The World of Myth Magazine

Aeolia City covered an area of just over a hundred square miles, and it smelled clean. Hugo Lewis sat at an oak desk, the window to his left overlooking the northwest quadrant, the nicest part of town. The buildings that rose beyond the glass pane shine like sterling silver in the afternoon sun. In one hand, a tablet detailed current crop harvests, in the other, a glass of eighteen-year scotch, over half his own age. The horizon beyond the city limits was painted entirely by blooming crops and passed by as the entire city moved. Home was characterized by moving air.

No one knew why earthquakes increased in both frequency and intensity in the latter half of the twenty-second century. The cities on fault lines were the first sources of major casualties, with state and local governments refusing to evacuate preemptively even as it became clear that any city near a fault zone would inevitably be struck. The political fallout might even have been considerable if elections were still sound at that point in time. After tens of millions of deaths, however, and decades of scientific development and international efforts to create the infrastructure, new cities were constructed, designed to withstand the quakes. Aeolia City was one of many such super-cities in the world, each of which wandered along the maglev rails that spiderwebbed across six continents and the oceans, hovering above land devoted entirely to growing crops for the increasing populations crammed into the moving metropolises.

There had been initial attempts to renovate existing cities, most notably in East-Asia, where countless measures were taken to salvage existing infrastructure by installing underground seismic dispersion networks. For a time, these systems worked, allowing several large cities to withstand quakes that would have otherwise reduced them to rubble. As the years went on, however, and the earthquakes grew stronger, these measures proved to be inadequate. By 2170, the general consensus became that only by removing cities from the ground entirely could human populations continue to exist in their current numbers. Less than a century later, in 2245, the first of many floating cities, Atlantis, had its maiden voyage upon the maglevs across Europe.

Hugo was born that very year in a small rural town on the northeastern coast of North America. His father was a bartender, and his mother was a seismologist who had been on the committee that generated projections for casualties as the floating cities went into production. His parents lived on the other side of Aeolia, a three-hour commute if you used the bus, and were in their sixties. They never talked.

"Did you get the new report?" A sharply dressed woman barged into the room, she had dark skin, buzzed hair, and two cups of steaming coffee.

"No, what report?" Hugo asked, not bothering to hide the glass of scotch.

"Our projected earnings from the wheat crop have been increased by %17. Looks like we'll be getting a bonus after all," she slid onto the edge of the desk.

"We get bonuses?"

"No." She handed Hugo one of the coffees. He put down his scotch.

"Delilah, you're—"

"Delightful," she finished Hugo's sentence.

"Sometimes I forget I work for you," Hugo laughed, taking a sip of coffee.

"Because women can only be secretaries?"

Hugo rolled his eyes.

"We'll be able to see the ocean in a few days," Hugo said, setting the coffee down next to his scotch.

Aeolia moved at over 20mph, a speed that allowed for a constant breeze to blow through the city and, in the summer months, kept the entirety of Aeolia at a comfortable temperature. The other floating cities navigated on timed circuits, travelling anywhere between 5-30mph, depending on the season, latitude, and their relative positions to one another. The motion couldn't be detected by those living in the city limits outside of the light breeze that, by the time it reached Hugo's building, was little more than a whisper.

"So, dinner tonight?" Delilah asked.

"Yeah, double-date with my mom and dad," Hugo joked.

"How enticing. So, I have my interview for the Wing Manager position coming up tomorrow, I was hoping we could, like, prematurely celebrate at The Mariana?" Delilah asked in a I-know-you-can't-afford-this-but-I'll-buy tone. It was, after all, in the northwest quadrant.

"Never been there before, but first time for everything. Has it moved, or still in the same place it's always been?"

"Same place. Not everything changes, Hugo." She smiled.

Delilah left the office to attend to work matters, while Hugo remained at the desk, oscillating his sips between the coffee and scotch. It settled clumsily in his stomach with an unpleasant, acidic warmth that he could instantly alleviate with a pill but chose not to. He checked the reports on crop projections, but no smile or flash of delight appeared on his face. It was all business, just business, an infinitesimal facet of his life, and he worked tirelessly to keep it that way.

Becoming Wing Manager would make Delilah one of the most important figures in Aeolia, but he felt that would only bolster their relationship. They functioned on the dichotomy, her workaholism and his indifference. It was compression and decompression. His job was just over entry level, high enough to get an office, but not high enough to afford the scotch, which was from her. It was allowed, of course, to have a drink or two while on the clock, so long as no indicators could be found to suggest that the habit was in any way incumbering job performance. People didn't get fired in Aeolia; nobody would tolerate destitution.

