Rio de Sol
The sun wilted as if it would be the last time it ever descended over Rio de Sol. The final magnificent arc of a dying race embittered until the end. He blinked two long gawping gazes at the red tendrils seemingly spitting out deep from the belly of the river itself. It would rise again tomorrow; it always did.
John laced his shoes tight- the trick was not to tie two bows but to tie one well. Why did you need a backup when you put sufficient effort into the original? His quads wriggled into life, and his calves strained against the tension of the rust-flecked chain. He was a packet boy. Destined to deliver mail to those who could buy every branch of his family tree down to the roots without a second thought. Cars, trains, bicycles, and the new scooters zoomed down the highway. The night shift. Not that a man could tell. Bright fluorescent overlay lights illuminated the roads with clinical and sterile light. He would cycle for hours each evening. One day, he wanted a scooter. But he would not go out like old man Zephyr.
Zephyr had saved his entire life for a scooter. Beautiful pieces of machinery. They hoovered several inches off the ground and screamed as they went. New propulsion tech rolled out by Phantom Labs- engineering at its finest. Each one had a dual-threaded engine, but ample resources demanded ample abilities. Old man Zephyr was too old to handle the scooter and had crashed it the same day he bought it, flying down Kamino Avenue. A miser’s death. Nobody there. Nothing romantic. An overshoot on the throttle and a dismal stain on the tarmac mopped up in less than three minutes by road maintenance.
He craved those late nights. Flying down the avenues existing in a world somehow more pure than the outside. Nobody had a creed on the road. Merely an unavoidable and mandatory segment of going from one place to another that made no distinction. Nobody fought; everybody accepted. There is a great equalizer in shared misery, and the queue was even longer this evening than it had been the night before. Downtown or Jito, as people had started calling it, was a hotspot for anybody who could rub half a cent together, and they descended on this squalid strip with a vengeance each evening. What had once been boarded houses and disused factories had become a booming hub of escapism. Holograms invited anybody in off the street; the only color that mattered was the color green. Traffic would back up for hours, and John, try as he might to weave in and out of the traffic when he arrived at the toll bridge, was inevitably pushed back to repeat the dance again.
Slick with sweat, he handed over his last packet and left the avenues to go home via what they called the ‘old roads.’ Away from the glaring order, automation, and frankly, in John’s mind, fascist nature of the tolls and avenues, these streets allowed any man to travel at any pace. But for all the freedom they offered, they existed in janky intervals, and going from one set to the next was quasi-impossible without dint of imagination. He saw the familiar curve of Rupert’s neck. He sat on the curb, knees upright, forearms laced over his thighs, and seemingly muttering to himself. He always looked out of place against the fading brickwork, cracked paving stones, and stillness of the early morning. John detected a vibration coming from Rupert’s head- the same as always- and ventured it was actually giving out heat when he got closer. Two great bulbous eyes looked up and blinked in slow consternation before he jumped up. His frame like a rope snapped taught under a mighty payload and beelined directly to his friend.
‘I think I have come up with a solution,’ Rupert said, jabbing some unknown foe.
‘Solution for what,’ John replied.
‘These roads are all single-threaded, a great pile of congestion, nothing more. Imagine if things flowed freely. Like they really moved.’
John grunted in reply. He stared at Rupert, not as if the man had said something unintelligible but rather that he was an expert in idiots and presented right before him was a species he had never come across. Rupert enjoyed his company. An straightforward man with desires caged by the poverty that had hemmed in his ability to see beyond anything except taking odds and ends from point A to point B. That was not essentially a bad thing he mused to himself. As John's sweaty figure collapsed on the curb beside him, he felt an enormous gap echo between them.
In his later years it was only with immense difficulty that he could call that face to mind. Its flat nose, the honest groove of the cheek, and the long lines etched into the face. Labor made the man and fashioned him in the same stroke. He had been appointed as a city architect, and great funds and subsidies had rolled his way on the promises of a new city design. Something that reflected the needs of a modern civilization. No more building from wonky foundations he had boomed in his addresses. We start today. A tabula rasa, a clean and honest foundation for a greater leap upwards. We all gentlemen feel the stride of progress, and I promise to draw it into this world. He had the habit of accentuating the words stride of progress. His palm perpendicular to the ground and swooshing down. And he had delivered. He observed the city. It whirred and hummed below. He had executed his mission faithfully.
Teasingly he had gifted the workings of the city a name. He had named the city's fabric after the most striking feature of his childhood town. To himself and not another soul he called it the Sol City Machine. Each component hummed and whirred below, millions of individual units thriving in utter chaos or swimmingly along perfectly oiled highways depending on how well a man tuned his ear. It existed as one giant organic brain, each subway station routed via maps of desire, the plumbing constructed far beyond the city’s current demand, the parks places of intrigue, the high-rise apartments staggered in piecemeal fashion affording each the best view of the city. His painstaking work at beating out rhythm among the chaos and aligning seemingly foreign objects and events gave him the most striking vision that the city almost communicated its state at the speed of light. Inhabitants and infrastructure had become one. Keen to stoop or jump when demanded. A description of single-threaded had always escaped Rupert, and the notion existed with a violence in his head and his perception, but its definition fell and hung loose in the air like a drowned pigeon. But what he saw. It was multi-threaded.
He laughed aloud. The hollow reverberation of his voice petered out into the concrete shell open plan. He had seen it in a dream. A global city ready to serve millions of everyday people, each desire, whim, and dream shuttled from where it was to where it needed to be at a speed incomprehensible to even to the holder of the dream. It had taken shape. And he realized. The steady tug of el Rio de Sol had been the proud owner of parallel execution channels, the undercurrent ferrying everything too heavy or dirty to be seen by society, and the top current flowing unobstructed in the opposite fashion. That great drooping sun descending lazily like the luck of a damned blind and deaf beggar had given birth to this tremendous swollen ideal.
A vision that had come to him. A place with instant communication between desires and wants. Between man, infrastructure, and the other. It trembled on his lips briefly, and then he spoke its true name.
‘‘Solana.’’