A Tale of Little Cities (Chapter 1) (Patreon)

Dr. Weaver slammed his fist on his workspace desk as he watched the transport vessel open again, still containing the test dummy. Typical. On his tablet, he scratched out Attempt #602, and pulled his calculations back up. Where was he going wrong? Velocity calculations? Trajectory? The weight of the test dummy? The coordinates themselves? All the math had been quadruple and quintuple checked, of course, over the past year and a half of intensive work. It felt useless now to keep checking, yet he did it again, just in case that one glimmer of a hint appeared in his calculations which hadn’t before.

He leaned back in the chair and massaged his balding head. It was pointless, it seemed. According to the figures, he should’ve been capable of transporting the dummy directly to Paris, straight into the vessel he’d rigged at his cousin’s house in the basement: its particles reduced at an atomic level, then transferred through the radio waves of satellites, and finally separated again in the pod.

Yet still it remained here, crushingly, in America. All this time and effort put in, trying to turn the transportation industry upside down with temporary matter reduction and wave transport, and all he could get was a vessel that kept opening to reveal the smugly smiling face of the dummy inside, mocking his failure. It didn’t actually have a smiling face, of course, but Dr. Weaver had learned to imagine one after so many catastrophes of talent.

“Dad?” Laura Weaver called from the top of the basement stairs. The dirty-blonde young woman placed a lithe bare foot down on the first old and rickety step, causing it to creak beneath her slender weight and long, bell-end toes. “Are you coming upstairs for lunch?”

“Not yet, dear,” he replied. “Don’t come down Laura, okay? Your dad’s onto something.” This was a lie, obviously, but he didn’t want his only daughter seeing him in the throes of non-success yet again. She didn’t need that example set for her in life.

“If you say so, Dad,” she shrugged. “After I eat I’m gonna take a shower real quick, then I might head over to Tara’s house to hang out. So I’ll see you later. Love you!”

“Love you too, sweetie,” he said, and rubbed a smudge on his glasses. Back to the old drawing board, he supposed. Looking for a temporary distraction, Dr. Weaver switched on the television and flipped to the news. There was nothing of interest, at least initially, until something caught his eye and gave cause for an eyebrow raise.

“…if you’re just tuning in with us, the photos you’re about to see are real and undoctored,” the news anchor said from behind her desk, straightening her notes. “These pictures were taken by multiple sources from just outside the city limits of Paris, France. Yes, just to be clear, what you’re looking at is the location of Paris, the city of love. Everyone is waiting for word from the Pentagon, of course, but until then, we have to ask that everyone remain calm, especially if you have relatives or friends in the city.”

Images flashed onscreen. Dr. Weaver removed his glasses, just in case what he was seeing was a trick of the light. But it wasn’t. In the prior location of Paris, France on the TV screen was instead a vast and uniform crater covering forty square miles, give or take. The city was completely and utterly vanished, with only a thin haze of mist and fog floating over its former glory.

Well, that was puzzling. Worrisome, in fact. Dr. Weaver immediately began dialing his cousin’s number on his phone, only to receive a busy signal. That was certainly coincidental. Possibly too coincidental. The inventor turned and looked to the dummy lying in the vessel again. Maybe, just maybe, he was looking at the figures too closely and had to examine the entire underlying function of his creation, on the off-chance he’d accidentally designed something with the precise opposite effect he’d intended.

Meanwhile, from not so far away, though it may as well have been across the galaxy for all the good it did, the city of Paris, France was in a state of considerable and understandable upheaval. To begin, an earthquake had ripped through the foundations of the city, toppling the majority of the citizens to their knees. It was just a miracle no major structures came down. Visitors atop the Eiffel Tower felt some of the strongest tremors, and genuinely feared they were about to meet their match if the tower should fall over like a domino, just before the shaking stopped. Louvre workers desperately scurried about, trying to preserve the priceless history and art.

