Below Block City, And Beyond

The earth has careened around its fireball and glimpsed all the sights that time and galactic proximity permit since these pages were visited last. At that moment, we were plunging into the depths below Block City...

...The yawning abyss swallowed our bruised and battered protagonist who was clinging desperately to his inexplicable spark of energy. Soon, consciousness was swept away...He awoke briefly to find himself gliding gently through a spacious tube of sorts with glass walls that enclosed and guided his journey. As gravity seemed to have disappeared, he couldn't quite tell in what direction he was moving, but he had the distinct feeling it was downward. Broadcast upon the glass were human faces of every shape and color emitting such a range of emotions that one couldn't help but be transfixed by the power of physiognomy. His body gathered speed and the faces began to blur together until a strange sight greeted his eyes: his own face. He stared at the tired eyes, the sallow skin, the creased brow and knew that this person was for yesterday. And sure enough, his reflected face melted away leaving only those eyes. But the eyes morphed into the blazing stare of a stampeding buffalo, then the dual glowing optical-cavities of ignited blue lasers and, finally, into crevices upon the ever-emotive face of a cliff within a sun-drenched valley where an hour disappeared in a second and shadows taught light the power of contrast. But this was only for a moment because his body then prostrated itself to the soporific beauty of efficient, clean power taking control and beckoning him onward...

Upon awakening a second time, he found a new world deep below Block City.

Gone were the endless gray days and nauseating monotony of an uninspired grid. Here there was color, and when there was no color the chilling absolute of the void was equally invigorating in its potency. Here was black the shade of an alpine sky at dead of night on winter's eve. Here was saffron of such vividness that salivating tastebuds might eclipse your dancing retinas in its presence. There we see jade fit to bejewel a wizard's wand and a regal purple that made the breeze feel like a velvet robe. Here there was rebirth cast in the brilliant aqua of a southern sea. Glancing upward, he saw how the colors in this welcoming-cavern bled together and receded into the invisible roof as a familiar dirty-rust shade. Of course it did, he thought.

And so began his countless adventures in this magical land. To speak of every creature he encountered, every labyrinth explored, every room that revealed treasures wrought by ancient hands in ancient lands, every room that revealed future treasures wrought by future hands...all this would would take far too long. Those stories can only be told from his lips, with his mind's eye back below Block City recounting the caverns and subterranean auroras and time-tubes and exotic languages and seers and poets and mythical creatures and others just like him who were, apparently, looking for the same thing.

But understand something critical, and, please, understand it well. This wasn't a land devoid of struggle. Quite the opposite my friend. This was simply a land of illumination and heightened perception. Here the victories were fantastic and so long as the valiant struggle persisted, melancholy could be embraced as a natural companion to the reverie of glowing embers. And out of those embers sprung unbridled fury, the likes of which had been foolishly relegated to another time. Its ability to devastate revisited him and hard lessons had to be relearned. Slowly, this fury was embraced and channelled. Another spark from the embers brought joy--not the precarious mania of fear, but the wholesome, hard-won, and indestructible elation of reason.

There was danger in this land. Unctuous peddlers with silver tongues and treacherous souls roamed freely among the dark corridors below Block City. Their wares were an illusion and your servility their purpose. They wore sandals from Nazareth and tucked vipers under their cloaks. They set a ten-course, silver plated feast in your honor; they sated your tongue with the finest wines from their own fields and offered false accounts of families and victories hard-fought...all in anticipation of you leaking the smallest bit of your soul. For when this happened, they seized the precious essence with gleaming green eyes and stole away to their lairs. There they punctured, pilloried, and poisoned this jewel; they scorched and boiled it until it was unrecognizably corrupt. They proceeded to pour this foreign substance into a weapon's mold (and here was their fatal flaw) hurled it savagely at it's original source. Such things, of course, can only strike a fatal blow when delivered by the agent of origin....So these peddlers saw blood and claimed their victories, retreating to their caves under the false impression of their ascendency. But there, they immured themselves in stone to immortalize their 'victory', only to crumble to pieces completely devoid of mourners. Here, at the moment of death, did they realize they'd immured themselves long ago. The patient seers would silently sweep up the soiled remnants and scatter them in the Crystal Lake. Here, nature would begin its process of purification and rebirth. Meanwhile, the flesh wounds had healed and wisdom amassed for the besieged.

