The White City and the Void

On the edge of the great plains, beside the cold clear lake, the White City begins to crack and splinter. This nexus of power and money has weathered many storms, but now its momentum has turned - decay arrives and seeps into its bones.

The White City, a lakefront trading town grown fat on grain and hogs, always sat uneasily on the ground that nurtured it. Men whose wealth was a dividend of the earth built tall palaces of iron and stone, as if fleeing the soil and the debt they owed it. Railroad migrants blew into town and were scattered across the plain in a hundred thousand balloon-frame houses. To be rooted, to throw down footings and climb away from the grey miasma of the workaday city, was the privilege of a tiny cadre of men who called themselves Insiders. In time, stone walls turned to great curtains of glass and steel - the Insiders, ever-more divorced from the ground, came to see their reign in the sky as natural and eternal. They built great roads and swept aside the powerless and poor, leaving blighted vestiges in their wake. But the centre cannot hold forever. Resentment and mistrust thrived in this divided city and the Insiders, defending their privilege, steadily hardened the barriers between themselves and the outside world. Today, a makeshift green zone inscribes a circle of steel and concrete around the city’s soaring towers. Yet the Outside encroaches still. The Insiders’ walls have become their noose, tightening year by year, threatening to strangle them alive.

Still they persist, building higher and higher, fooling themselves that security and stability live at the highest peak of the tallest tower. They have devised a grand scheme intended to cement their legacy once and for all. These cash-fattened sons of Ozymandias have found a man from across the ocean who promises them the world. His tower – a twisting, turning masterpiece in white steel and blue glass – will pierce the prairie sky, an eternal beacon of power and permanence. They pour their money into the open arms of this snake-oil charlatan, praying his edifice can secure them against the coming tempest.

As her weight shifted, the weathered cyclone fence pitched unsteadily beneath her. Reacting quickly, she loosened her grip on the rough wire and vaulted over it, landing firmly on bent knees. The dirt under her feet was gritty and pockmarked - ahead, the empty lot dissolved into a messy thicket of buckthorn and prairie grass. She paused a moment to take her bearings as her pounding heartbeat returned to its slow, steady rhythm.

Above, a giant tower loomed over the cityscape. She recognised it from its silhouette on the late evening skyline, unyielding and uniform, scores of identical floorplates stacked a thousand feet high. Clearly this was once an office building, but now she could see telltale markers of domesticity inside - furniture shuffled up to windows, blinds drawn against the morning sun. Its facade was furrowed with tall white columns, but time and neglect had not been kind - the gleaming pearl of her memory had decayed to the colour of dying teeth, in places knocked clean out, exposing gray, pitted concrete underneath. She was close now, perhaps a quarter mile from the Insiders' sanctum; the closer she came, the weaker and more fragile their domain revealed itself to be.

Early that morning, when a re-purposed garbage truck full of improvised explosives breached the outer-ring wall, she was not caught unawares. For weeks, rumours had ricochetted around the small Outsider community that huddled at the wall's southernmost edge: that the Insiders were in retreat, repairing to a core ring of fortifications and abandoning the swathe of no-man’s land that lay between the city's inner and outer walls. Forewarned, she had seen the blinding double flash from the roof of her building. She watched the flickering backwash of firelight, and listened to the eerie quiet: usually, any break in the wall would be answered by searchlights and the crack of gunfire, but this morning nothing came. Dressed in black, with a dark shoulder-bag slung across her body, she clambered down from the roof and towards the fire. At the blown-open breach in the wall she slipped past the still-smouldering wreckage. Scrambling over broken-up concrete and steel, she passed silently through the membrane between Inside and Outside, breaking all at once a boundary that had once seemed preordained and impassable. No alarm sounded as she turned down the street. No men in black armour arrived to drag her away. The wall’s spell was broken – as darkness greyed into twilight, she set her eyes on the White City's jagged skyline and began to walk.

She covered at least ten miles that morning without seeing a soul. She was cautious, and the going was slow, once-familiar territory rendered strange by layers of time and neglect. She had grown up in the White City, but even a decade ago it was a radically less segregated place. The hardening, imperceptible at first, quickly became self-reinforcing: new security measures enclosed ever-more space, displaced ever-more citizens and created an ever-increasing resentment that spilled over into protests, resistance, and ever-tighter security. Within a few years, a concentric set of concrete rings cut meandering scars through the city. Seven years ago the outermost ring enveloped her neighbourhood, and she was evicted into the make-do settlements banked up against the perimeter wall. The in-between had been empty ever since - abandoned to the elements and the creeping hand of nature. But the Outsiders had not been idle in their exile. For years her and others had been scouting, probing, testing the Insiders' defenses, preparing for the day the levee broke and returned the White City to its people. That day was today.

