by the desert wind.
District 1 is located at the southwestern tip of Omega Blocks; from it, the large hole of the border highway and the cement townships of Autostrada can be seen.
The man that died this morning lived here, on the sixth floor, in apartment 6.
They walk with rapid steps across the sandy floor of the lobby, their footsteps echoing in the enormous concrete cube.
The sand is like a liquid—it seeks to infiltrate every place it possibly can, and when confronted with a mass it cannot flow into or around, it piles up like reservoir water against a dam. Thus here, as well as at the edges of the deserts and all throughout Mohawk Territory, the dunes are gathering around obstacles both natural and artificial—buttes, mesas, buildings, ruins, and garbage and slag heaps.
Junkville is half encircled by waves of sand, like a dusty sea whose tides are dictated by the Midwestern simoons.
Moreover, the desert is a veritable topological-combat strategist. Not only does it advance forward, pushed by the dominant winds, but it executes “flea jumps” during storms or when it is caught up in a rising current. It settles dozens, even hundreds, of kilometers away from its original resting place, and sometimes, when the local conditions are right, it masses in place to form a sort of anti-oasis, a beachhead of moving sand in a semiarid region heretofore protected from the ocean of silica. Thus the Territory of Grand Junction, like the entire ex–state of New York, is dotted with microdeserts that form the front line of an army of sand moving in from northern Ohio.
There is an analogy to be made between this storm of sand from southern Pennsylvania and what is happening, invisibly, in the Territory, he tells himself. The storm causes the desert to advance a few meters more into the state of New York; it deploys miniature armadas of silica throughout the Territory, continuing its scouting work, breaking the battlefield down into a collection of microdeserts that will eventually, little by little, attach themselves to one another like semisolid lakes connected by other lakes of sand deposited by an aerial tsunami in passing.
Death, in Grand Junction as in the rest of the world, strikes in a manner similar to that of these desert storms. It is a sort of front that advances and destroys, slowly but surely, all human life in its path. And it also has its “parachutists,” which take up positions at the rear, attacking where it is most unexpected, and in ways impossible to predict.
Death is analogous, now, to this endlessly expanding desert. Death has become a strategist; no longer content with piling up corpses on the field of battle, it conducts operations down to the smallest detail. Generalissimo Muerte. Feldmarschall Tod. Major General Death.
Here in Omega Blocks, the configuration of space possesses its own specificity, as does each zone in the Territory. In order to withstand tornadoes and storms, the inhabitants of this region have abandoned the top floors, where all the windows are now broken, the apartment blocks saturated with sand flying in from all directions. To avoid problems related to the proximity of peripheral dunes or sand whirled into flurries by “naturally” created wind tunnels occurring between the buildings in their monoclonal verticality, various local clans have bought up the lower and middle floors—entire buildings between floors 4 or 5 and floors 12 or 13.
Death is astonishingly similar to the desert in an especially formal way, Yuri thinks. Not because it “destroys life”—all life forms, including man, adapt very well to their ecology—but the death of the Metastructure, that global evolution system turned global devolution system, seems itself like a
completed
form of the desert. Like a liquid, it is penetrating every orifice of this reality already largely eaten away by the catastrophic End of the machines, de-mechanized though it has become a co-mechanical prosthesis of the
District 1 is located at the southwestern tip of Omega Blocks; from it, the large hole of the border highway and the cement townships of Autostrada can be seen.
The man that died this morning lived here, on the sixth floor, in apartment 6.
They walk with rapid steps across the sandy floor of the lobby, their footsteps echoing in the enormous concrete cube.
The sand is like a liquid—it seeks to infiltrate every place it possibly can, and when confronted with a mass it cannot flow into or around, it piles up like reservoir water against a dam. Thus here, as well as at the edges of the deserts and all throughout Mohawk Territory, the dunes are gathering around obstacles both natural and artificial—buttes, mesas, buildings, ruins, and garbage and slag heaps.
Junkville is half encircled by waves of sand, like a dusty sea whose tides are dictated by the Midwestern simoons.
Moreover, the desert is a veritable topological-combat strategist. Not only does it advance forward, pushed by the dominant winds, but it executes “flea jumps” during storms or when it is caught up in a rising current. It settles dozens, even hundreds, of kilometers away from its original resting place, and sometimes, when the local conditions are right, it masses in place to form a sort of anti-oasis, a beachhead of moving sand in a semiarid region heretofore protected from the ocean of silica. Thus the Territory of Grand Junction, like the entire ex–state of New York, is dotted with microdeserts that form the front line of an army of sand moving in from northern Ohio.
There is an analogy to be made between this storm of sand from southern Pennsylvania and what is happening, invisibly, in the Territory, he tells himself. The storm causes the desert to advance a few meters more into the state of New York; it deploys miniature armadas of silica throughout the Territory, continuing its scouting work, breaking the battlefield down into a collection of microdeserts that will eventually, little by little, attach themselves to one another like semisolid lakes connected by other lakes of sand deposited by an aerial tsunami in passing.
Death, in Grand Junction as in the rest of the world, strikes in a manner similar to that of these desert storms. It is a sort of front that advances and destroys, slowly but surely, all human life in its path. And it also has its “parachutists,” which take up positions at the rear, attacking where it is most unexpected, and in ways impossible to predict.
Death is analogous, now, to this endlessly expanding desert. Death has become a strategist; no longer content with piling up corpses on the field of battle, it conducts operations down to the smallest detail. Generalissimo Muerte. Feldmarschall Tod. Major General Death.
Here in Omega Blocks, the configuration of space possesses its own specificity, as does each zone in the Territory. In order to withstand tornadoes and storms, the inhabitants of this region have abandoned the top floors, where all the windows are now broken, the apartment blocks saturated with sand flying in from all directions. To avoid problems related to the proximity of peripheral dunes or sand whirled into flurries by “naturally” created wind tunnels occurring between the buildings in their monoclonal verticality, various local clans have bought up the lower and middle floors—entire buildings between floors 4 or 5 and floors 12 or 13.
Death is astonishingly similar to the desert in an especially formal way, Yuri thinks. Not because it “destroys life”—all life forms, including man, adapt very well to their ecology—but the death of the Metastructure, that global evolution system turned global devolution system, seems itself like a
completed
form of the desert. Like a liquid, it is penetrating every orifice of this reality already largely eaten away by the catastrophic End of the machines, de-mechanized though it has become a co-mechanical prosthesis of the
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