The Orchestrator's Tower
Jonathan Russell & Aaron Tjie
Far to the North, on the vast, flat salt pan between the mountains and the sea, rutted trails map the trajectories of travellers. These paths, straight and narrow, converge alike at the centre of this barren plain: the Orchestrator's Tower.
The Trader knew the route from years of experience. Every month he would travel to the tower from his home in the hinterlands, his caravan weighed down with fabrics and gems. There he would stay a while, buying and selling, before returning with goods brought to the tower from across the sea. Descending onto the unending salt flats, the Orchestrator's Tower was out of sight: hidden behind the curve of the earth. Following the trail, he kept his eyes on the unbroken horizon and watched a dark speck grow in the distance. He recognised the distant peak of the tower by its silhouette – a razor-edged steel spur, thrusting into the sky. As it came into view, clad in great sheaths of metal and glass, the tower sent dazzling beams of reflected sunlight careening across the plain. Fixated, almost hypnotised now, the Trader drew closer. From a distance the tower looked rational and singular but now, as its lower reaches emerged from the horizon, it changed. Outlined against the setting sun, it seemed skewed and unruly. Less a work of man, more like an act of nature, it had the bearing of an ancient butte – eroded and fragile, on the verge of collapse.
As night fell, he could see the tower in its fullness, rising high into the cold, clear evening. From its peak a great beam of light emerged, piercing the air. Visible for hundreds of miles around, this constant stream stood sentinel each night, marking the scale and ambition of the Orchestrator's vision. Below, thousands of windows spilled diffuse light across the empty salt pan. Scattered over the face of this unruly edifice, these lights told a different story: of a cacophonous multitude, irreducible to the dictates of one man's vision.
At daybreak, with the sun rising over the Trader’s shoulder, the Tower revealed its complexity. Bathed in soft light, it loomed above him - patches of straight-line glass and steel, intercut haphazardly with irregular swatches of timber and corrugated metal. Tall, long-armed cranes swung back and forth in steady rhythms. A flock of migratory birds swept and dove around the tower, tracing obscure patterns in the crisp morning sky. Order and chaos, held together in tenuous equilibrium – an unstable amalgam, he wondered how long it could hold. Passing through the East Gate, the trader entered the city's enveloping depths. Built up piecemeal over generations, he could read the strata on the walls around him – sequential layers of rebuilding, overlaid by years of adjustment and adaptive reuse. At the centre of the tower was a rounded hollow core with a void narrowing to a pinpoint at its peak. Arrayed over its long curve, a panoply of storefronts and signage were lit against the interior’s endless night. At ground level, a ramshackle market with makeshift stalls of wood and canvas sprawled from edge to edge. Taking a small, roughly sewn canvas purse from his breast pocket, he walked to an unsigned stall where an elderly merchant sat alone. Greeting her warmly, he emptied a handful of dull, coloured stones into her open palm.
The Merchant, having studied the gemstones, paid the Trader for his wares. She had been buying and selling stones for many years now – since before the arrival of the Orchestrator. She had grown up here, in a tiny town on the salt-flats, an isolated waypoint on the trading road. But the fate of her hometown changed the day the Orchestrator came. A young man with tanned, leathery skin and deep-set blue eyes, he walked out of the desert as if he were born of it. Rumour had it he was more than his rough-hewn appearance would imply: that he was the exiled scion of a powerful city-state, who had spent years walking the desert in mourning for his lost home. Driven by bitterness and nostalgic memory, he sought to rebuild this village on the barren plains in his own image. A visionary and an expert logistician, the Orchestrator quickly amassed a cadre of loyalists from among the townspeople and passing traders, and they soon ceded absolute power to this charismatic outsider. In a few short years, the Tower consumed the small town, becoming a singular edifice in the long, empty desert. In time, the scope of the Orchestrator’s prescriptions grew – with his functionaries, he drew up an increasingly exhaustive set of design parameters, which reached deep into the lives of the tower’s citizens. The Orchestrator's grip tightened.
A decade into the Tower's rise, the Merchant and her husband bought a small apartment. At first, the Orchestrator's strict standardisation suited them – door handles and benchtops were at the perfect height, their living room was flooded with light in the winter and shaded during summer. Everything in their new home seemed thought-through, and they were thankful to the Orchestrator for his simple, humane design. Over time, however, they began to chafe at the apartment's strictures. At first, to soften their home's straight-line rationality, they carted soil up the tower and planted a small, verdant garden on their balcony. On spring mornings, they would wake to the call of nesting songbirds, and they were happy. When their son was born, the Merchant and her husband were forced to take more drastic action: they bought a room from a neighbour and broke out of the Orchestrator's box. Between the adjacent apartments a narrow light shaft sliced through the tower's facade. The Merchant hired a contractor to build a simple, steel-framed footbridge across the gap to their new bedroom on the opposite side. Strictly speaking, this was entirely illegal – any alterations to the Orchestrator's design could void their tenancy, and they risked forfeiting the entire apartment. While the Orchestrator's rules on areas, volumes and ratios only grew stricter with time, the flowering of ad-hoc modifications testified to their impracticality. In the early years, they would sometimes have to pay off a municipal Inspector to falsify a certificate of compliance. These days, there was no need – the overtaxed Inspectors were occupied by the more pressing challenge of simply keeping the tower standing.
The Inspector was frantic. The tower was decaying, crumbling from the bottom up, and it was his job to halt the entropy. In his sector alone there were a dozen critical faults, any one of which might set off a catastrophic, cascading failure. In part, these faults were caused by residents' alterations impinging on structural elements, shifting stresses around the tower in complex and unpredictable ways. But there was more to the problem: a fundamental gulf had emerged between the Orchestrator's grand vision and the reality of the tower. Where once the Inspector was schooled in the Orchestrator's rules, he was now reduced to triage. Where once the Orchestrator would labour over the needs of the tower-dwellers, he now sought escape from their unruliness and idiosyncrasy. His perfect system of scales and proportions had proved unequal to the people's needs, and it had driven him mad. Clambering ever-higher, he cloistered himself in his eyrie, throwing all the tower's resources into a final, nihilistic upward surge. The Inspector would feel it sometimes, alone at night in the tower's upper reaches – a shudder, transmitted through the bones of this city, like a cliff-top house dug under by a great but silent storm. Teetering.
The Trader packed his caravan and turned for the mountains. Whenever he visited this city, he found it changed. The pendulum between order and chaos was swinging again, but wildly now, unpredictably. Between the cold rationality of the Orchestrator's plans and the piecemeal disorder of individual adaptations there lay, surely, some middle ground. But the people of the Tower had found no such ground, instead creating an ever-more divided city. Facing the mountains, a jolt underfoot snapped him from his thoughts. A moment later, the sound reached him like a cracking whip, a blast of cool air raising hair on the back of his neck. Turning to face the tower, for a moment all was still. As if in slow motion, the great tower began to buckle, and a vast cloud of birds arose like a spirit departing its body. A thunder rolled across the salt flats as jets of burning metal and glass exploded in all directions. The edifice cracked and crumbled and the destruction began to run away, the thunder becoming a mighty roar. The Tower’s highest peak, intact, tipped drunkenly then freefell, disappearing into a white roiling mass of dust and debris. A chaos of noise and motion swept out across the plain – a screaming, screeching choir of birds rifling out across the desert. The Trader felt a thud and caught a glimpse of blue sky as he toppled over backwards. Beside him, a great brown eagle thrash its crumpled wings against the broken ground as the dust cloud overtook them both. He closed his eyes.