Overgrown and rust-mottled, a massive excavator stood in the wild-grown lot, its raised bucket frozen overhead as if abandoned mid-swing. She climbed the machine’s broken tracks and peered into its cab, the windscreen plastered with creeping vines that cast gentle islands of shadow across the dash. Scaling the yellow digger’s long arm, she emerged above the overgrown canopy. Looking North toward the inner wall, her eyes narrowed at the sight before her. A giant hole – perfectly round and at least a hundred feet across – disappeared from sight, as if the fabric of the city had been suddenly and precisely pierced by an colossal, unknown force. She knew instantly what lay in front of her, though her knowledge of it came only from rumour and half-remembered stories. This was the White City Spire, the gleaming, towering monument that had exhausted the Insiders' energies and drained their coffers before it ever emerged from the earth. The Insiders' power had waned: the fast-fingered architect had departed with their money, and they were forced to set the endeavour aside, abandoning the deep foundations to the vicissitudes time and decay. Climbing down from the excavator, the great void yawned in front of her, silent and empty. Its walls were striated, with thick slabs of water-stained concrete protruding from layers of ribbed, rusted steel. She counted 12 levels in all, a hole as deep as it was wide. Several feet of dark water swirled around drifts of sandy soil on the concrete floor below - near the centre of the void, a single weeping willow dappled the calm, quiet water.

An old steel scaffold protruded above the void's rim to her left. Stepping onto the structure, she felt it shudder and looked down cautiously, steadying herself against the steel-tube railing. She set off down the shaky ladder, the sun hot on her back, her hands rust-flaked and sweaty. As she climbed, the surface and the security of solid ground retreated from sight. The air grew cold and still around her, and the noises of the overgrown city faded. Her clanging footsteps echoed through the space, and her heartbeat drummed in her ears. The bottom of the long ladder had rusted away - reaching cautiously with one foot, she lowered herself into the waist-high water. It was bracingly cold, and she stood still for a moment to acclimatise. Looking up, she felt enveloped by the hole, the perfect circle of its perimeter framing a cloudless blue sky. Past the edge, the white tower’s crown was barely visible, light reflecting dully from its grimy glass. Down inside the earth, the silence was cacophonous - her ears strained for any sound to drown out entropy’s dull static, before a sudden gust of wind over the rim set the whole space thrumming a low, resounding bass note. Moving slowly, she stepped into the dappled shade of the young willow as it shimmered and shook with the deep resonance. A flash of silver caught her periphery and she turned, startled, sending ripples across the water’s surface. Still now, she followed with her eyes as dozens of fish schooled in the shady waters. Giant silver carp, they were somehow thriving in this strange place, in these strange times. Like the willow tree, like herself, they were products of circumstance, responding and adapting to survive. Looking up, she fixed her eyes on the dying white tower, then turned towards the tall ladder and the long upward climb. Already she could envision a better future for this space, a rejoinder to the hubris of this massive, failed project.

Stepping down from the cracked-concrete stoop and into the rushing stream of people, she pulled her old shoulder bag tight around her. Dodging bodies, she flowed through the crowd like a liquid, feeling and navigating through defensive instinct and muscle memory. Not wishing to be recognised, she veered left, stepping out of the river of ebullient revellers and into an alleyway barely wider than her shoulders. The sound of the throng died away quickly, and she was surrounded by the sensations of life on the Outside. Above her, wall mounted air-conditioners spanned between rough fibre-cement walls. Light spilled from barred kitchen windows alongside plumes of steam and the ambient chatter of domesticity. Ahead, a sleek white cat fled her footsteps, leaping onto the corrugated steel roof where the alley split in two. A maze of narrow plastic pipes canopied the junction, casting abstract shadows across the concrete. A cryptic set of red-painted numbers were daubed on the wall in front of her, and she paused to study them. Quiet now, she could hear the dull roar of thousands gathering inside the Void.

It had been twelve years since the city’s outer wall was breached and she made her first foray into no-man’s land, discovering the abandoned Void. The in-between territory was quickly occupied by the Outsiders and adapted in their unique makeshift style. Grand edifices were broken down into warrens of smaller space, and the city was infiltrated by informal networks growing through, into and over the top of existing form. The new urban grammar was unfussy and agile, thrown up by people with few resources and little security. Once the outer wall came down, the Insiders were nearly powerless to control this lost territory. Struggling to maintain the giant, wasteful monuments they had dedicated to themselves, they were little interested in what happened outside their walls. The sole exception was the deep foundation of what was intended be their grandest construction and greatest triumph – the Void.

From the day she stumbled across the overgrown Void, she could see its potential for accretion and aggregation. Outsiders soon flocked here, using its robust structure as a scaffolding, their hastily-built homes occupying the hole within months. The Insiders could not let this stand. Outraged, they attacked the settlement with shock-troops and bulldozers. Time after time they would evict the Outsiders leaving the Void an empty pit. Time after time the Outsiders would return, sprouting like weeds, to fill the space anew. The Void became a totem for both sides, and a war of attrition was waged between Inside and Outside. In the end, the Insiders’ power to destroy could not match the Outsiders’ will to create. It had been seven years since the Void was last razed, and the Outsiders’ settlement had spilled over into the surrounding streets, a dense knot of urbanity at the very doorstep of the Insiders’ last bastion.

