Skyward - (NaNoWriMo 2013 Novel)

Beauty Outside - (Nov 23, Saturday)

The beauty.

The still pools in mountain clearings.

The light of sun and the blue of sky, and the green of pines, punctuated by the colouring of orange and yellow and red leaves as the season was beginning to shift to autumn.

Jakob had never seen a scene so beautiful. He’d seen nature photos or vid facsimiles of such scenes, but it was the quality of the wind, blowing through those trees and gusting on through his hair that really served to enforce the key third dimension of what he was witnessing. Even without the wind, though, Even the highest def of displays, failed to capture all of this.

The girl was coming more alive with every kilometer they put between themselves and the city. She would point out the shapes of clouds, and the flights of the occasional bird, and the way that the sun would shimmer on the surface of the ponds they passed.

She began telling him stories, of Old Bear, and World Wanderer, and Raven, and Black Dog, and he could never tell if these were stories of actual people or legends about mythic figures. Their stories would sometimes be set out here, in the proper wilds, and sometimes Old Bear would wander into the Core, toppling buildings and cracking them open, and alternately eating and educating their shell-shocked inhabitants.

From her, he learned that the nomadic peoples out here in the wilds referred to the dwellers of the Core as skywatchers. It was a name that had come down, through years, from a satirical jab at the rise of MegaDo culture and about the kind of people who tended to wind up in the ‘Dos. “Skywatchers” had been euphemistic slang for how the ‘Do dwellers seemed to perpetually be walking around with their noses in the air, so deep in the belief that they were better than the landlocked ones that they spent their entire days with their noses held aloft, “watching the sky.”

(better joke? Something about skywatchers not being able to tell if their shoes were untied or tied together because they were so busy keeping their noses in the air, looking at the heavens for any sign that they were about to be accepted into its boundless bounty.)

Through a combination of disinterest and a want for stories, this image of the ‘Do dwellers having their noses in the air birthed a belief that they were all a part of some neo religious cult: that they worshipped the sky and watched it constantly for fear that they might miss something. It came from a want to be a part of it; to break the bounds of gravity and to float off into the wild blue.

Old Bear had sometimes called them “Birdmen”, which the girl had thought was funny since Jakob and Benedict were the only skygazers she’d ever met, and neither one of them looked very much like a bird.

Her people’s myths made it seem like they mostly doubted the existence of skygazers. Though they’d definitely been around, and had shut themselves up inside the ‘Dos, it was unclear whether they still existed. Jakob could understand why from the time they’d spent winding their way out of the Core together. The Wild absolutely teemed with twisted life, from the massive Genohulks that would spar in the streets like angry titans, down to the cockroaches and mammal scavengers that picked clean any animal that fell in the Wild.

However, the Core was, for the most part, barren of human life. You’d run across the occasional hermit, shut up and surviving in one of the abandoned buildings. There would be dazed Exiles, who had been unceremoniously dumped out of the ‘Dos above for some transgression. However, a civilian who has been raised in the luxury of a MegaDo was hard pressed to survive when thrust up against the Wild with only his fists and wits as defense. Add to that the fact that Exiles were usually held in solitary before their Exile, and denied the vitamin cocktail that held off Fever. Therefore, you mostly came across the corpses of Exiles, rather than living, breathing examples thereof. You could easily identify them by the torn remains of their flight-suit like pale grey civilian garb, with the number and colour markings of their former designated layers in the ‘Do still in evidence.

It was even difficult to find Sky Pirates on the ground. Though the rats made extensive use of the newly-liberated PATH system to move between their towers and to facilitate the launching of raids on new ones, All of this traffic happened internally. The Pirates only attempted the streets of the Core when their other predations failed to net them enough food and they were forced to hunt Wild game.

But, aside from these signs, it would be easy to believe that the Core had been abandoned. With the MegaDos sealed up inside their protective flexcrete layers, and with any actual windows being made of completely mirrored glass on the external side, the only outward signs that the ‘Dos were still functioning was in the presence of blinking, red lights on their exterior, which had been installed to warn away aircraft.

You could understand how the nomadic forest people contemplated the possibility that the ‘Dos were now barren of life; that the people inside that they referred to as “the skywatchers” had become so taken with their fetishistic love of the heavens that they had finally succeeded in realizing their dream: in finding a way to propel themselves up into the sky to live amongst the stars.