Part 1 of a (possible) Series | Next: "------" ->

It is 1 AM in a sleepless city. Light shines from a hundred thousand windows, urban eyes that never shut. Their collective glare washes the stars from the night sky, leaving it with the dull luster of pencil lead. There are people here who have never seen a constellation and whose only star is the sun. There are thousands of them, walking the streets day and night, conditioned not to recognize beauty.

Somewhere, tucked away in a cuboid apartment, one of them turns on the television.

*Pzt* On the screen the following appears:

Two women are coming to blows over how many cockroaches the other ate. Blank faced competitors look on as the bright-eyed host cringes theatrically at every swing. When it's finally over he informs the victor that she can stay on the show for another week. She cheers and pushes her breasts toward the camera.

*click* goes the remote control.

A collagen injected news anchor drones on about war in a country no one has ever heard of. A glowing news ticker slides through the space beneath her perfectly smooth jowls, displaying the latest results from the playoffs beside a steadily increasing casualty count. The report ends and goes to commercial but not before promising to give you the scoop on Jerry! The cheeky and courageous jet-skiing raccoon who beat cancer!

*click*goes his patience.

A gleeful man with an Afro paints "happy little trees".

*click*goes the magic button of judgment.

"And this lovely transparent lingerie can be mine? My goodness. Frank, show them what it looks like on Maria."

"Oooooh!"

*applause*

"You too can entertain your loved ones with this fantastic lingerie for -what was it again, Frank?- only $49.99!"

*Warning: Transperawear may dissolve in hot water and/or increase your chance of developing cervical cancer.

*click*goes his good taste.

AND NOW.... SATURDAY NIGHT ACTION HOUR!

Three thousand pandas drop from the sky and assume battle position in a verdant field. Their foes rise from the tall grass, chattering excitedly amongst themselves before charging en masse. The pandas roar their defiance and beat their traditional bamboo blades together in anticipation of the onslaught. The lines converge and the two ancient rivals grapple in the dust, panda and naked mole rat locked in eternal combat-

And *click*goes the great silencer.

The television screen fades back to black and the viewer slouches back in his seat, dejected by the state of culture at large. He is surrounded by the discarded remains of urban living; empty pizza boxes and grease stained take-out bags litter the floor. The room smells of body odor mixed with rotting vegetables and nicotine and the only real items of furniture are a coffee table covered with old newspapers. A portable gas oven sits off to the side, its fuel long since exhausted.

The man lounging on the sofa is in little better condition than the rest of the apartment, shifting uncomfortably beneath the recently formed paunch of a fatty diet. His clothes are stained with sweat and he suffers from intermittent bouts of hacking coughs. A scruffy beard has spread unevenly across his face, speckled with crumbs. Pants are nowhere to be seen on his person. He is, very obviously, an artist.

It wasn't always like this. Only a few months ago he'd been one of the most revered creative forces in the western world, not to mention one of the most highly paid. His work had been featured at exhibitions, displayed at snobbish corporate gatherings, and, on three separate occasions, globally televised. The reason for his success was his choice of medium: he'd been an auto-destructive artist, making a specialty of building grand and ornate structures of crystal and shattering them with high-frequency blasts beyond the range of human hearing. Cities had invited him to visit; he'd shattered the Louvre in France and the Empire State Building in America. But the focus of his work changed and thus began a meteoric fall from popularity. He'd turned to a mix of alcohol and drugs to soften the blow and the subsequent unabated indulgence had left him bankrupt and living here in an economy-class compartment apartment, wishing he had the money for a handful of Ambien.

Like his art, Francis Malcolm has been shattered.

But it is not yet time for him to collapse. This place, this hive of social dregs, it lacks the drama he seeks. It would not do for him to fall here. The end must be grand, an explosive display of internal virility. It will be his masterpiece, he thinks as he extracts himself from the sofa, and it will start here. Tobacco-stained fingers reach into his jacket and pull out a slightly crushed pack of matches. They fumble at first, struggling to extract the last survivor of an old cocktail party favor, but with some effort, they eventually dislodge it.

A clumsy stroke ignites the phosphorous and Francis spares an instant to bask in the light of the minuscule inferno. Then he lets it fall from his grasp to the floor, a tiny creative spark determined to set the refuse of the world aflame. The haphazard array of paper catches instantly and, much as he wants to watch, Francis must run. There is art yet to be done.

