EXCERPT

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 its 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 graphene, to its crude seeds, the old buildings of brick and granite.

I wonder, as I look 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, with
all the sentience of a dumb idol. 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 stage in its evolution, another weave in an ever-lengthening tapestry
of buildings and machines.

Sometimes I 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 vapor of City engines clinging to the fibers 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.