Hugo left the office that evening, leaving two empty cups on his desk for himself to wash in the morning. He'd clocked in eight hours, worked for perhaps three, and had taken liberties on the duration of his lunch break. The elevator ride down was long, consisting of dozens of stops for other leaving workers that eventually sandwiched Hugo against the controls. When they reached the ground floor, the elevator opened to reveal a busy lobby flooded with shuffling workers. On the other side of the immaculate glade was an arcade of swinging and revolving doors trying to accommodate the volume.

When he stepped outside the building, he was greeted by the slightest of breezes, and the ambient insanity of five o'clock traffic going from one place to another. It was true that most Aeolia residents didn't have cars, that most of them walked or took the bus for transport. It was also true that when you have hundreds of thousands of people leaving work at the same time, that none of that mattered. His apartment was just across the street on the eastern side of the building, poised on the fourth floor of a shiny building that looked like a filing cabinet. He walked across the street and through the lobby, nodding at the front desk's three employees as they flashed their smiles. At least the elevator was quick.

There was no time to waste the moment he entered his own apartment. The shower water came out as hot as he wanted the moment it turned on, perks of paying the extra premium fee on his water bill. He hopped in, lathering himself with a shampoo and conditioner and body-wash all-in-one that actually worked. The Cave Man pumice stone felt good across his skin, especially when coupled with the Alpha Wolf skin moisturizer that Delilah had gotten him as joke. He left the shower, allowing the floor and ceiling fans to blow dry him in a matter of seconds before wrapping himself in a thick cotton bathrobe.

The bathroom led into a small kitchen he never used, but at the opposite end, separated only by a change in flooring, was a cozier than hell living area complete with an artificial fake fireplace that he hoped to show Delilah someday.

He changed into a pair of tan corduroy pants, which had made a comeback, and a long sleeve corduroy shirt that had a navy-blue color that drew the eyes. His hair looked good, slicked back, and while his beard needed a trim there wasn't time for such a thing. Hugo left his apartment, smelling like an herbal-scented neolithic man and looking like he'd never spent a day outside of the city. Which he hadn't, in spite of traveling the entire continent hundreds of times, done.

The bus ride to the western side of town that he'd always looked over from his office took almost an hour but given that he'd spent three years flirting with Delilah before getting a date and six months before getting a second date, and things were now getting serious he didn't mind. It was quiet, with nobody possessing either the energy or the interest to say a word to one another. They would, after all, probably never see one another again once the bus stopped moving. The sole redeeming quality about the ride was the clear roof, the glimpse into the night sky that, in spite of being dampened by the ambient lights of the city, still possessed a stagnant, cosmic magnificence.

One of Hugo's symptoms of living in a big city had always been his feelings of insignificance. Those feelings were intensified by those large cities acting as transient bodies that swept across the continents, with no real tether to regard as home. Even Hugo's apartment, where he'd stayed for several years at that point, felt like little more than a pressurized cabin. The sky, however, offered a different wavelength, an understanding poignant feeling of temporaneous life that didn't feel degrading or belittling. He stared at it the entire way, until the small, turquoise neon of The Mariana's sign flamed over the road and the bus came to a stop for all the faceless apparitions to disappear.

Hugo stepped off the bus, nodding to the driver who said nothing in return. He was early, and the hostess immediately inside the restaurant wore a bright red dress with a floral arrangement where a pen pocket would normally be. The entire outfit appeared to have been designed to encourage Hugo to reassess his corduroy, but she greeted him with an intense smile that signified that she was either really happy to see him, or very good at faking it.

"Two," Hugo said, as a sudden rocking sent him stumbling forwards and nearly into the hostess's chest.

"What was that?" She asked, grabbing menus, and acknowledging the sensation by word alone.

"No idea maybe had a skip on the tracks. Sometimes the maglev gets interrupted by the quakes," Hugo replied, adjusting his shirt collar as if it had been jostled by the shock.

"Would you prefer indoor or outdoor seating?"

"Outdoor, facing the world, if possible."

The hostess nodded and smiled, walking with Hugo in tow as they shuffled through the busy restaurant. It was one of the few places where real meat was still served, with the cattle and chickens raised on the rooftops above with some thirty acres of grassland. Most of the other roofs in Aeolia were covered in solar panels or wind turbines, both of which had a near infinite supply of energy from the movement of the city to the long summer days.

They went through a wooden door and onto a balcony that hung off the side of the city itself, with a glass floor that looked down at the shifting terrain below. It was late evening, and the sun was beginning to settle over the hills that passed in the distance. The wind was only slight, buffered by a transparent wall that allowed only a fraction of it to pass through.

