by Ifeoma Maduka

Created on: November 14, 2007

AD 2700

The rest of the City beyond my apartment is a rising stack of glass helixes and pregnant ellipsoids, twisting up to the crimson filament above. It has grown, this City, in just that way, slowly developing layers of hyperglass and ultraplastics, straining from it's old stone foundations throughout the centuries. All this, right before my eyes. I look down on the City and find myself seeing through the animate frames of silicon and graphite, to it's crude seeds, the old buildings of brick and granite.

I wonder, as I look on at my assistant Tabo, if he sees it with the same mancy as bequeathed to me by right of my phenotype. Certainly, when I catch him pausing from his work to look out at the shining kingdom about us, he shows no sign of gnosis. The City is simply the City, a physical edifice as opposed to the tangible base to ethereal memory. Like an animal observing a fresco who cannot discern it as a thing apart from the wall, Tabo cannot understand what he sees, as a mere weave in an ever lengthening tapestry of buildings.

Sometimes I'll join him at the window, making him startle. If I don't reassure him, he bustles away with a beautiful smile of remorse, busying his hands with the paperwork or optic files. Of course I avoid this; there is something so very alerting about the boy. His scent, sweat and parfum, the vapour of City engines clinging to the fibres of his tunic, awaking me, however briefly, to the sensations of his life and world, of mortality. His dark skin, so supple and dry, dull in the blue light of the apartment. I fancy it would feel like felt beneath my fingertips and his hair like the tendril roots that carve minute paths into the walls of stone buildings.

It is not so much mortality that fascinates me. I had had more than a few assistants in my time, who work tirelessly to gather and organise the data of my many laboratories and colleges: unlike many of my race, I keep these assistants in my service until they choose to retire, rather than banish them when they succumb to the lashings of Time. I surround myself with mortality.

What fascinates me is Tabo's mortality. The way it has bled into his veins, a constant reminder shooting through his nerves, that reminds and informs his every act.

"Why are you always so sad, Tabo?" I once teased.

"I am never sad, Madam Venerable," he replied quite solemnly. "Merely reflective."

Reflective, I liked to muse, on the nature of Nature that is mortality, a mortality that life, by virtue of it's

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