litlinks 2021

The Heart in the City

by Daniel Kipling, Namadgi School

I always knew to fear the deep city. This was not from any of my own experience, but instead from the smog I could see in the sky or the rasping of distant machines. I knew that there were strange things in the deep city. Things that did not care about my wife and son. I always assumed I was safe from those things. But I didn’t know just how hungry they were.

First I saw it in the papers. Genius Industrialist Damian Astvoltn Wants New Workers, the headlines exclaimed. Below was a picture of a smiling man with dead eyes. The pay was good, and we needed money. I tried to put it off. Did my best to find a local job, but they had all been moved to the city. It was inevitable that I would get on the great black trains that sped me away from everything I knew. It was then on that train I first felt that sense of inevitability in my gut. The circumstances of my life had led me to the place I dreaded most. And there was no way for me to deny the factory.

I walked down a long street in the depths of the city. Tall concrete buildings hemmed me in on all sides. From out of those buildings came the people of the city. They were not like me; these people were born and bred in the city. Their faces were set hard, and their eyes were cold. The more I looked at them the more I felt like a stranger. Was that blood dripping from that man’s nose or was it oil? Was that woman’s leg broken or was it malfunctioning? I didn’t have much time to contemplate these things before an enormous iron gate loomed over me. Beyond that threshold stood the great altar of pipes and cogs. It was a mess of belching furnaces and whirring production lines, of churning pistons and screaming presses. It was the factory. In its shadow stood the foreman. He was clad in a big brown overcoat that could not quite hide the scuttling things. Clutched in his skeletal hand was a loudspeaker from which orders spewed. “Groups A and B, you’re on refining,” he barked, “and new guy, you’re on extraction.”

Then we were shepherded into the factory. As I stepped through that iron gate, the feeling of inevitability transformed into a mounting dread. I didn’t want to step through the door, but I had a family to support and a life to uphold. Most of the other workers started to force dead ore into furnaces or hammered away at twisting machine parts. But that was not the fate I was destined for. Me and a few others walked to a steel lift that was suspended above a great hole in the ground. I knew then that this was to be my ultimate fate.

It’s strange how I always assumed the deeper you went, the colder and quieter things would become. It’s impossible to know how long I was in that lift. We just went down, and down, and down. The walls of the hole appeared wet and sticky. What were they covered in? Was it oil? No, oil was not red. There was a sound. It was a distancing booming sound, like far off thunder. Eventually, the elevator stopped its descent. Disembarking we walked out into a vast tunnel. The not-oil covered the floor. Its walls were warm pink stone and were shot through with bones of pure iron. That pounding sound could be heard off in the distance. The heat was sweltering in the tunnel and it made our journey hard as we moved towards our final goal.

As our march neared its end, the tunnel expanded into a cavern and the booming sound intensified. I stumbled into the cave, eyes watering and head throbbing. Noting all my compatriots were staring at something above my head, I looked up and saw it! This thing would dwarf the entire city. A mass of pulsating flesh and writhing cartilage. It was the heart of the city, the core of the world’s industry, and every one of its spasms sounded like a thousand furnaces or a million of cogs. I fell to my knees because this was the source of everything, all the world’s products and industry, and compared to that, I was an ant.

Finally, I surrendered to the city and let myself be overcome.

Meanwhile Damian Astvoltn sits in his cold dead mansion. He hears the factory give a satisfied rumble from his cocoon of machinery. He knows that another round of manufacturing has begun. The city will keep producing and consuming, even after all the parts have been broken down and fed to the factory.