Falling Cities

F-o-s-t-e-r

I was so sick of running, if I never lifted my feet agian, it would be too soon.
But every moment to rest was borrowed.
"Lucinda?" I ask. She's laying in the grass staring up at the sky.
"Lucinda!"
"It's been so long since I've seen the stars..."
"We need to go!" I demand. Although it probably isn't my decision, nor did I have any idea where we were headed.
She bolts upright
"What's wrong?"
I couldn't answer. Something just felt wrong.
Then granade went off. Luckily,I heard it land an instant before it exploded. I dove on top of Veris, she screamed, it was drowned out by a blast that deafened me for a moment, then we where hit by a shower of dirt that clogged my nose and irritated my eyes.
Lucinda had rolled away, maybe she wasn't deaf.
Veris looked at me, her blue eyes where wild.
I can't hear! Her lips read.
I stood and wrenched her upward, we began to sprint alongside Lucinda agian, my hearing slowly returned in strangely cracked intervals.
Lucinda was saying something.
"Meeting a friend of mine - 000 - the peak." Her fractured sentences did little to reassure me. A friend? Did that mean rest?
My ankle. Crap, my ankle.
I was limping fine until I remembered it.
I stumbled and Veris caught me.
"Move Foster!" She said.
The cliffs around the dome where plain and particularly nondescript. Grey with small reddish deposits of iron.
Color-
Where? A tiny amount of snow drifted at my feet as we sprinted up an incline.
Color-raid? No. Color-rad?
"Lucinda where exactly are we?!" Veris asks.
"Colorado!"
Ah, yes, that's it.
The mountains, although these didn't remind me of any Colorado mountains I'd seen in the history books. How much had they changed since the building of TIB?
I knew a little about erosion, about the wearing down of great land formations, but this was something else entirely. This had the climate of Colorado, humid, yet cool and damp, but it didn't look like Colorado.
Finally we approached a wooded area.
"Treeeeeees?" Veris whispered.
Lucinda nodded sadly.
"Some of the last. They are.. alone out here."
They where majestic. I'd seen pictures of trees, played the virtual reality sims where I'd walk through a deep forest, but I'd never seen such a powerful force in my entire life. Serene and full of life. Made of cells just the same as me, not computer cells either. Humans, I would come to understand, spent too much time trying to upgrade themselves, technologies that didn't belong in our bodies, things like TIB.
Instead of injecting the position of Artificial intelligence technology into ourselves, we could've been doing what we evolved to do, what we where created to do, what our ancestors did.
Climb a freakin' tree.
How I know that? I don't, I suppose I shouldn't take the credit, I'd been living inside a dome my entire life, with a computer logging every thought that entered my waking mind.
But I am still human, and if I can't control myself, then TIB will.
"Foster?" Veris was approaching a tree. Slowly, deliberate steps.
"Yes?"
"Will you?"
She gestures to the tree.
I shake my head. I'm afraid. I've never touched a tree before, grass was shocking enough, but a tree?
"Oh! You chickens!" Lucinda brushes past Veris and rubs her hand on the bark, then she takes a leaf and plucks it off, handing it too Veris.
She gasps, goes to touch it, then yanks her hand back.
"It's alright, it's good luck. I've decided I can't keep fighting technology with more technology. Maybe it's time we actually revert back a little, maybe. Free ourselves."
Veris takes the leaf and stares at it, gingerly rubbing the tip of her finger along its ribs.
"Can I keep it?" She asks.
Lucinda laughs, plucking another leaf. "You can't put it back on the tree."
Veris smiles.
"Here." She hands the bright green leaf to me.
"Really?"
I take it. All at once I feel a rejuvenating rush. Something I've never felt before, something that makes the throbbing in my ankle lessen.
I'm holding something that's alive.
"Wow you guys. Just wait until you meet my dog."
Veris smiles.
"A omnivorous canine?"
Lucinda nods. "He's.. a mutt."
"Does he have a number tag?" I ask.
All the animals we have in TIB have numbertags, their DNA code, logged into TIB.
"It's Barley."
"Like the crop." Veris says.
"Yeah.. you two have a lot to learn, are you ready to go?"
I nodded, Veris smiles.
She begins to move agian, this time she isn't running, she's walking.
"We aren't going to make good time at this pace Lucinda!" Veris says, a panicked sound somewhere inside her voice.
"It's alright." She breaks off and turns into the forest, a thin dirt path marks the way, almost unnoticeable.
Veris stops short, I almost run right into her.
"What is it?" I say. Then I follow her eyes. Lucinda is opening a door to a strange relic of a machine, red paint chips along its body, if it's not worn paint, it's rust. In fact, the entire thing looks like it's about to fall into pieces on the spot.
"It's called a pickup truck, get in."