Vicious Aliens (continued)

Cycle 15

CYCLE 15

“Trouble with you

Is the trouble with me

Got two good eyes

But we still don't see

Come round the bend

You know it's the end

The fireman screams

And the engine just gleams”

-The Grateful Dead, Casey Jones (surviving fragments)

It’s not easy operating behind a screen, although, in the early 21st century many people found it more comfortable than direct contact with the real world. While the visual display of my SHROUD Suit pointed out environmental hazards; all the dangers in my immediate field of vision and across my peripheral, my body strained under its additional weight and bulkiness. Chains buckled, rotors whirred, and conveyors hummed as we ascended from perch to perch, one structure to another. Sound penetrated the cocoon of my suit even if radiation didn’t. The violent thrashing of gears interrupted the high-tech harmony of my head-up display but I didn’t mind. The early morning sun painted the metal structures around me all kinds of burnt orange and scorched red. The whole scene felt both terrifying and undeniably beautiful. In our pressurized, radiation resistant suits, I imagined we were astronauts walking on the surface of Mars.

The Fab Four and I were traveling from the Upper West Side Division to the Columbus Circus Transport Hub. The area was deserted, the circus had shut down after the summer season and its apocalyptic entertainment zone was now boarded up and abandoned. But that’s a whole other story. From Columbus Circus we had to make the treacherous journey upwards toward Midtown. The entire city was covered in a vast steel skeleton that blanketed the roofs of its buildings and skyscrapers, creating peaks and valleys where none had existed before. The apparatus resting on top of Midtown real estate was the highest and most vertiginous section of this atrium.

Groaning and often moaning, our group trudged onwards to the “basecamp” of New York City’s Mount Everest.