There were now noticeable divots in the earth, as if the hills and topography had abruptly shifted. The whole city was laid in a shallow, oblong bowl, and at the eastern border of town, five distinct crater-shapes scooped beneath the land. And that disaster aside, there were far more troubling and inexplicable factors arising.

The previously cheerful blue sky had abruptly gone dark, like an overcast and cloudy day shrouded in pre-sunset shadows before a hurricane or typhoon. None could decipher what they were looking at. It was as if the entire city was suddenly beneath a storm cell cloud, as the textured white barrier of presumable clouds rose up toward an epicenter, yet then broke away. Directly overhead, then, was a seeming hole in the clouds: an opening not unlike, say, a portal to the darkness of space. Suffice it to say these discoveries created panic in the streets. Prayers were made silently and screamingly alike in homes. Many people sent frantic calls and email attempts, only to find no signals of any kind were functioning, city-wide. Soon the police stations and embassies were flooded with individuals losing their cool, and for good reason.

Off in the distance, as if heard through a tunnel, many in the city started perceiving what was distinctly the echo of falling water. Massive droplets, splattering against hard surfaces as well as soft. Something torrential and biblical in its size, the meteorologists had to estimate that wherever the apparent rainfall was coming from, its scale was large enough that, if it were to fall on Paris now, it would likely drown the entire population. The prayers doubled. But at least the violent shower, whatever its cause, was distant.

Aside from the dastardly and confusing weather, there was also the matter of the air. Most were too frightened to even notice it at first point, chalking up the oddity to nerves, but eventually the whole city had to acknowledge there was something tainted in the atmosphere of Paris. Specifically, the smell. It wasn’t just ordinary pollution. Not gaseous or smoky. Rather, it was a much sharper odor. Like saltwater, cranked up to the nth degree. If the people didn’t know better, many of them would even admit that it smelled an awful lot like BO, albeit not quite as stinging and filthy as might be found on a man, though still heady and damp nonetheless. Rather, it was ever so slightly blunted by the zest of something resembling clementine soap, and fabric softener as well: almost feminine, really. All of this was fairly ridiculous to consider, of course, even as the smell was uniform now across the entire city.

Those at the borders soon discovered there was a distinct breaking-off point from the rest of the surrounding area. The crust had seemingly been ripped straight from the Earth, and beneath them was a drop hundreds of feet down into blackness. However, upon acquiring night vision gear and other tools of study from civilian residences, it was soon determined that the ground far below the split crust of the city consisted of none other than the same off-white, fluff-textured surface as the sky. Clouds, down below? Strange, and no more helpful in understanding this phenomenon.

The city government and National Assembly was holed up for defense against rampaging, confused citizens outside. The president was loaded into a bunker. Armed guards blocked the doors. In the command room, technicians using telescopic technology brought a new finding to the attention of their higher ups: upon the cloud cover above, previously believed to be uniform in its shape, there was instead found to be a very specific shape etched in jet-black upon the skyline and bearing down upon them, taunting Paris’s greatest minds with its lack of rationality.

Three conjoined soft, black leaves crossed by stripes were painted upon the clouds. Below them was the recognizable logo letters of Adidas, the athletic company, of all things.

Was Adidas doing advertising with cloud writing now, or what? Secret police and investigators immediately set out to look into these bizarre circumstances before public panic went any further. Already there were reports of rioting in the streets, though the police were keeping a temporary lid on the damage, for now.

Of all these calamities, though, none brought the city to quite so drastic a standstill and haunted quietude as the re-emergence of the seismic activity. Except this was unlike anything that had come before, even whatever force had severed the city from its foundations in France and delivered it unto this alien cloud environment. Repetitions every few seconds. Buildings shook violently. Citizens were flung like popcorn through their homes and the streets alike. Several of the smaller, less established buildings did, in fact, crumble down. The previously noted crater-slope created at the center of Paris, as if it was built on top of an ovular sinkhole, made this fresh disaster especially damaging, as the wobbling buildings now had an off-kilter center of gravity toward which to tip.