So last year's over, conspiracy theorists remain crazy and wrong and yet the assorted governments and corporations of the world give us more than enough reason to be paranoid and afraid and the environment's going to shit and I had this weird dream I’m going to foist on anyone who's still reading.
*huff*
I'm wondering through an elegant residence hall eating a banana. I pass a group of girls who are naked or something like it, and totally unfazed, just standing around having a conversation. I stop at the patio, a wavy grandiose sort of thing. The sign indicates I'm on the fifth floor, but I'm clearly hundreds if not thousands of storeys above the ground. TG from work rides some sort of futuristic flying motorscooter. It's purple and appears to have been designed by a toy company in the 1970s. TG sort of hovers jauntily about while we discuss.... I have no idea now.
I look over the balcony and am amazed at the architecture in this city, elements of traditional filtered through twentieth century movements, so that below us I see a gothic cathedral that has been streamlined into an echo of Art Deco. The air seems pristine, and parkland and greenery abound.
So far, pretty cool, right?
For some reason, I wonder about really large buildings, and then I see them in the distance, huge, vast, mile-high monstrosities. Smog descends. The streets are in ruins, littered with corpses and debris. As I fly row-like over the desolate landscape I realize the city I had been seeing exists in the future of this future, a better world powered by clean energy, but one built after the collapse of civilization. Humanity struggled and the seas turned to a soup of death. A thousand years or more passed between the City of the End and the City of New Beginnings, and I want to return.
And I do. Relieved, I fly by some unidentified sporting competition and then over the city and I land in front of the tall residence hall I'd been in. I look around at the campus. Traditional buildings again, run through some kind of sandblasting and smoothing. I see people I know: the young couple next door, with their son, driving in a tiny sportscar. My nephews. Three local kids. N. No one has aged, and yet we're centuries into the future.
An elevator takes me to the fifth floor again, all a-bustle with students returning for the new semester. On the balcony, a char tells me that she hasn’t much use for Superman, though she allows he's done good. Yes, Superman is real, and generations of Supermen and Superwoman have patrolled the city, maintaining law and order. I see one now, a blonde bloke with a prodigious nose, who sits on the rail in the traditional red and blue outfit.
I'm glad I don't believe in made-up prophecies imposed on ancient calendars, or I would face this year with terrible trepidation.