Kaleidoscoptic
“Oh God, how did I get myself into this mess?”
Standing on the edge of a building façade, his toes hanging over the endless drop through chrome bridges and steel towers below, sirens going off through the walls behind him, acoustic guitar in one hand, it really is an accomplishment how deep he’s gotten himself tangled into this trouble. As he looks below, a constant wave of air pulses up from the lower levels, blasting his hair back and billowing through his clothes. Through the maze of overlapping domed streets and colossal buildings that push out in every direction, the artificial light of the Street Level pumps against the darkness of night. The blackness cuts across the building walls in sharp contrast. Here and there, windows twinkle with light, mirroring the sky above. It’s a long way down…
Jack grips the guitar neck.
----------
He ran his fingers down the fret board, puzzling over this strange contraption of a guitar. It was made out of some lightweight green metal, with the same anatomy as a Gibson Flying V. But there were no frets on the neck, no cables attaching to the amps, and no strings. He looked, uncertainly, at Crash.
“What sort of guitar is this?”
“Don’t chicken out now.” She rolled her eyes. The three Green Teens were sprawled across the entrance hall floor before him in a makeshift audience. “We all want to hear this ‘magical music’ of yours.”
“No…” Jack frowned. “Seriously, how does this work?”
Crash stood up, and moved quickly behind Jack. She folded out her arms, placing her hands gently on his. Resting her chin on Jack’s shoulder, she formed a chord on the metal neck of the guitar. The board responded to the pressure of her fingers with tiny green waves that lit the fret. With her other hand, she led Jack’s wrist in an easy strumming motion.
The chord slipped out of the amp, colorless.
“Go on, then…” Crash stepped away from Jack, and joined the other two on the floor. “Play for us.”
Jack sighed, holding the strange guitar uncomfortably. He pressed his fingers against the soft fret board, and began to play. At first the sound was flat, colorless. There was not enough depth in the chords to spark color into the air. All noise and no motion. For a moment, the colorless sound terrified him. And then, his heart fell into place and locked with the song. The colors began to pulse out from the amps behind him, surrounding him in a rainbow halo. The colors, these true colors, danced in the wide eyes of the Greens. He saw the music echoed in Crash’s open lips, and he knew that this was no trick of his mind.
Color was music. But… when Crash played, it sounded just the same, but there was no color, no motion, no ocean…
Crash’s jaw dropped.
“HOLY FUCKING SHIT!”
In the City of All Cities, so many people were walking dreams. They drifted back and forth through one year, one month, or the worst day of their lives. And even those who weren’t choking in airtight, sealed-off Eras were lost in self-delusion. Maybe the truth was too bizarre and unreal for them.
But for all of those deluded dreamers, music had been a wake-up call. It was a secret pleasure of Jack’s to see their eyes aflame with this unnamed beauty—color.
Here, everything was different. Color wasn’t some obscure, harmonic motion hanging in the air—color was engraved in their skin. Color pulsed through their flesh and was such a part of them, like music to a musician. So he watched the three gangsters as he played. He saw their perception of music and color shift as the song sparked in their eyes. Even later, they would turn at every sound, and follow voices with their eyes to see if that too would yield to these fantastic colors. They were different form the shell-shocked, time-locked passerby of the City of All Cities. The gangsters imbibed the music like a drug.
So when Jack said that he preferred to play acoustic, Jade, Crash, and Il all shared a look, and said it was time to go for a ‘walk.’
They took the Club Vertigo elevator to the Upper District. On their way up, Il pulled back on of the smooth metal plates off the wall, exposing livid, fleshy bundles of wire.
“Damn, this place is overgrown!” he said, grabbing a fistful of chords. Somewhere between the 500th and 501st floors, Il unceremoniously ripped them out, and the elevator came to a screeching halt.
Once their feet found the floor again, Jade pulled away a grate on the ceiling. One by one, they swung up into the elevator shaft. Green light shone from the box below, casting color against the shadowy wires that snaked on the walls. In front of them, a human sized chunk was missing from the stone. Outside, bright light paraded about the sky.
The gangsters stepped out into the city.
They stood on top of a wide, domed bridge that connected the Vertigo building to the one directly across from it. The top of the archway was paved with steel, but the walls were made of thick glass, in which obscure figures strolled. All around, similar enclosed pathways arched and branched out to all the buildings around, creating a woven net of suspended streets on each level. As they walked out on top of this bridge, the wind blasted their skin and lights illuminated them from below.
