The Fall of the City of Steel

Epilogue

After we got off the helicopter, people all assumed I was Soren Caster- correctly, as it turned out- and I thought my game of pretending to be someone else was up before I could even start to play. However, when I fed them my story, they believed me.

For five happy years, I was Bill Hargreaves, honest farm worker and former electrician. From my comfortable home in a cabin, bunking with a kindly old couple and their granddaughter, I watched as the rest of the resistance moved on with their lives. Emilia and Tony Gasperi are tailors living by the textile mill. They intend to start a family soon. Rico Vercetti was one of the many, many new recruits who flocked to the volunteer desk when we began hiring for a new police force. Surprising no one who knew him, he was admitted, and he has protected and served us ever since. James Knox and Annie Dunbar are respectively second- and third-in-command at the biggest maintenance shop currently in operation. Thanks to them, the last technological remnants of the city are immortal.

During my time as a farmer, while my head cleared of all the fear and frustration that had clouded it for so long, I watched the new city- the Crescent, we've all agreed to call it- grow into a proud civilization of its own. There is a certain sense of smallness that comes from living here when one remembers a city that rose into the clouds, but I am proud of the Crescent all the same.

However, even now that everyone knows of the horrors we committed and why the late Soren Caster blew the city, the reaction of the people has left much to be desired. Perhaps predictably, they blamed everything on the natives. The slur 'red-skin' had become little more than another curse in the current vernacular, and theft between the Crescent and the neighboring indigenous villages is all too common.

As the racism intensified, it grated on me more and more, until, one day, I received a letter, hand-delivered by Jeremy Gottlieb himself, now a fine young man who works both as a weather forecaster and an agriculturalist. Inside that letter, written by the surprisingly fluent hand of the former native resistance fighter known simply as Joan told me what the postwar villages looked like. She told me that her kind feared us even more than we did them, and urged me to do something to change it. I spent the rest of the day in a cold rage at my own people, and, the next time I heard someone yell a curse at the so-called 'red-skins,' I pounded my hoe into the soil and stormed home. I ran for the next seat in the new government that became available.

I'm not a farmer anymore. I'm back behind a desk, doing what I always did, trying to make right what this new city is doing wrong, fighting uphill as always. Thanks to Jeremy's efforts, I've maintained correspondence with Joan, and I've been informed that my work is not in vain.

Sometimes, in this job, I can close my eyes and see myself back at the old city, during those awful years I spent trying to keep that miserable hive running.

But when I open my eyes, I come back to the future I spent those years fighting for.