Passenger

…and there was the city, that fucking city, laid out like a string of fat, glittering pearls in the darkness of mankind. Perfectly aligned, perfectly designed, grid-like and heavenly mathematical, this city that looked so dazzling bright. All the scum, all the dirt, the derelicts, tramps, well-dressed reptiles, and whores had been washed away by a simple act of distance. What had seemed so distasteful from a dog’s sight, all covered in vomit and roaming the streets for days with a half-decayed belly and homicidal thoughts, now contained a primitive, inhuman beauty. From the eye of the sun, god had imposed a kind of incomprehensible order atop the writhing humanity of the city, those fat pearls quivering like a galaxy, like a circuit board, humming in perfect alignment through streets and buildings, towers and castles, homesteads, brownstones, and fortresses. It throbbed and it moved like sculpture, it danced while steady perfectly still, it was completing a task, a thousand trillion computation a second, each person a little electron zooming on its way to complete some heavenly circuit it had absolutely no idea about. Each little car zooming along covered in viscous blood and racing to return to the heart, to pick up more oxygen so this perfect construct, this heavenly grid, this living mathematical organism could fill its lungs again, so it could breath and consume and continue to live, so it could keep acting out the puny, oblivious lives and tiny horrors that existed down, way down, at that same old familiar street corner that looked so ugly each and every day.