“Where are we going?” Jack asked as they scampered out over the urban abyss. They danced from bridge to bridge, rooftop to rooftop, as the night swelled around them.
Crash looked back at him, with laughter in her eyes and mischief in her teeth. “The Museum.”
----------
The others are on a bridge below him, maybe twenty feet down and to the left. They wave up at him, urging him to take the plunge and “JUMP!”
He looks up as the city circles around him, dancing to the eerie beat of the sirens that eat into his mind. He can’t hear the guards racing down the hallway behind him, but he can feel how their oncoming footsteps clap trouble against the floor.
And for a moment, he considers that he might just want to fall, fall, fall, plummet through that air which is time, and fall…
Jack, Jade, Crash and Il emerged onto the Museum rooftop. Glassy shapes formed a silver dome over the maze of galleries below. The roof was pierced with rectangular towers, like the one the gangsters stood upon.
“Netto…” Crash said to no one in particular, pacing over to the steel door before them. “Net-Netty-Nettoooo—“
She paused in her catcall, and flipped her cybershades down. “Yeah, I need to open the Museum roof door, third tower…Hey, I LIKE to go the Museum! What’s that supposed to mean?!”
Jade snickered a bit. “Yes, she just adores going the Museum at night, when it’s closed.”
“Yeah, okay,” Crash said, resigned. “We’re making a heist. Darc and Ace can take care of themselves. We need a map of the place! Okay…Oh.”
Crash glanced over at Jack, holding a promise of excitement in her smirked lips.
“An acoustic guitar.”
She stepped back, and the metal door swung open for them. “We’ve got 25 minutes before the alarms come back on,” she explained. The Green Teens hurried stealthily in, and Jack followed like a lost sheep.
The gangsters moved quickly and with a purpose, somehow knowing exactly which turn to take. Doors unlocked at their fingertips. They snuck through tall hallways that were lined with glass cabinets illuminated by sallow lights. There wasn’t enough time for Jack to stop and wonder at the displays. Here and there, mysterious technological artifacts lay– crushed chrome entangled with wires that seemed to breathe with life. As they sneaked from hall to hall, it wasn’t these landmarks of the future that astonished him. It was how many of these artifacts of the past he recognized.
My past, chronicled in little plastic boxes.
The long galleries were completely deserted, but they tread carefully. Their footsteps sounded hollowly against the emptiness.
“They have guards posted at every wing,” Il whispered against Jack’s ear. “The alarms may be off, but you still don’t want to get caught!”
“The Music Room is in the next gallery over.” Crash glanced at her fellow Greens. “God Jaq, you need some bitmites.”
The gallery was shrouded in darkness. The only light came from sharp spotlights above that cut down on the glass cases. Instruments stood out from the darkness—drums with reddened skin stretched over smooth gourds, bells, flutes and whistles shining with silver, and brass trumpets gleaming gold and proud in the light. It was the most extensive collection of instruments Jack had ever seen, all of them bursting with raw, soundless color.
In the middle of the gallery, an old six-stringed guitar stood on a pedestal. It almost seemed as if it was waiting just for him. He could hear it’s old strings aching to be played, and felt a similar ache in the bones of his hand as soundless music reached out to him. He stepped into the bright spotlight, his eyes filling up with the glistening colors that filled the wood.
“I think I’m in love.”
From across the room, a foreign pair of footsteps sounded. Jade, Crash and Il yanked Jack back into the safety of the shadows. A guard, dressed in a plain black uniform, entered the gallery, swinging a flashlight around the room lazily. The small light passed on the wall above their heads as the gangsters crouched down. The guard began to walk across the room towards them. Every now and again, he would pass by a spotlight, and his bored, bitter face was illuminated.
The four of them crawled slowly around the podium as the man moved forward, careful to stay out of the ring of light. Jack was afraid that the guard would be able to feel the tension pouring out of their bodies, but he paid them no mind. The man stopped in front of one of the cases, and looked down at the prehistoric piano lying there in spoiled wreckage. Crash nudged Jack, and he quietly crawled up to the guitar. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the guard carefully. He saw the man’s half illuminated face smear with sudden anger. And he spat at the display.
