loop, infinite

Fractal was a city that only needed itself. It had been built on a tall, ragged cliff, seven thousand feet above the shatterscape. Countless generations of citizens had lived out their entire lives without ever leaving the confines of Fractal’s stark, gleaming buildings.

They saw the shatterscape distantly and from windows, and it looked like a dangerous, terrifying jumble: a desolate expanse of jagged ice-spikes and twisted sheets of exploded obsidian that stretched out to the horizon and beyond.

There were legends about the shatterscape. Some were outlandish fantasy; others were patent nonsense. Most of the legends were both, but you had to pick one to believe in.

If you didn’t, you’d go mad. Over the centuries, hundreds had tried to make sense of what the shatterscape was and why it was there; when they all eventually lost their sanity, the Civic Enforcers threw them into the evaporator.

Choosing one of the old myths and trying not to question it was generally considered the better option.

The myth Seven believed was one her grandmother had told her years ago.

She’d been a little girl then, still young enough for nightmares. One night, she had a vision of the shatterscape that woke her up screaming. Her grandmother heard her. She came into Seven’s room and sat at the edge of her bed.

In her dream, Seven had seen flakes of glittering light. The flakes could fly. They traced tight, dizzy circles around her head like crazed bees made of broken glass.

Seven had seen herself standing at the cliff’s edge. She was outside, in the elements, without Fractal’s climate-controlled environment to protect her. She looked down into the shatterscape as the flying flakes slowly tightened their orbits around her. She took a deep breath.

And then, with a sudden jolt, either she fell down to meet the shatterscape or it fell up to meet her. She wasn’t sure which. All she knew was this: the shatterscape was now inside her head. It felt like her eyes and ears were bleeding. This was when she screamed.

In that instant before she awoke, Seven had somehow seen everything and nothing simultaneously. She’d been faced, one-on-one, with totality and finality, immortality and mortality, existence and non-existence. It was heavy stuff for a little kid.

“It was scary. It went on forever,” was all Seven could say. “Just forever. Forever and ever and ever and ever.” She started to cry.

“It’s nothing to be afraid of,” her grandmother had said.

Her grandmother told her the shatterscape had once been the vast sea where all life began. And though it was no longer an ocean, it was still where all souls were born, and where they would all eventually return.

When her grandmother died a decade later, Seven wasn’t sure what to think. Every time she looked out the window at that gnarled horror-world below, she tried to believe the old woman’s soul was out there somewhere, somehow.

She tried hard, but nagging doubts from the back of her mind always crept their way in.

“There’s no such thing as a soul,” the doubts said. And a small part of Seven wanted to concur.

That was a line of thinking she had to suppress. She didn’t want to end up in the evaporator.