The Carnival took place every year at the height of summer, on the anniversary of the Void’s last destruction. Every year since, the Outsiders had thrown a great, wild party, thumbing their nose at attempts to suppress them. She was drawn there each time, both in solidarity with the cause and by the riotous spectacle of the event. Standing in the back-alley, she looked to her right and spotted a narrow set of open stairs. Climbing up, she hoisted herself over a rusted steel handrail and leapt into thin air. Landing with a metallic clang on the roof opposite, she stumbled forward a step before regaining her balance. From here she could see the spreading landscape of rolled steel and fibreglass roofing, studded with bright blue plastic water tanks. This near-solid mass of unplanned urbanity was shot through with narrow alleys like veins in an arm. To her left the field of rooftops ended abruptly at the edge of the Void. A great, pulsing haze of yellow light filled the air above it, and she could see crowds gathering around the edge. Moving closer, the noise of the carnival gradually resolved itself from a roar into a cacophonous medley of voices and music. Reaching the perimeter, she climbed down onto a tiny roof and sat down between a busted up satellite dish and a row of chattering, excitable children. In previous years she had been publicly feted as the mastermind of the revitalised Void, but this attention sat uneasily on her shoulders. These days, she preferred the quiet anonymity of the observer.

Looking out now, she saw the whole Void at once. The rippled roofscape tumbled down into it, like a sinkhole frozen in time. Tonight, on the night of the Carnival, the face of the Void swarmed with life. People scurried up stairs and ladders, danced on rooftops and leaned from windows to call out to one another. Front doorways were repurposed as storefronts selling sweets and cakes. She saw a brass band leading a procession of revellers up and down the face of the city - a small, red-faced man wrapped in a Sousaphone nearly toppled over as he struggled to keep pace with his bandmates. But Carnival was more than just a rowdy street party - rather, it was an annual index of the Void’s survival and progress, in defiance of the Insiders. Every year, the community gathered to collectively remodel and renew the settlement in time for Carnival. Walls and front doors gleamed with new paint in a riot of bright colours. Wild geometric patterns and mosaics dotted the scene, and huge murals spanned whole sectors. The renewal was more than decorative, too - from here, she could see at least a dozen new pieces to the giant puzzle of the Void’s complex urbanism - rebuilt stairwells, new or expanded homes, shopfronts advertising grand opening sales. For the Outsiders, the Carnival was a bold, noisy assertion of adaptation and renewal as a strategies for survival. Just yards away, on the other side of the wall, the Insiders sought longevity through stasis. Out here, survival depended on collective agility and responsiveness to change. By thriving here at the Insiders’ doorstep, within the ruins of their grand, failed project, the Outsiders asserted the power of their own ideology.

It was growing late now, but there was one event left on the Carnival schedule. The music stopped and crowds gathered, the roar of voices receding to a low babble. From her position on the rim, she saw the lights cut out throughout the Void. Down in the centre of the great hole, a dazzling blue-white beam shot into the air. The crowd gasped and heads turned skyward as a dozen identical beams shone from the perimeter of the Void, forming an almost-solid wall of light. Moments later a rocket exploded upward, racing two thousand feet into the air and bursting into a million yellow sparks cascading through the warm, still prairie air. Cheers and applause swelled into a great roar of mockery to greet the towering, incorporeal ghost of the never-built spire. She stared up into the night sky and imagined the great edifice that might have been. For a moment, she was struck by a pang of regret - a sudden nostalgia for a beautiful thing that never existed. Lowering her gaze, she saw the Void and the crowd of Outsiders surviving and thriving in the ruins of the Insiders’ hubris, and the feeling faded. Climbing to her feet, she paused for a moment, then turned away.

The fate of the White City has turned again. From the outside in the city remakes itself in a new guise. The Insiders’ vision – a grand, eternal monument of soaring towers in glass and steel – has withered and died. Soon the last wall will fall, and Outsiders will flood the inner sanctum. When they do, they will discover that the walls and towers were not a show of strength but a symptom of weakness. The Insiders, afraid of change, sought to freeze their privilege in place by casting it in concrete. In doing so, they made it brittle - the walls and towers became totems of Insider society, which in time in crumbled just as they did. The great spire and its unfinished foundation was the inflection point around which the White City’s fate turned. If, as the Insiders believed, the power and longevity of a society could be measured by the scale and grandeur of its built form, the Void represented the Insiders’ decline. The arrival of the Outsiders turned the Void from a mistake to an existential challenge. By imposing their own ideology of agile, piecemeal adaptation, they obliterated the unfinished masterpiece that still existed in the Insiders’ minds.

From their crumbling bastions high in the sky, the Insiders see a storm coming across the plains. They know it will end them, but they are frozen in place, and can only await their fate. For the Outsiders, however, a renewal is at hand: the first glimmers of a complex, vital hybrid emerge and, on the edge of the great plains, the White City promises to grow anew.