Our metal paradise
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original mircrofiction
and macrophotos
 - by @d-pend - 
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Our metal paradise

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Atop a ninety-three story highrise, on the forbidden robotic maintenance roof, a man grips the railing. The sky is splashed with rust; the mechanical city gleams. "How beautiful is the world we dream," said the man aloud to no one. Though ground and sky teemed with transport units hovering through various vacuum-tubes or gliding through air, there was practically no sound save the lonely wind's howl through the precise architecture.

As far as the eye could see, the planet was clothed in metal. Otherworldly reflections jumped between sectors as the daylight was mindfully funneled — equally distributed everywhere by the chameleon-shifting of the metal's hue. Rainbow-light interference seemed to banter with strange humor. The man chuckled for no apparent reason, then stifled his amusement abruptly. From behind his left shoulder a swarm of small, capsule-shaped drones passed with an effortless glide and plunged into the quiescent abyss below.

The insistent sunrays played about the man's features. His tan skin and orange-brown hair made him seem a mere foreshadowing of the sunset to come. Though the lines of his countenance might have been striking in some other setting, here, at the top of everything, he appeared more as some malignant outgrowth on the building's scalp. An intuition caused him to turn around — or perhaps it was the subtle darkening at his vision's periphery. An aperture opened, and a second man appeared.

An old man with dark-brown skin and a bright, white beard strode confidently towards the edge of the railing. Neither man looked at the other, but both surveyed the complex juttings of metal that constituted their motherland. "Indeed, our home is the epitome of nature's perfection — beauty in its most quintessential form," asserted the older man. "The oppression of such beauty causes us to dream it, in order that we may have the pleasure to destroy it."

A moment of silence passed, and the solar orb edged closer to its imminent departure beyond the horizon. In the warm gold of sunset, the two simultaneously turned towards each other. From the roof below their feet gorgeously patterned with embossed hexagonal geometries, a six-pointed star of bluish metal began to rise in a pillar between them. The same dark aperture as before yawned, and four robed figures made their way in slow deliberation towards the star-shaped pillar at the edge of the building.

Each stood at a point of the hexagram and closed their eyes. Thin, iridescent tendrils emerged from every side of the pillar and attached to the middle of six foreheads. Overhead, thin wisps of cloud began to coalesce into a slow cyclone about the center of the device. A long moment died away before vivid plasma coils began to form undulating lines between the ears of the six.

Sparks of every color began cascading from their closed lips that caused ripples of light to streak between the geometric circuitry of the roof beneath them. All the words they had ever uttered were writing themselves at their feet and filling transparent sheaths that rose like windblown paper when full of the curvaceous script. These clear scrolls with writing of plasma billowed into the cloud-funnel above until it formed a continuous grid.

With the sound of a world's beginning, an enormous laser blasted through the sky, cutting through the encroaching purple of night's approach. Every facet of the city reflected this livid saber of light, artificially pinkening the sky with a bright haze that clung around the endless stretch of buildings. The column was so blinding that the six were bleached the pure white-orange of molten metal — and in a clap of thunder they vanished and the city went black.

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writing and images created by Daniel Pendergraft
— and published on-chain on April 23, 2020 —
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