The Path is Made By Walking

It was a slow day, but every day was slow here. District Dessous was an unsettling place to be for most. It was a place of little light. Most of its streets were below the sun’s reach, and many of the lights below no longer worked. The bulbs worked, but it was a waste of power to keep them all lit in parts of town with no inhabitants.

The underground roads were obstructed by sections of collapsed tunnel. But the railcar connecting the roads still worked, so it was possible to bypass such obstructions by taking a circuitous route.

It was not exactly a ghost town. Its structure was intact, and while most of its dwellings were abandoned, many were not. There were lights here and there, lit windows in the dim tunnels, cozy dwellings where the stranger characters lived apart even from one another, in the outskirts of the district.

The district would be a maze for visitors, if indeed it was a place anyone wanted to visit. The residents were used to the idiosyncrasies of its layout. While the way the streets connected was not simple, it was logical.

The streets were multi-layered, such that one could take an elevator to the street directly above or below. However, many of these elevators didn’t work. This was indicated only by a sign over covering the call button beside the door, which had a cartoon illustration of a man holding a wrench, and said “closed for maintenance.” This exact sign was at a number of the elevators, and most of them had been there as long as anyone could remember.

During the day, most of the district was illuminated by a diffuse light from the sun. Though the district was well above ground, the multi-layer construction obscured the sky. But it was not entirely enclosed. There were some walkways where one could peer over a railing and see the sky above, and the floor of the bottom level deep below.

There was one street which still had all its street lights. Bright LED bulbs ran along the ceiling, softened by elegant chandelier-like diffusers. The design of the lights suggested luxury, one of the signs that perhaps this was a place once expected to be a thriving metropolis.

The district was meant to be continuously expanded in all directions to indefinite size. It was built during a time when science and “futuristic” architecture was in vogue. So ironically, while the district had the most avant-garde and supposedly forward-thinking design, it was also the oldest area of the city and in the most disrepair.

The street of lights spanned four levels, with one working elevator which went between them. The other elevators were either broken or had power cut to route electricity to other buildings. The one that worked was a very large freight elevator with huge, ornate double doors. On the inside, it had a large panel of buttons which went from 1 to 16. However, only levels 1-4 actually existed, and when you pressed one of the higher numbers nothing happened. Perhaps this was part of the original plan to expand the district in all directions, including up.

Some enterprising city planner gave the levels of this particular street the systematically-derived names VR-MLN-1 through VR-MLN-4. This could be seen on the elevators and at various signposts here and there.

You knew someone didn’t belong in this part of town when they actually said “V R dash M L N”. The locals called it Vermilion.