Untitled Narrative #002 [excerpt]
The building to your left whispers and whirs in motility, like a freshly serviced Fly-Trans shuttle, and you find yourself staring up, into the interminable maze of the sterile shifting Singaporean streetscape. Beveled grey-white buildings populate the space floating about your head, seeming to operate without the knowledge or consent of those inside. At street level, mildly desaturated Echelon ads bleed into one another each message tailored to the personal inclinations of those passing in front of the sensors. The junctions of translucent photovoltaic windowpanes operate on rounded joints with minute motors twisting smoothly, each wired and connected in mysterious ways you cannot conceive in this stupor. While the movements of each structure are subtle, the combined effect of the towers swaying in the stale air gives you a strange tension in the soles of your feet and a quiver in your gut. Tubes of enclosed hermetic space create a neuron-like web obscuring the sky beyond, each one flexing and squeezing its occupants from one side to the other. Lighting diodes illuminate in small halos the passage of feet and electricity measuring, recording, and adjusting in a precise ballet of efficiency. The diodes always seem to be getting brighter, even if a few are exploding in bulbs of bitter red here and there. In those flashing moments of lucidity granted by an expired sheet of tabs, the diodes still never seem to dull.
“This is going to be a long day,” you say to yourself, out loud this time.