[ IP ] The Sheltered City

He swam on narcotic tides through the digital depths. He perched from a vantage point higher than any other had achieved and he traveled farther back than anyone can remember, before the war, before Dark ’ s rise, before the walls went up. Staring down upon the collective unconscious, Lethe was still there, the megalopolis shadowed by the Seven Towers. Even now it looked old, the arcologies wore their cracked facades with the same resolute weariness that he had known, that his father had known, that maybe his grandfather had known, if the old man, or anyone else could remember back that far. The air still carried the same thick pollution that reddened the skies and choked the lungs and obscured the stars at night. There was nothing new here. 
 
 His veins filled with frost as he pushed himself further back, to the beginning of it all, the Calamity. His heart staggered under the chemical load. The city warped. The towers bent and bowed at right angles to gravity, and the bones of the earth erupted, driving him higher and higher. The world bent in on itself as his trip neared its morbid destination. But through it all, Lethe kept running. The traffic still flowed above the congested rivers of humanity. No one thought twice as the horizons kissed and the Sun ’ s light was squeezed from existence. The air became so thick he was crushed by it. His eyes closed as the throbbing beat of his heart slowed to a stop and the Calamity washed over him. 
 
 Another needle joined the half dozen already siphoning chemicals into his body, this one lancing into the core of his being, reigniting the Sun ’ s light, captive in a fluorescent bulb. He came down, and he was back in the city, under the city, in the deepest basement of the Ivory Tower. His dilated pupils drank in the white light of the lab like a flood. He squinted and shaded his eyes with his hand, dragging several cables and tubes with it. The scent of antiseptics scorched his nostrils. 
 
 `` We almost lost you, Joe,'' a man in a white lab coat said. He walked to the bed Joe laid in. `` What do you remember?'' He asked. 
 
 Joe stared at him. The details which seemed so vivid moments ago fled to the darkness once again, just outside of his grasp. “ I don ’ t remember anything. Just a bad dream, Doc. ”