"Go ahead and bring a bottle of red, something dry," Hugo said, wondering how much of the tab he would be responsible for. "Oh, uh, and thank you."

"You're welcome," the hostess replied. "I'll have it sent right out."

Hugo sat alone for several minutes, watching as the world passed. A server returned with a bottle of wine and two glasses, and only a few seconds later Delilah emerged, wearing a long white dress and a matching bandana wound tightly around her buzzed head. She sat at the table while the server finished pouring the wine.

"Thank you," she nodded. "Good evening, Hugo."

"I hope you like this bottle."

"It's wine, of course I'll like it."

Hugo shrugged, taking a sip from his glass. It was dry, with dark-cherry notes. Part of him wished he was already drunk, at least then his nerves wouldn't be firing off left and right. Even if he screwed up, maybe he wouldn't care until the next day and even then maybe she'd just attribute it to him being drunk altogether and maybe forgive him and maybe he should just stop thinking about those things.

"Did you feel that bump earlier? Must've been a blip in the track." Delilah took a sip, giving a subdued smile at the taste.

"Yeah, haven't had one of those in a while. I'm sure we'll get briefed at work tomorrow. Investors always do crazy things whenever there's a bump, like it's the end of the world or something."

"The world ended a long time ago," she replied.

"Yeah, I guess so. I mean, do you ever feel like you don't have a home? I mean, we always move, and the city never changes but it's like I'm, I'm not even tethered to it."

"It's called the Transient Phenomenon, it's a psychology term. This is the part where I reach over the table, hold your hand, and tell you that you're not alone," Delilah said with a laugh.

"Can you imagine having a yard? I mean a real one, not the little eighth acres the billionaires have in the cities. I'm talking twenty acres with trees and a littler stream that runs through it. Did you know that used to be common? A hundred years ago we called those people poor. You had to have money to live in the city. Something like this would've been for the one percent."

Hugo looked down to see that he'd already guzzled his entire glass of wine without noticing. Delilah refilled it and gestured at the server to bring them another.

"And two of your best entrées!" Hugo declared, giving the server a thumbs up just before they disappeared through the wooden door.

"You realize I'm paying for all of this, right?"

"Yeah, otherwise we'd be eating crackers and canned cheese."

"That's a fair point."

The server returned with another bottle of wine, a slightly brighter, more vibrant red than the last.

"Bartender's recommendation," he said, then disappeared again through the door.

"He forgot to uncork it," Hugo said.

"It doesn't have a cork. It's one of those smoke bubble ones," Delilah replied, pointing at a small, smokey orb that floated at the lip of the bottle.

"What the hell," Hugo grabbed the bottle.

"Don't pop it yet," Delilah cautioned, and he set it back down.

"How does this even work?"

"They open a bottle and then use a little device to fill the bottles with smoke and then seal it using a robust bubble."

"Well, that's, uh, different."

The moment they finished the first bottle, Delilah took one of her long nails and gently plunged it through the bubble, dispersing the trapped smoke into and around the bottle while Hugo looked on like a starstruck child. The sun set as their entrées arrived, a thick brisket with potatoes and asparagus, all grown hundreds of feet above on the rooftop. It was, Hugo thought, the best dinner he'd ever had, in spite of all the food and attraction being placed in his periphery by the woman seated across from him.

"So, think you'll get the promotion?" He asked.

"I'm a shoe-in. The whole thing feels like a formality, like they're pretending to go through the process just to make it look more democratic."

"What's more democratic than being the best for the job and getting the job?"

"There hasn't been an election for thirty years."

"There weren't any good candidates long before that."

"You like talking politics?" Delilah asked.

"Not really." Hugo finished pouring the last of the smoked wine.

"What are we going to do?"

"You mean dating or the world at large?" He swirled the glass, watching the smoke lap away from it.

"The world at large. Keep the floating cities until the quakes stop if they ever do. Why?"

Hugo took a moment to think about his answer, opting to drink the remainder of his glass of wine before opening his mouth. "I just want to stay still for once."

They talked long after the plates and bottles had been taken away, still sitting at the table as the night sky enveloped everything in a concrete darkness. The city moved along, but the wind couldn't be heard, and the stars seemed to stay in their positions as Hugo and Delilah looked up at them. He didn't know what he wanted, out of life, out of his job, or even out of what seemed to be a budding relationship. He was tired of the transience, of the shifting, moving world and the lack of stewardship. Delilah stood up, wandering to the railing at the edge of the restaurant that overlooked the world, and Hugo followed.

"Feel that?" She asked.

Hugo stood next to her but couldn't sense the wind or anything else in the air above his own intensifying drunkenness.

"No, what is it?"

"I think we stopped moving."

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