12 April, 2011

[SFAP] Chapter 2:12

This is the twelfth section of the second chapter of Sonnets from a Proton. The novel starts here.
The next section is here.

Water flooded out into the lake. Was it rock or metal that formed the bottom of the lake, Martin wasn’t sure, but he could with his binoculars see the torrents filling the lakes; perfect bowls of mechanical construction and soon he’d be there amongst it.
For now he was stuck behind this glass, what was the wall had now been lowered down to approximate the horizontal. Who was he kidding, it was the horizontal, it’s just the horizontal was visible as constantly shifting here for that it slowly arced up into the distance to terminate at the new pylon. Apparently construction of yet another plate had begun at this new pylon although there would probably be less of a rush this time. Half of humanity had been crammed into a few hundred thousand kilometres of space. Well surface space, when you counted the hundreds of floors below the original plate then humanity had more city space in this one structure than the whole of Earth had suffered before. Half of humanity had fit in this structure before this vast extension had occurred, what awaited next as the Habitat continued to build itself? Many had stayed on Earth because they loved the large open spaces and hated cities. Soon the Habitat would have land enough to provide that and more was being built all the time. Would the rest of humanity leave its home for up here and what would happen to Earth after that? This was a structure seemingly built for humans and giving them all they needed. And there ahead of him was a new plate ten maybe twenty times the size of the previous one and he knew there was another plate identical to this one at the opposite side of original plate. Over five hundred thousand square kilometres of metropolis topped by the solar system’s largest park now had probably fifty times the space it had before.
The strongest words and feelings of awe and power Martin had always reserved for the forces of nature. A dam bursting and eradicating valleys, a tsunami decimating entire countries, earthquakes levelling and smashing cities, yet he’d never felt quite this insignificant before; yes all that was to be his, but it was a gift and from no human agent either.

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