Jack was struck, frozen, his arms outstretched towards the guitar. That simple action had shut out everything else—the museum, the three gangsters, the spotlight blazing above him— everything was gone except for the guard’s spiteful grimace. For five seconds, nothing moved.
Crash hissed Jack’s name, he snapped back into focus and grabbed the guitar, the guard spun his flashlight onto the four of them, Jade and Il lunged forward, the guard shouted something, and the blackness ripped open with green light. When Jack looked back, he saw the man fighting against the two Greens. He hit Il into a case that splintered around him. Jade came up from the other side and wrestled his body down with color.
The alarms began to sing.
All of a sudden, Crash was tugging at Jack’s arm, and they were running down through the exhibit. The Green Teen’s shouts were only a buzzing in Jack’s ear as the alarms blared around them. Past walls lined with paintings, and dodging around sculptures, they zigzagged through the museum halls. Jack cradled the guitar to his chest.
As they turned down a long, narrow hall, another guard appeared at the fork at the end. He began to sprint towards them, and the gangsters split into side hallways. It was only after running down this dark hall, and turning back to another corridor, did Jack realize that the others were no longer behind him. He paused, his heart hammering against the body of the guitar. The alarms were so loud that he couldn’t hear anything—not even his own breath. It was worse than being blind. A panic gripped him, causing every shadow to leap out at him, and every shade of darkness to strike harshly against the walls.
He stumbled down the corridor. He felt a cool breeze pass through his paranoia, and cut down into his calm. An open window looked out into the bright night at the end of the hallway. Jack glanced back down the corridor—an ominous shadow creeping from an adjacent hallway grew steadily bigger. He looked back out the window, and found a ledge that was wide enough for him to stand on.
Jack stepped out into the cool breeze, holding hands with the guitar.
----------
Jack takes another side step on the narrow ledge, trying to get closer to the bridge below. Jade, Crash and Il all make frantic gestures, their shouts floating up towards him. He looks back. A green stained guard with a broken nose looks out from the window behind him. Jack looks down. The city stretches down below him, a colorful kaleidoscope of shapes and light. Giving the wall one last, comforting squeeze, he presses off and falls through space.
“Oh God, how did I get myself into this mess?”
Standing on the edge of a building façade, his toes hanging over the endless drop through chrome bridges and steel towers below, sirens going off through the walls behind him, acoustic guitar in one hand, it really is an accomplishment how deep he’s gotten himself tangled into this trouble. As he looks below, a constant wave of air pulses up from the lower levels, blasting his hair back and billowing through his clothes. Through the maze of overlapping domed streets and colossal buildings that push out in every direction, the artificial light of the Street Level pumps against the darkness of night. The blackness cuts across the building walls in sharp contrast. Here and there, windows twinkle with light, mirroring the sky above. It’s a long way down…
Jack grips the guitar neck.
----------
He ran his fingers down the fret board, puzzling over this strange contraption of a guitar. It was made out of some lightweight green metal, with the same anatomy as a Gibson Flying V. But there were no frets on the neck, no cables attaching to the amps, and no strings. He looked, uncertainly, at Crash.
“What sort of guitar is this?”
“Don’t chicken out now.” She rolled her eyes. The three Green Teens were sprawled across the entrance hall floor before him in a makeshift audience. “We all want to hear this ‘magical music’ of yours.”
“No…” Jack frowned. “Seriously, how does this work?”
Crash stood up, and moved quickly behind Jack. She folded out her arms, placing her hands gently on his. Resting her chin on Jack’s shoulder, she formed a chord on the metal neck of the guitar. The board responded to the pressure of her fingers with tiny green waves that lit the fret. With her other hand, she led Jack’s wrist in an easy strumming motion.
The chord slipped out of the amp, colorless.
“Go on, then…” Crash stepped away from Jack, and joined the other two on the floor. “Play for us.”
Jack sighed, holding the strange guitar uncomfortably. He pressed his fingers against the soft fret board, and began to play. At first the sound was flat, colorless. There was not enough depth in the chords to spark color into the air. All noise and no motion. For a moment, the colorless sound terrified him. And then, his heart fell into place and locked with the song. The colors began to pulse out from the amps behind him, surrounding him in a rainbow halo. The colors, these true colors, danced in the wide eyes of the Greens. He saw the music echoed in Crash’s open lips, and he knew that this was no trick of his mind.
