We followed the science through streets lined with statues, their faces worn smooth and their inscriptions lost beneath graffiti and grime. These are our past, said the guide with the mask, and this is our glittering future. He lifted a vial, which was caught by the sun as if it was a bird in a trap, its song a coruscation of ecstatic fear. Its secrets were patented and beyond my understanding, but I saw it as a sign to follow through fields where lambs lay down, blissfully unaware of lions, while the real life rumbled deep underground. None may pass, said the guard with the gun, there’s nothing to see here. He lifted a finger that was nothing but bone and pointed to a place inside my head where nothing moved but vulgar fractions and a steady blue flame. Silence followed, and I saw the sum of all reasons as a single figure, a simple equation, a songbird trapped in a glass flask. I followed the silence back to the crowd, where statues bowed with the weight of failed experiments, where the guide in the long white coat checked the time and cleared his throat. This is what we’ve got so far, he said, striking a match from a book he picked up in a club that closed when the dancers turned to stone. The results should be in any day.
Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor