A symphonic overture is synthesized on a 2009 Netbook as it’s run through a dishwasher.

Mawru steps onto the porch of a compact ranch-style house. Clean blue-white light shines through the windows. A fine, fresh layer of concrete dust coats the vibrant AstroTurf lawn and the white picket fence. A wall of black fire opal fills the entire frame behind it. Mawru pushes up his sleeves and raises a conductor’s baton.

The sun rises over the ocean. The waves are gentle and tipped with gold. Long, low clouds drift along the horizon, dyed stunning shades of pink and orange.

The barren surface of Imsaren, studded with enormous erratics, blocks the sun. The silhouette of a spindly catwalk cuts across the eastern sky. A woman leans against the railing, looking down at the sunrise. The wind off the ocean stretches her skirt out behind her knees like a flag. She almost leaves, but she hesitates, resting one hand on the railing like a butterfly about to fly away.

The camera sweeps over Dock Street in Halk, several dozen yards below the cave ceiling but so high up that the people at street level are the size of ants. The morning light has barely reached the cave floor, but the docks have been swarming for hours. Triangular-sailed ships, built like knives to be light, sharp, and fast, are efficiently jigsawed into the harbor. Sailors crawl across the decks and through the rigging. Shouting ricochets from the cave ceiling. A cascade of runners, longshoremen, and hawkers churns down the avenue, parting around Port Authority police like water around pebbles. Masts’ shadows swing across the water lapping at the ship’s hulls, which are already falling back into darkness.

West of the docks, Crown Street blazes in the morning sunlight. Thirteen mansions flank the mouth of an underground river as it flows to join the ocean. Each of the thirteen is built in a radically different style — Romanesque, Gothic, Tuscan — but all of them are crowned with glittering conservatories where vividly green leaves crowd against the glass like snowflakes in a snow globe. Twelve of the thirteen mansions are coated in gemstones that range in size from pinheads to tabletops. The thirteenth mansion is starkly plain, elegant concrete and glass. 

A monumental white stone building dominates the island in the middle of the river. It’s built with stone blocks bigger than shipping containers and windowless except for a narrow rectangle cut into the wall above its single door. It’s surrounded by a crush of vegetation. Leaves sparkle in the sunlight. Tree branches bend to the ground, weighted down by fruit and covered in flowers. Every surface is choked with vines, except for the building’s walls, which are bare. A thin tower barely reaches above the treetops behind it. It looks like it could have been built by hand.

The thirteen center city suburbs, each radiant in a different color of neon light and surrounded by high walls, stretch out across the cave floor west of Crown Street. More suburbs pile up behind them, where the sunlight never reaches. The inner city suburbs are lit by warm kerosene, and the walls that separate them are brick or stone. Farther out, the light fades to cold glow tape and dots of painfully bright blue, clouded by smoke from open fires, and the suburbs are separated by high chain-link fences. A wall of towers like Awas’s rises behind them.

Old Bridge stretches across the river almost a mile west of the sun line. It’s bigger than some of the suburbs around it. It’s lined with rows of colorful, densely patterned tents and courtyards surrounded by crisp townhouses. People saturate every surface except for the last yard of pavement closest to the Bridge’s walls: no matter how many people cross that invisible line, no one is ever on the other side. The walls themselves are significantly lower-resolution than the rest of the frame. Every building and every person on the Bridge is perfectly visible in as much detail as if the camera was only inches away from them. There are no shadows.

The edge of a cliff. Rocks along the edge have been intermittently marked with peeling glow tape. There are holes drilled for fence posts, but no fence. A cloud of thick black smoke hangs motionless a few yards below the edge of the cliff. Open fires surrounded by tiny knife points of searing blue light steep the lower layers of the clouds in a faint, eerie charcoal-gray glow. The air is full of the sound of water and the chirps of cave swallows, flashing through the cloud like lightning and popping back up to the surface with insects crushed in their beaks.

The overture resounds.

At the bottom of the cliff, past the western edge of Halk’s outer suburbs, the air is soundless, still, and empty. A glassy sheet of water stretches out across the floor and disappears into the abyss. The waterline is motionless and lined with sticks wrapped in glow tape. Some have been moved towards the sea; dates are marked in neat columns along their paths. A few have been moved back towards Halk. Urgent messages are scrawled next to them. 

Awas walks into frame. She’s dressed in her vest and pants, and her polearm is slung across her back. She drops a small canvas bundle on the water’s edge and kneels to unwrap it.

Mawru, still conducting on his front porch, holds out the final note of the overture. He smiles broadly and gives a cue.