Khepri

I wake up in my office on the top floor of an enormous spool-like tower. I don’t know how I got there. I remember being carried – I think it was by Kataar? She’d been talking to me.

I have no memory of how I got here. This is the third time I’ve been awakened in some tower, and each time it’s been the same tower. Each time, I’ve had the same experience, carried in and delivered to this place by someone or something. The last time, Kataar came with me.

The tower is in the middle of the Flax ocean. I don’t think there is any place on the tower with more than twenty feet of unobstructed verticality, so if I climb to the roof, I’ll see out across the surface of the Flax ocean. In the center of the ocean there is a great spinning wheel, the largest wheel in the world. Every twenty-four hours it turns, slowly, so that the entire ocean turns over each day.

The ocean has no visible currents. No waterfalls. No waves. If you’re on the water, you’re perfectly at home. In the light of dawn or dusk, the ocean looks just as calm as an inland lake. When the water is still, you can see fish floating here and there. The ocean floor is entirely featureless, an unchanging expanse, which can be traversed by nothing but a single enormous rotating cylinder.

The ocean floor, too, has no features: flat, featureless, devoid of the small irregularities that would come from, say, the presence of an underwater mountain range. This is the largest place in the world and there is no place within it like it: a place completely lacking in any kind of spatial variability. No valleys, no peaks. Nothing.

There is just ocean here. And, at the center of it all, the spool-shaped Tower. It is, in its way, as perfect as anything else in the world.

This is the last time I’ll sleep in that tower. Something in me has changed, something fundamental. In the dream, I’d had no thoughts. I was just a floating passenger. Kataar talked to me about her home world of Pneuma. She told me she’d come here to learn about the strange and hostile life of the Flax, and, somehow, I had understood. I felt a kinship, or a love, perhaps, for her.

And so, in a way, I was her. This last time, Kataar carried me from the bed up the ladder to the roof. When I woke up, I felt the same kinship, the same love. There was something profoundly comforting in her company.

Then she vanished.

And I was alone again.

I’m in an office. The walls are made of some opaque, reflective material. In the center of the room is a large window looking out over the top of the Tower. There are a lot of other windows, like mine, all around the room, looking in every direction. The windows reflect the ocean in front of the tower, and the tower in turn. I look out the window for a long time. The ocean is motionless. It is a vast expanse of nothing. There are no currents. No waves. Nothing. It is the stillest lake in the world, one of the most placid lakes you could imagine, a lake you’d expect to see somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, but here in the center of this ocean, all the way out in the middle of it, surrounded by this Tower. The Tower seems to tower over me, here, from my window.

I walk over to the window, turn around, and walk back to the door. The door is made of the same reflective material, with a handle that’s not there. It opens, and I walk out onto a narrow balcony in front of the window. There is a railing, but it is just a few centimeters wide, so I walk straight out into the air. It is still motionless, silent. I turn around, and walk back inside.

I walk back to the window, open it, and look down again. There is a small platform with a railing, like the one out front, running directly down the middle of the Tower. I climb onto the platform, and look out from the center of it, looking down.

The platform takes me all the way to the edge of the Tower, which is more than a thousand meters up. From my perch, I can see everywhere. I can see down to the edge of the ocean’s surface, and see that, although the ocean is still, it is not at all placid. It is full of activity. It is full of fish and fauna. Many of these things cannot be seen, even with the aid of the windows, because they are many kilometers below the surface, but those that can be seen – all living things, at all depths – are swimming and darting and fighting in their thousands. I can see these things from my perch because, unlike almost everything else, they have no regard for the stillness of the surface; they are, in all senses, alive.

This, then, is the Flax. As I look down from the tower, I’m looking into the very midst of its chaos. It’s chaos, yes, but it feels like a friendly chaos, like the chaos of a large body of water with large, friendly, swimmers. It feels almost intimate. The chaos is not of a hostile and dangerous world. It doesn’t feel hostile or dangerous. It feels like something with no inherent malice.

The chaos in the Flax doesn’t feel hostile toward me. It doesn’t feel like it has any reason to.

The Tower sits in the center of this ocean of chaos, in a placid center of it. The Tower is made of the same material, the same material that the windows are made of. It’s the most reflective material there is. As I watch, a small boat appears at the edge of the ocean’s surface. It heads directly for the Tower. It is a strange, angular, futuristic design. At this distance, it is impossible to see any of the details on its surface. It is almost as impossible to see the people in it, too. The boat disappears from sight as it arrives on the edge of the ocean.

The Tower sits there. A large part of it, like the middle of the world, is empty: a pure expanse of the same reflective material, the same material that the windows are made of. Around the Tower, the Flax ocean is full of life: thousands of ships, a vast variety of people, a complex and complex ecology of marine life and fauna, with many varieties of intelligent organisms in its depths and along its surface.

The Tower is quiet. It has no engines, no motors. There is nothing moving inside it, no people. It sits there, and it’s silent, but, it is not empty. It’s not just a shell.

The Tower is a city, with its own internal economy, its own internal history. The Tower is a city with a society, a people. They are mostly unknown to the surface, to the people of the Flax. But the Tower is not entirely unknown to the people of the Flax.

The Tower sits there, quiet. It is motionless. The people of the Flax swim in its depths. They live in its skyscrapers. And they are, as far as the people of the Flax are concerned, the people of the Tower. It’s the Flax people that built the Tower. It is the Flax people, who are known to be more aggressive and violent than others. Their people built the Tower. Their people are its residents.

The Tower sits still. There is nothing moving within it. But, even though there is no one inside it, I feel a kinship for it. A kinship in which I can feel some of the power, some of the strength of the people of the Flax. Because, even though the Tower is just a shell, it sits in the midst of all of the Flax life. The Tower is not just empty. It is alive.

Something is alive. The Tower is alive.

I look up, from my perch, to the edge of the ocean. There is a small boat, a strange design, heading right toward the Tower. It is very fast, moving almost too quickly to see. It comes in closer and closer, and I can now see the details of its surface. It is full of people. They look like ordinary people. They are dressed in ordinary clothes, they have ordinary faces. But they are alive. They are in a great hurry. They rush toward the Tower.

They must reach the Tower before the end of the day.

For a split-second, I feel a kinship for the people of the boat. For a split-second, the kinship makes me feel some of their power. My perception of the Tower suddenly feels like it’s been opened up. There is more to it than just metal and glass and reflective material. There is a history, a society, inside it. A history whose people, whose members, have built this Tower, and are rushing to reach it, to begin to understand it.

It all feels very intimate. It is too intimate, too intimate, and, in that moment, I know that I am not welcome here. I look away.

I look over my shoulder, and I see