___________________________________________________________________________

Patrick Lonkoff learned of the 331 fire by mobile alert, the vibration of his phone jarring him to consciousness in the driver's seat of his beat-up delivery van. Shaking off his fatigue, he checked the alert and quickly recorded the time and date, dutifully jotting them down on a notepad affixed to the dashboard. Then, pausing only for a second to map the route he wanted to take in his head, he turned the key waiting in the ignition and drove off into the concrete labyrinth of NeuCity.

The route came to him easily; Patrick always had a talent for navigating his way through the streets, going all the way back to his days playing tag in the downtown ghettos. He put the skill to good use as he swerved beneath the orange glow of the city lights, dodging traffic in busy intersections. The skillful driving got him downtown in mere minutes; from there it was merely a matter of following the blaring sound of sirens, which led him deep into the OldBourough, arguably the seediest of NeuCity's neighborhoods and(as the name would suggest) the oldest.

The buildings in that sector were of ancient and shoddy design, early examples of the corporation age's early experiments in mass housing. The idea had been to find a way to shelve away every member of society, beginning with the poor, and this reflected in the building design; huge, ugly structures built from cube-shaped modules barely large enough to house one person, let alone a family. Patrick thought they most resembled the plant cells he'd studied in High School biology, only more rigid and urbane.

The reason the design was so asinine and was no longer legal, Patrick knew, was that these "cells" wrapped around the building in three layers, meaning those with an apartment on the outside had to pass through two other apartments to reach the stairs or the elevator in case of emergency. They'd been allowed in the first place because the corporations had, at the time, promised to install the absolute best in automated fire-fighting technology within every apartment. A few buildings did receive such treatment and the systems had been more than adequate in those cases, if a bit crude (an apartment set alight would seal itself completely until the fire burned itself out, leaving more that a few citizens to roast alive in their homes) but with such high demand for housing, most of the apartments lacked even a basic smoke detector. The result was that most of the original buildings had burned down, save for a few exceptions, all of which obeyed strict fire codes.

331 was one of those exceptions. Or had been one of those exceptions. By the time Patrick arrived, two floors had already begun to burn and denizens of the building were flooding out into the streets. The flames were much too high for truck hoses to reach and copters had been called in instead, heavy duty double-rotor jobs with steel bellies full of smothering foam. Just spraying down the outside of the building wasn't enough though; the flames had undoubtedly spread to the innermost apartments and would have to be quashed from within if structural integrity was to be maintained. Thus, the trucks that had arrived on the scene had already sent men up to hook a hose to the building's central water supply and fight the inferno from within. Two truckloads of men vanished up the smoky corridors to an unknown, unbidden fate.

Patrick parked his van down the block from 331 and hastily retrieved his camera from the backseat. He filmed the building's fleeing inhabitants, wrapped in blankets and carrying whatever valuables they'd been able to snatch up before they left. There were families of six, even eight, some holding babies wrapped in swaddling, all looking ragged and lost. This was clearly journalistic gold. Pat made sure to get all the sympathy shots before turning his attention to the fire fighting operation itself.

Tongues of flame were still groping their way through a few of the windows, good for an action shot or two but the truth of the matter at that point was that most of the fire had probably been extinguished, at least from the outside. On the inside it was impossible to tell, but a few of the fire fighters that had run in earlier had returned with survivors, only to run back in after dropping them off with the paramedics. Things were beginning to look a little more optimistic. Patrick took a moment to grab a bottle of water from the van. When he came back the smoke had entirely ceased to billow. A few exhausted looking fire fighters were exiting the building with their masks off, red-faced but grinning from ear to ear. Congratulations were starting to be exchanged. Patrick pulled the camera off his shoulder and reached to shut it off. It was then that he heard the cracking. Everyone did, and all eyes turned back to 331, where something truly remarkable and tragic was happening.

The site of the fire had been somewhere just below the mid-point of the building, too high for the street hoses and too low to make an airdrop of firefighters practical. While each module had been designed to carry enormous amounts of weight, the inferno had managed to damage a set that were not only inaccessible but also supported the bulk of the structure's mass. The result, which Patrick's camera documented in full, was the sudden collapse of external girders and the slow, dreadful fall of the entire top half of the building onto the street below.

The video was extracted from the rubble three weeks later, and shown across the globe.

To be continued...