Color was music. But… when Crash played, it sounded just the same, but there was no color, no motion, no ocean…
Crash’s jaw dropped.
“HOLY FUCKING SHIT!”
In the City of All Cities, so many people were walking dreams. They drifted back and forth through one year, one month, or the worst day of their lives. And even those who weren’t choking in airtight, sealed-off Eras were lost in self-delusion. Maybe the truth was too bizarre and unreal for them.
But for all of those deluded dreamers, music had been a wake-up call. It was a secret pleasure of Jack’s to see their eyes aflame with this unnamed beauty—color.
Here, everything was different. Color wasn’t some obscure, harmonic motion hanging in the air—color was engraved in their skin. Color pulsed through their flesh and was such a part of them, like music to a musician. So he watched the three gangsters as he played. He saw their perception of music and color shift as the song sparked in their eyes. Even later, they would turn at every sound, and follow voices with their eyes to see if that too would yield to these fantastic colors. They were different form the shell-shocked, time-locked passerby of the City of All Cities. The gangsters imbibed the music like a drug.
So when Jack said that he preferred to play acoustic, Jade, Crash, and Il all shared a look, and said it was time to go for a ‘walk.’
They took the Club Vertigo elevator to the Upper District. On their way up, Il pulled back on of the smooth metal plates off the wall, exposing livid, fleshy bundles of wire.
“Damn, this place is overgrown!” he said, grabbing a fistful of chords. Somewhere between the 500th and 501st floors, Il unceremoniously ripped them out, and the elevator came to a screeching halt.
Once their feet found the floor again, Jade pulled away a grate on the ceiling. One by one, they swung up into the elevator shaft. Green light shone from the box below, casting color against the shadowy wires that snaked on the walls. In front of them, a human sized chunk was missing from the stone. Outside, bright light paraded about the sky.
The gangsters stepped out into the city.
They stood on top of a wide, domed bridge that connected the Vertigo building to the one directly across from it. The top of the archway was paved with steel, but the walls were made of thick glass, in which obscure figures strolled. All around, similar enclosed pathways arched and branched out to all the buildings around, creating a woven net of suspended streets on each level. As they walked out on top of this bridge, the wind blasted their skin and lights illuminated them from below.
“Where are we going?” Jack asked as they scampered out over the urban abyss. They danced from bridge to bridge, rooftop to rooftop, as the night swelled around them.
Crash looked back at him, with laughter in her eyes and mischief in her teeth. “The Museum.”
----------
The others are on a bridge below him, maybe twenty feet down and to the left. They wave up at him, urging him to take the plunge and “JUMP!”
He looks up as the city circles around him, dancing to the eerie beat of the sirens that eat into his mind. He can’t hear the guards racing down the hallway behind him, but he can feel how their oncoming footsteps clap trouble against the floor.
And for a moment, he considers that he might just want to fall, fall, fall, plummet through that air which is time, and fall…
Jack, Jade, Crash and Il emerged onto the Museum rooftop. Glassy shapes formed a silver dome over the maze of galleries below. The roof was pierced with rectangular towers, like the one the gangsters stood upon.
“Netto…” Crash said to no one in particular, pacing over to the steel door before them. “Net-Netty-Nettoooo—“
She paused in her catcall, and flipped her cybershades down. “Yeah, I need to open the Museum roof door, third tower…Hey, I LIKE to go the Museum! What’s that supposed to mean?!”
Jade snickered a bit. “Yes, she just adores going the Museum at night, when it’s closed.”
“Yeah, okay,” Crash said, resigned. “We’re making a heist. Darc and Ace can take care of themselves. We need a map of the place! Okay…Oh.”
Crash glanced over at Jack, holding a promise of excitement in her smirked lips.
“An acoustic guitar.”
She stepped back, and the metal door swung open for them. “We’ve got 25 minutes before the alarms come back on,” she explained. The Green Teens hurried stealthily in, and Jack followed like a lost sheep.
The gangsters moved quickly and with a purpose, somehow knowing exactly which turn to take. Doors unlocked at their fingertips. They snuck through tall hallways that were lined with glass cabinets illuminated by sallow lights. There wasn’t enough time for Jack to stop and wonder at the displays. Here and there, mysterious technological artifacts lay– crushed chrome entangled with wires that seemed to breathe with life. As they sneaked from hall to hall, it wasn’t these landmarks of the future that astonished him. It was how many of these artifacts of the past he recognized.
