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Legend of the Moving City Read this. You must. I know this must be strange as you’ve probably never even seen a piece of paper before, but please take a moment to read this. My name is Evelyn Waters. I’ve been walking for two days straight without food or water just to deliver the account of what happened to our walking city during the years 2340-2344. You may have heard of the walking city and if you have, you probably thought that it was a legend. But it is real. Was real. I lived there. I was the last woman to leave it behind. My story began at Telnet. I was a mechanic, working to repair the trams at base level of C-Sector in the indoor city of Odessa. It seemed like good work, but our factory initiated an update and all of our jobs were to be replaced by automation. Telnet reassigned us—scooping trash out of the City’s portal and dumping it outside the city walls. Hundreds of mechanics were demoted. We had no recourse. Telnet had a monopoly over Odessa and probably controls your city, too. We had no option but to follow what we were told. The red pops we swallowed each morning kept us feeling relaxed throughout the day. But something arose in a few of us—a longing for something more. Working at Telnet means you live how Telnet wants you to. You know what a normal day is like: you wake up and eat your three red pops. Then you have a plate of bacon and eggs out of Telnet’s Food Printer and it tastes perfect every time. You step out of your HomePod and onto the elevator and go down to floor B22, passing by a hundred different screens along the way. Once you make it to your WorkPod, you sit all day in front of another screen. After you’re nightly blue pops, you retire back to your room and play on another screen until you fall asleep. I know what it’s like to be lost in the screen. The physical world around you drops away and that vast digital land rises up, where you can explore historical times of love, war and adventure. But there is a dark side. There is nothing sadder than to run out of points late at night while you’re deep into a love game. The screen turns off. The lover is gone. You’re back in your pod, alone again. This is not the way the world has always been. I know you’ve heard the rumors of the outside world. You’ve probably heard that it’s wretched. That’s true, in part. It is hot—blazing hot—with temperatures so high you could boil a blue pop on the sidewalk. The environment is angry at us. Back in 2250, we pushed it to its limit and it finally pushed back. The environment forced us to live indoors. Did we try to fix things? No. We gave up. We retreated into our airtight chambers of digital dreams. But even the harsh, unforgiving sun—the same sun that took the life of my beloved Stephen—is more loving than any screen in Odessa. My team of demoted mechanics was forced to go outside of Odessa and dump the city’s trash in the streets of the nearby abandoned city of Nesh. After spending time outside, my mechanics and I could not shake that longing for something more. We started to gather secretly at night. We talked about how amazing it would
be to actually make our own food—what must a real egg feel like in your hand? We talked about digging our fingers into a garden or dipping your body into a pool of water. We talked about escaping. We whispered. We passed secret messages. To our surprise, we found others who had similar feelings. As more and more surfaced from the dark corners of Odessa, we built a team of people. We found engineers, chemists, biologists, and programmers—including Stephen Coates, the man who became more than my dearest friend. We designed with all our free time. But our designs always collided against the same obstacle—the weather. Outside of Odessa, heat storms move across the earth’s surface. No place is safe for more than a few months. If we were to venture out, we would need solid shelter, but we would need to stay moving, too. It was those two factors that gave Stephen and I the idea of a walking city: a city that functioned like an organism. A city that didn’t isolate people in cells, but brought people together, so they could depend on each other to survive—an idea lost to our modern world. Our team had grown into the hundreds, so we had to design a city big enough to accommodate hundreds. In Nesh, we located five building complexes we could reuse for living. The generous basements of those would serve as working spaces. A retrofitted ship’s hull would be the main computer lab and head of our city. On the tail end, we salvaged a domed greenhouse, which we would haul by a scavenged truck. To propel us forward, we planned to use a large engine and plane parts we stole from the Military Vehicles Depot. To lift everything off the ground, we designed four massive, hydraulic legs of steel. We decided to take one last thing. You may think it frivolous, but it means more to us than all the rest. We found a Native American totem pole from the Yavapai tribe, in an old museum in Nesh. We raised it in our town square and named our walking city after them. We chose a city block in Nesh. Our plan was to build our whole city on that block and then blow it out of the earth with explosives. The legs, attached to the block, would then hoist the chunk of earth out of its place and begin walking toward freedom. We worked. We sweated. The first blisters we’d ever seen formed on our own hands. Finally, on December 22nd, 2340, we were ready. At four in the morning, everyone began loading their families on to Yavapai, leaving behind their food printers, their screens, their comfort, and everything they had ever known. By 6:30, the explosives shook the ground and the city began to emerge. Mechanics, myself included, made sure the legs and gears ran smoothly. Stephen and his programmers controlled the complex system. The remaining people—even the children—helped dig away the dirt. Every person helped to raise this city from the earth. First, her front end rose up. The whole city tilted at a sixty-degree angle. The children screamed and clutched onto whatever they could. Then her back end slowly rose into place and… Click, click, whoosh, pfffffzzz, chrrrrzzz, kff…we were moving. Everyone cheered. That glorious feeling didn’t last long though. We ran out of food in just a few weeks and the little food we grew was tough and bitter. We wanted to experience real life, but we didn’t realize how uncomfortable it could really be. Many people gave up after within the first weeks and left to find the closest indoor city, but most of us stayed. It was hard, but I slept soundly every night. Hard work is what I felt like I was put on this earth to do. But these times of peace did not last.
Two months ago, the wind began blowing harder and hotter than ever. We were just about to harvest fields of corn and wheat, but the fiery storm killed it all. Stephen’s team of programmers came to us and said they couldn’t handle the hardship any longer. They wanted to get off at the next indoor city we passed. I tried to convince them not to go, but the pull of comfort and security was too strong. My programmers left. Without them, Yavapai failed during the next storm. Stephen was unable to keep all the systems running. The seventy-three of us that remained stayed inside for weeks until we ran out of food. We grew weak. The oldest and youngest among us died first. Finally, only Stephen and I remained. Five days ago, at dusk, Stephen passed on. I wept for a day when he breathed his last. Yavapai has died. I left camp three days ago, parting ways with the remains of a tribe I had come to love. I am back at the gates of Odessa. I write to you now as the last woman standing from our beloved walking city. I am slipping this letter in an air vent near the main Odessa gate. I hope it will reach the hands of someone who cares. Someone who questions. The walking city is no legend. It was real. It worked. Yes, it died, but you need to know, I have no regrets. I would do it all again, if I could.
Sincerely,
Evelyn Waters