds to regain my balance, I wound my alarm clock back up, then grabbed a crank on the suite wall, depressed the button on the tip and turned it. As I did, a cabinet folded out from the wall, heralded by the creaking of metal gears. This cabinet held up a mirror and contained a sink with a water pipe that telescoped from the wall. Here, I brushed my teeth thoroughly, then flossed. Once I finished, I got to the same crank and turned it in reverse, causing the cabinet to retract back into the wall, its front face latching into place as the button on the crank's tip protruded once again.

Next, I selected my clothes from a wardrobe that folded out from the wall and left my room. To shower, I pulled a showerhead down from the ceiling of the bathroom and drew the shower curtain, which sat folded up in the ceiling's corner, all the way around me. Below me lied the drain, conveniently embedded in the galvanized floor, at the center of a subtle depression.

Once I finished, I yanked down the chord that hung from the ceiling, beside the showerhead, and, after two tries, the piston engine roared to life, powering a hefty fan built into the ceiling. After it finished blow-drying me, which took only seconds, I shut it off again, waiting as the fan blade slowed to a halt.

Once outside the bathroom and dressed, I breakfasted on my favorite brand of cereal and waited for my little brother. For a long time, he and I had been synchronizing our alarm clocks so that he would awaken just after I finished with the shower, and so that we would have time for me to bring him to school before going to college. This time, it seemed, he was taking abnormally long.

With this additional time, I gazed contemplatively out the huge picture window that took up a portion of our suite's kitchen wall. The sight outside was a thing to behold- a spectacle that, just twenty or thirty years ago, could have only existed in the most outlandish of legends and dreams. All-metal skyscrapers rose hundreds of stories above the mountain valley that cradled this glorious city. Resting on titanic, subterranean supports, these buildings stood safe from the tremors that so often shook the ground beneath them, and could even migrate very slowly through the city, as though resting on their own tectonic plates. Towards the upper levels, the towers tapered asymmetrically in gradients as they rose, flourishing out into broad landing pads at the top. Three-quarters of the way up, where we lived, one could see the beautiful, misty, mountain-filled skies around us and catch just a slight glimpse of the lower levels below. Beneath the bottom of the city sat its infrastructures: sewers and plumbing and even electricity all coursed through the pipes and wires that snaked around the building supports. The poor used to live down in the cavernous apertures between these metal bones and muscles; now, they have the lower apartments to call home.

In between these steel towers, countless air vehicles roared and whined. Civilian hovering cars and bikes and even small planes whizzed around the spires, shuttling people to their jobs and schools. This morning, I even caught an unusually good view of a rare sight: A pair of police airplanes streaking through the lanes, racing off to whatever duty called them. These majestic monoplanes were a marvel; bubble canopies protected their pilots from the wind and grit, their landing gear could retract or deploy, and each plane featured a radio with which the pilots could communicate. Wires strung between each vehicle's tail fin and the back of its cockpit received these communications. Affixed to the front ends of large motors, two large propellers roared, one on either wing. The engines that mounted these propellers could be rotated independently of the rest of the wing, and landing feet stuck from behind each. Coupled with the downward-facing propeller affixed to the tail, this allowed the planes to make vertical landings on crowded pads. Each plane also featured a pair of machine guns, mounted on either side of the cockpit, with which the police force could stop fleeing criminals or deter outside threats, keeping the city safe.