My past, chronicled in little plastic boxes.
The long galleries were completely deserted, but they tread carefully. Their footsteps sounded hollowly against the emptiness.
“They have guards posted at every wing,” Il whispered against Jack’s ear. “The alarms may be off, but you still don’t want to get caught!”
“The Music Room is in the next gallery over.” Crash glanced at her fellow Greens. “God Jaq, you need some bitmites.”
The gallery was shrouded in darkness. The only light came from sharp spotlights above that cut down on the glass cases. Instruments stood out from the darkness—drums with reddened skin stretched over smooth gourds, bells, flutes and whistles shining with silver, and brass trumpets gleaming gold and proud in the light. It was the most extensive collection of instruments Jack had ever seen, all of them bursting with raw, soundless color.
In the middle of the gallery, an old six-stringed guitar stood on a pedestal. It almost seemed as if it was waiting just for him. He could hear it’s old strings aching to be played, and felt a similar ache in the bones of his hand as soundless music reached out to him. He stepped into the bright spotlight, his eyes filling up with the glistening colors that filled the wood.
“I think I’m in love.”
From across the room, a foreign pair of footsteps sounded. Jade, Crash and Il yanked Jack back into the safety of the shadows. A guard, dressed in a plain black uniform, entered the gallery, swinging a flashlight around the room lazily. The small light passed on the wall above their heads as the gangsters crouched down. The guard began to walk across the room towards them. Every now and again, he would pass by a spotlight, and his bored, bitter face was illuminated.
The four of them crawled slowly around the podium as the man moved forward, careful to stay out of the ring of light. Jack was afraid that the guard would be able to feel the tension pouring out of their bodies, but he paid them no mind. The man stopped in front of one of the cases, and looked down at the prehistoric piano lying there in spoiled wreckage. Crash nudged Jack, and he quietly crawled up to the guitar. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the guard carefully. He saw the man’s half illuminated face smear with sudden anger. And he spat at the display.
Jack was struck, frozen, his arms outstretched towards the guitar. That simple action had shut out everything else—the museum, the three gangsters, the spotlight blazing above him— everything was gone except for the guard’s spiteful grimace. For five seconds, nothing moved.
Crash hissed Jack’s name, he snapped back into focus and grabbed the guitar, the guard spun his flashlight onto the four of them, Jade and Il lunged forward, the guard shouted something, and the blackness ripped open with green light. When Jack looked back, he saw the man fighting against the two Greens. He hit Il into a case that splintered around him. Jade came up from the other side and wrestled his body down with color.
The alarms began to sing.
All of a sudden, Crash was tugging at Jack’s arm, and they were running down through the exhibit. The Green Teen’s shouts were only a buzzing in Jack’s ear as the alarms blared around them. Past walls lined with paintings, and dodging around sculptures, they zigzagged through the museum halls. Jack cradled the guitar to his chest.
As they turned down a long, narrow hall, another guard appeared at the fork at the end. He began to sprint towards them, and the gangsters split into side hallways. It was only after running down this dark hall, and turning back to another corridor, did Jack realize that the others were no longer behind him. He paused, his heart hammering against the body of the guitar. The alarms were so loud that he couldn’t hear anything—not even his own breath. It was worse than being blind. A panic gripped him, causing every shadow to leap out at him, and every shade of darkness to strike harshly against the walls.
He stumbled down the corridor. He felt a cool breeze pass through his paranoia, and cut down into his calm. An open window looked out into the bright night at the end of the hallway. Jack glanced back down the corridor—an ominous shadow creeping from an adjacent hallway grew steadily bigger. He looked back out the window, and found a ledge that was wide enough for him to stand on.
Jack stepped out into the cool breeze, holding hands with the guitar.
----------
Jack takes another side step on the narrow ledge, trying to get closer to the bridge below. Jade, Crash and Il all make frantic gestures, their shouts floating up towards him. He looks back. A green stained guard with a broken nose looks out from the window behind him. Jack looks down. The city stretches down below him, a colorful kaleidoscope of shapes and light. Giving the wall one last, comforting squeeze, he presses off and falls through space.