Other dark creatures lurked in the shadows, but the real power lay in the noblest of souls: Those who built reigned. It mattered not if they constructed a palace or a meal; they still reigned. Those who forged-with respect-into unchartered lands reigned. Those who guarunteed their own power by ensuring that their neighbors live with unimpeded freedom--they too reigned.

This was the intensified reality that he had lost. This was life in all its phenomenally complicated nuance. This was a celebration.

Oddly, for such an exotic realm, it allowed him to connect more intimately with his comparatively-prosaic past than he had ever done before. Childhood memories surfaced that seemed lost to the unrelenting wheel of time. The smell of pine trees and dirt on a dry, summer afternoon; musty ski gloves on a hotel heater; the sight of a friend's dog in a friend's long-lost basement; school and teachers; family and friends during another time; a thundering rainstorm; a magical snow and the innocent wonderland it brought; fleeing in terror across grassy fields from enraged 8th graders. Names like Ryan and Spencer and Davis and Deanna and McChesney and PJ and Tigger and on and on. Isn't it odd, he ruminated, to consider somebody part of your daily sphere of interaction then watch them recede into a memory? Some bitterness accompanied these thoughts; a visceral and agonizing yearning to recapture and relive those moments burned within him. The haunting reality that those days had vanished plagued him and weighed heavily upon his soul. But consider the alternative, he considered through welling tears: a haze of vague recollections scattered over a nebulous past that supposedly added-up to the flesh and bones of today...utter disconnection and, therefore, utter lack of understanding. Fair enough, Time, a truce: you can savagely claim the former minute as no longer mine to mold, but i claim that minute as mine to cherish. Furthermore, if I don't mold the next minute into something superior to the last, you win. But, Time, you won't win.

And that was that. Time had taught him a hard, but crucial lesson: to never forget and to never sleep.

So he didn't forget and he never slept. The days below Block City were, arguably, the most crucial he ever had. When he finally decided it was time to leave through a passage to the surface, he found himself far away from Block City in a land bustling with vibrancy, mystery, and promise. But he had learned never to forget. Block City lay burnished deep within his consciousness and he saluted it as he closed the portal to its underbelly.

It was a new minute.

Tales from below Block City: Entry

...and down the spiraling steps he crept, wary of the disappearing noises of life above and the mounting darkness below. soon, only the faint reflection of dank condensation on the moss under his soles offered any indication of where his foot should land next, or if it would land at all. the air hung damp, thick and cold; it almost seemed you had to part a curtain of hovering vapor to advance. Rats scurried around in the darkness, the luminescent glow of red eyes darting here and there in their muted symphony of angst.

an errant step on crumbling stone made his heart jump as he desperately scrambled to brace himself and prevent a headlong tumble into what was now almost sheer blackness below. chest heaving as the fingertips of his left hand violently clawed the step behind and his right hand scraped along the wall to his side, he finally managed to stay his body. the echo of falling shards colliding with the wall far below gave an unmistakable indication of the calamity that he'd just narrowly avoided.

wiping the sweat from his cold brow and curling his frigid toes inside soaked boots, he leaned back against the slimy wall and glanced above at the pinprick dot of pale, filtered light far beyond. what on earth was he doing down here, all alone, following cryptic signs from an unknown source, heading to an unknown place?...........

......as he figured it, the strange saga had started to unfold months ago. Treading tired roads under gray skies those days, his eyes started to play this trick where the buildings morphed into enormous slabs of dirty-rust colored jello that slowly wobbled in an endless, unbroken shuffle. The surreal monotony plagued his deranged soul. Doubting his own sanity, verity bleeding into verisimilitude and back again, he launched himself headfirst at a nearby slab in an attempt to breach the glossy walls, only to stumble away amid the stifled gasps of passersby with a reeling, bloodied head. Still the gooey blocks wobbled away. They mocked him with their cold, removed laughs of knowing disdain; impenetrable fortresses of drab that stretched as far as the eye could see.

