Part One: A Dry Drowning
By Stas’ Wiatrowski

Late C29, Tower One, Norstralia
There was nothing left in the world now but reaching that distant Tower. Nothing but shoving and kicking and angry words, sobs and moans and supplications to the empty sky. And that was just his own sad self – some of the crowd were complaining even louder than he was, and that was very irritating indeed.

Chaz stopped staring at the distant column of Tower One soaring up into infinity, dropped his chin and tried to focus on the rock strewn desert floor immediately around his feet. Gazing straight ahead was out of the question, because it brought him far enough out of his fugue to register the hundreds of thousands of sweaty, smelly, desperate types crushing around him.

The worst possible thing to do right now was to consider the possibility of stumbling and then drowning into this choppy sea of human desperation.
      
"Are you all right there Chaz?" asked Link, with that smooth unruffled tone.
Chaz was too far into a reverie of misery to hear his friend. But he did register the random elbow that jammed itself hard in the soft part between his hip and his ribs. He groaned and cursed, his pain relief kicking in too late and without much effect. He was so strung out that even his nanodocs couldn’t do anything about the weariness now. His hat had blown away eons ago, the sun was boiling the juices of his brain, and his eyes were weeping precious fluid behind his matt black specs.

Link stood tall and straight behind him, impervious to the heat of the day or the crush of stinky humanity all around them. For a moment Chaz was able to dip into a deep and murky pool of envious hatred for his friend, but that pool was getting shallower and shallower by the minute – evaporated by a dry fear taking precedent over everything.

There was another one of those spontaneous crowd shoves, a savage Brownian agitation throwing people forward in chaotic stumbling waves. These were the most dangerous times, when you truly had to work your sense of balance against multiple opposing forces generated by elbows and knees and whatever other body parts people were liable to shove out at you.
A small lapse of concentration could bring you to your knees, and that was it. Death by asphyxiation.

It had taken five days of walking to get here. They had started from the Transmat banks at the edge of the desert, and for the first few days there had been space enough to lie down and sleep.

For the last day and a half they had been walking pretty constantly, the mass of petitioners holding each other up through some kind of mutual exhaustion, the group coalescing into a tighter and tighter clump of marching desperation as it converged on the Tower. They were close enough now so that Chaz could make out the incredible display of tech at the base.

The first 500 metres of the Tower’s column was protected by a spinning shield of billions of diamond shards that looked exactly like the skin of a gigantic soap bubble. The Tower stretched another fifty kilometres up, a thing made by the Titans, vanishing into a sky that was a deep unblemished blue, not a wispy hint of a cloud.

So close. So tired. So hard to stay standing.

Time shift. The sky now indigo, the sun red and fat and sinking beneath the ground.

Suddenly night in the desert and very cold. Huge floating floodlights struck the spinning diamond field so that it was a constant riot of sparkling rainbow effervescence.

It was simply too beautiful, too surreal, too lambent. His gaze turned inward with his utter exhaustion, and one of his hallucinations overwhelmed him

He had a sudden walking dream flash: the image of a crack appearing in the hard earth beneath the sand out here, and then water exploding from it in a titanic ocean-smelling geyser, roaring out enough water to drown a world.

God, he could almost taste the spray, feel it caressing his parched skin. But only for a heartbeat, and then it was all gone. And with it any last vestige of the strength let alone the will to go on

This was it. He couldn’t go any farther. He had nothing left to give. He had been the one so insistent about coming here, certain as he was that someone or something would take pity on them, after all they had been through in the past.

Water. His body craved water, his throat was dry, his skin losing its last moisture into the night air. To die of thirst, what the hell antiquated way was that to go?

Too much to think about, and no energy left, even for fear. He closed his eyes and felt his legs disappear as he pitched forward, the sight of the Tower filling his eyes, phosphenes swirling as he felt a foot connect with his shin, a snap of bone painful enough for a rush of fear even as consciousness flicked off.

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