Zone C -- Megacity One

[Corporal Light]

He was getting the feeling he had unintentionally entered the seediest part of the city. It certainly wouldn’t have been the first time he had stumbled across that sort of thing while living in the metropolises of the colonies. He once had to ask for directions to a CEC corporate building from  the owner of a strip club back on the New Horizon Colonies, a situation he had made a point to try not to get into after that ordeal. And yet, here he was, stumbling his way through the dusty ruins of a 1950s capitol city, and now traversing its underbelly. It was either that, or the classy exterior that had pervaded everything up until that moment was merely a guise for what the city was truly like within.

The skyscrapers that had been small, seemingly miniscule things that served only as paint to the background of the abandoned city had increased exponentially in size until they stood, towering over him at every turn. The gas stations and warehouses had been replaced with apartments and offices of various sizes, each with the flair and pizzazz of a washed-out, grey shoebox. The graffiti that vandalized the alleyways had become more frequent and, much to Isaac’s distress, more evangelical in nature, spouting off quotes from several different religious scriptures, most of which he had never even heard of before. He passed by neon signs detailing pictures for bars and the legs of scantily-clad women hung over pubs and strip clubs. He considered checking them out, if only to see what a strip club from the 1900s actually looked like back in the day, but quickly decided it would just be a waste of his time.

Yet despite it all, he just couldn’t get over the silence. He should have been hearing the sound of a saxophone blaring in the streets, the faint pounding of kick drums and club beats from the nightclubs, the rhythmic taps of the citizens as they went about their daily lives. That’s how literally every history book described life back then: a day full of busy work, and a night full of fun.

Perhaps it was less history and more a result of him getting overly-excited about something as mundane as a car, or a pub, or the footsteps of the crowd on commute. It was like space, in a sense: it was completely outside human control, perception, or any real “knowledge.” All humans had were relics, treasures from the past with no real context to them aside from the context we gave to them. The picture formed in the process could have been entirely wrong, but no human could ever be sure. But it wasn’t just that. At least space had meaning. It was the void ships used to travel from planet to planet. The past, however, had no inherent meaning to it, no real “value” to it that could be measured. It relied on human’s thirst for knowledge, their natural curiosity, to be significant in the face of the future, of ambition. Without that, it meant nothing, and could be forgotten with ease.

Most past things could, anyway.

He brushed the thought out of his mind and continued on.

Team Space Man (Isaac) -- Moving from C20 to C21