Neil found himself both impressed and confused as the train returned to the outer station. He’d told the latest passenger, what was her name, ah, Wright, Emily Wright, about the dangers, yes. But he hadn’t told her about the emergency releases. The ones that would send the train back ahead of time. Nobody had ever used it anyway, so now that the train returned ahead of schedule it seemed like she’d found it herself. He smiled. While learning the job, it had been imperative to distance himself from the customers. They didn’t return, his manager had told him, so it was pointless to try and get attached to any of them. Neil pretended to learn this lesson, even as his manager bought their ticket. But every now and then he still failed.
Like today, when passenger Wright had shown up. He’d noticed that there was something important about her, even though he did his best to just do his job. Which had resulted in him forgetting some very important information. Luckily it didn’t seem like any harm had come out of that, and his intuition had been right. Wright was the first to come back, she was important.
Neil found himself standing on the platform as the train came to a stop. Not like he needed to service anybody else, a single customer these days was already above average, and the train only left once per day. How strange though, the lights inside the train car were off.
There was no real protocol for returning passengers, so Neil just straightened his work uniform and stood at what he imagined was attention while he waited for the train’s doors to open. The seconds stretched like old chewing gum, which to him felt like the unpleasant sensation of being drunk. In retrospect this came across as a warning to heed. But in the present it was nothing except confusing to him, so he just shuddered and waited for the moment to pass.
When the doors opened, it was dark on the inside. No, that wasn’t it. There was nothing on the inside. The inside of the train car was a blank, featureless void, and Neil’s mind almost fell apart as it tried to comprehend the pure absence of anything that its sensory organs fed it a lack of information about. In the end he decided that what he saw was darkness, only less so. That was it, the inside of the train car was perfect darkness. Had somebody asked, Neil would have confidently told them in this moment that he looked through the doors and from that could tell that the train car didn’t have an inside. Just the darkness, but not even that really.
Neil took half a step backwards. Nothing slowly oozed out, towards him and into the rest of the world.
The first fact everybody learned about Tower City was that it wasn’t one. Or at least, not initially. In the beginning stood a colossal construction site designed to create the ultimate skyscraper. Initially planned to reach a full mile in height, actual engineers had managed to convince politicians and planners to settle for a kilometer instead, which took years off the estimated construction time and added them right back to the lifespan of people who actually understood the limitations of terrestrial construction materials. Some people still suggested that perhaps an attempt to reach the Moon first was more feasible, but even if it was it would’ve reeked of surrender to switch competitions while already in the middle of the first. People suggesting a space race therefore were often laughed out of conference rooms.
As was the case so often with grand projects set in the middle of nowhere, logistics were an issue. Wyoming was ideal because while there was a lot of space available it didn’t offer any distractions other than a slumbering supervolcano in the opposite corner of the state. It also didn’t offer much entertainment. Or accommodation for workers. As there was a strict schedule to keep, accommodation was built. Followed by entertainment. Workers who stayed on-site for long periods of time had their families join them. By the time Project Babylon was halfway complete, Tower City was officially named and sported a healthy population. That was in 1967.
The Tower was finished on July 20th, 1969. The media was exhilarated. Politicians from all over the world arrived by July 22nd 1969. Pictures were taken, the loss conceded while the USA graciously broadcast their victory to the entire world that could tune in to their television sets. By the middle of August interest slowly waned. There was a sense of normalcy coming to Tower City, at the heart of which proudly stood the spire that had started it all. Everything was fine on September 24th, 1969. Everybody was gone on September 25th, 1969.
Emily stared at her cards. Were they broken? Something was up. Which was the opposite of her problem, for everything she drew was upside down. She thought about guidance to where to go, all cards came out reversed. She shuffled and flipped cards and went through every trick she knew to randomize what she could, but no matter what she did, every time she drew honestly she drew nothing but reversed cards. The Hanged Man showed up often, which she appreciated to a degree. “No sacrificing myself to the Greater Good, got it,” she caught herself mumbling to nobody in particular. She had one card left to complete the reading, and when she drew it she froze. The one card to come out right side up loomed not far from the station as well. The Tower.
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Enough was enough, these past few hours were already not coming back and now spending more time trying to figure out something with a deck this uncooperative was only going to waste more. She shoved her cards back in her backpack. Then she sat down. There was no way she was going to leave the station building for now. Tomorrow the next train would arrive. Emily didn’t intend to miss it. Nor did she feel like stepping out into the street again. Something might wait for her there. Plus, here she had food. There was plenty left after all, in the backrooms of concession stands. A lot of it was packed in tin cans that dated back to the late ‘60s. Not much of a surprise, and neither was the fact that it was still edible. She also did a good job at ignoring the fresh fruit that also looked untouched. It remained untouched, because Emily stuck to the cans she could have some rational trust in. The canned food was cold, bland, and not particularly mood-lifting in its cold state, but it was at least possible they just remained preserved the regular way, right?