And then he'd awake, shake his head and look around. Unable to decipher dream from reality, he'd set off under the gray skies and see the Block City in its usual, solid form. Yet when darkness started to descend, the same vision would revisit him as the buildings would slowly, almost imperceptibly start their wicked metamorphoses....until he woke up again, head pounding and vision blurred.

So it continued for unknown days that bled into weeks and beyond. Afraid to confide such disturbing thoughts in those around him, he conversed, instead, with the ever-vigilant pages of a spiral-bound journal that never left his side. Sheet after sheet filled with detailed accounts of his wanderings; vivid recollections of different locations where the psychosis, or whatever it could be termed, had taken over. He paid such attention to the minutest details, including intricate maps and figures, in his neurotic drive to record these recurring circumstances that his increasingly wartorn journal read more like the laboratory notebook of an assiduous alchemist than the lonely scribblings of a nondescript denizen of Block City. Without fail, the final note in each entry read something to the effect of, "long shadows gather around now, the air grows quiet and people shrink away into a muffled distance. stand at exactly 27 paces SSE from Post 3.2 in the Subsquare J. i feel the warmth within and know they beckon. jesus, it's beautiful. fuck...fuck..." So the siren song played and played.

But then something devastating and auspicious transpired that changed the whole landscape of our troubled gentleman's story. He awoke one morning in his usual state of aching paranoia to find that his one link to reality, his one anchor amid the swelling tempest inside, had abandoned him. The journal had disappeared.

Desperately, he tore through the few spare rags that constituted his possessions in a frantic struggle to reclaim the only thing that could possibly matter to one in his state. But a tornado doesn't build a house and neither does it dislodge one that isn't there. It was gone.
Huddled in a dark corner of his self-imposed asylum, he shivered away the hours. no food, no air. sleep, but no rest. minutes, hours, days. Slow fade...

Then electricity! Clouded, bloodshot retinas focused to razor acuity. extremities tingled and saliva wet parsed lips. with the stealth of a panther he shot from his corner redoubt to crouch amid the strewn clutter. Forgotten lucidity cringed at the deplorable mess scattered about. But that didn't matter right now. that was for later. the pulse came from outside. Relentless and mesmerizing, vibrant and enraging. out the door, down the hall with torn tapestries and cobweb lanterns, around the corner, through the arch and outside.

His journal lay there on the doorstep. With a darting glance he saw that nothing stirred in the gray world; nobody awaited his arrival. The energy pulsated from the little black rectangle at his feet. With delicate touch befitting a cherished photograph or a newborn's skin he closed his fingers around the binding. A familiar warmth greeted him. It was then he noticed that the frayed edges of the cover had the slightest dirty-rust coloration. a coloration he knew well.
perplexed, intrigued, and inexplicably apprehensive, he thumbed open the cover. Two words greeted his gaze: "Your choice".

Scribed in an elegance bordering on calligraphy, the letters appeared the same dirty-rust. But it made no sense. thumbing through the first couple pages, he noticed that most of the pages appeared exactly as his hand had left them, except when one of his maps appeared. On the first map, a dirty-rust arrow pointed upward and slightly to the left, with the inscription, "1.7 m", written next to it. On the next, another arrow appeared pointing almost directly downward, accompanied by "so close, 0.2 m".

After eyeing ten or twelve of these revised maps, he finally came to one that had no arrow. Instead, a tiny, dirty-rust dot lay in the middle of the page. It took another couple arrows and inscriptions before the realization settled in. All those arrows pointed directly towards the same spot in Block City: the spot where the tiny little dot lay on the eleventh or thirteenth map!

.......and so, there he stood, hundreds of feet down a dank, spiraling staircase in the abandoned underbelly of Block City, leaning against an invisible wall of slime that offered a fleeting, but real sense of comfort. But 'fleeting' was the word of the day because an instant later the peril became real as his crumbling steps heaved their last breath and gave way to the yawning abyss below.....