Day turned to night, Emily found an acceptably comfortable sleeping spot on a bench, and as night turned today the universe turned a page. A new one awaited as Emily awoke. She found herself feeling optimistic. Not much longer now until she had a way out. Something caught her eye and occupied her mind for a moment. The cup of coffee was still where she’d found it, but it was cold now. When she’d first seen it she had assumed that it was fresh, and used it as a warning. But now that she thought about it, an unseen something making a cup of coffee and then just leaving it didn’t make sense. Not to mention, the fresh food she had found in storage that at this point had to be almost thirty years old was still in perfect condition. Emily pushed all these thoughts away. It didn’t matter, she was on her way out of this place. She drank another can of cold soup and got out to the platforms to wait until the train was there.
The train didn’t come. Of course there weren’t going to be trains every day, she thought to herself. But as she looked to the shapeless area at the horizon that completely eluded her mind’s ability to make sense of it, she was filled with the growing feeling that no train was going to come ever again. After an amount of time had passed that sufficed to lengthen the shadows from the passage of the sun across the cloudless sky, Emily tore her gaze away from the swirl of absolute nothingness and headed back inside. The migraine that set in over the course of the next hour prevented her from doing anything else on that day. Eventually she fell asleep.
Day turned to night turned to day. Another page was turned. Emily awoke on day three. She had canned soup, then headed out to the platforms. One look towards the horizon showed her that the ungraspable void had expanded slightly. She made a mental note to never look that way again, and once she was back inside she decided to head out the front door. After the distant void and the confusing lighting conditions in here, she needed something to distract herself with. Better yet. It was time for her to find a way out of this situation.
The street outside was as empty as it had been two days ago. Other than the complete absence of motion, it looked as ordinary as a major street could. As Emily walked down the stairs towards the street level she could feel sudden goosebumps on her arms and a shudder running down her back. There was nothing here, she just had to be safe. Her boots set down on the pavement. Now she was fully exposed, and the stairs meant she had no easy way to get back to safety. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and so the sun’s harsh light hit her and everything around her unfiltered, but the bright light only served to deepen the shadows that existed, and turned doorways and windows into rectangular cut-outs of void. Strangely, smells one would expect from heated stones and roads were completely absent today. Every step thundered in her ears as she crossed the abandoned street. She half expected to see a doppelganger of hers step out of a building on the other side. Of course nobody came, but it didn’t stop her from scanning every window she saw for movement that just didn’t happen.
She found some solace in a less wide open alleyway between the office blocks. Finally she had shade. Emily leaned against a wall once it occurred to her that she didn’t have a goal. Ambling about aimlessly was a sure way to eventually find something she didn’t want to find and be unprepared to deal with it. What were the destinations she knew in this city? Pushing a certain something all the way to the back of her mind, there wasn’t much. From her cursory research before making her way here, she remembered the vague direction to a hospital. There was also a hotel, which was probably closer. That would also make for a more comfortable base of operations. She could always get any supplies she needed in exchange for not spending more time than absolutely necessary in the abandoned hospital of an empty city.
Once she exited the alleyway on the opposite side, the aptly named Peak View Hotel was already insight. And unfortunately for Emily, so was its namesake.
Babylon Tower didn’t feature on the skyline. By its very nature it dominated, even completely overshadowed any skyline of any city it would be placed within. The base alone took up what would otherwise have been multiple city blocks. Foundations below that clasped into bedrock, invisible from the surface. Both were more than necessary. A building, that was the stipulation. Creating a pole one kilometer tall wouldn’t have done it. All the way, until it reached the kilometer above ground level, the building required an interior and floors that one could access. From its base, the Tower first narrowed slowly, but close to the top there was a ring-shaped section enlarged and fortified. This also took the view of the peak away from anybody who stood underneath, but this laboratory space had been granted in exchange for generous financial backing for the entire project.
Emily knew some of this, but at this point in time she didn’t care. Her eyes were wide open as she stared up past Project Babylon, into where the sky should have been. Her brain refused to process the signals the eyes sent it, because they just didn’t make any sense at all. Her hands grasped a nearby streetlight for support, which was good, because that was the moment that reality fully snapped, wiping out any sense of gravity along with it.