UTOPIC UP AHEAD
Excerpt from novel in-progress titled Fruiting Bodies
Last night, the whole city had the same dream: It’s a warm summer night sometime in the indeterminable but resounding future.
The clean and sirenless air shimmies balmily through the city center. Domed and triangular high-rise buildings interlock, isosceles glinting, each of them climbed by ninety stories of vines. These skyward stripes of flowering green are fed by ionic mists that cascade from a series of urban waterfalls, cycling through the now standard biome buildings: high-occupancy citizen housing in the form of lush symbiotic systems. A constant dialogue of breath between city dwellers and their agricultural counterparts. Downtown Arcadia is equal parts skyscraper and hanging gardens. Dotted with hawk moths and fruit bats and hummingbirds, interspecies crepuscular. The spray from the patented infinity falls slicks the living columns with condensation, rose gold dripping, every drop drunk or absorbed, gathered and rained back into the ecosystem. Mingled with crucial spores.
As the dusk progresses, widespread bioluminescence flickers, the abundant fungal strands gradually illuminate themselves, draping and ambitious, making a glowing web of skyline. Their substrate stashed in roots of sky-living firs and cedars, as each floor alternates between human and plant habitats, making for pristine and bountiful oxygen. The soil, too, is made more fertile than any has ever been by the second volcanic event of the prior century, and kept that way from a no-waste soil transformation service offered for all Arcadians after their body dies, where it too will be sown back into the benevolently engineered ecosystem. Their consciousness left to mingle, using every molecule.
A 60-story aquaculture outpost stands steady; but inside its tall chambers, life undulates—cross sections of living waters. Levels that start with shellfish and crustaceans, shiny mussels gulping their bubbles, and up higher, every color and shape of fish, gliding around in their reeds and their corals. The estuary floors where the salt and freshwater halves overlap.
And for every one of these vertical floating protein farms, there are three high-rise greenhouses, humid with crops: jewel-tone amaranths, and floors and floors of frilly, freckled lettuces. Each roof stacked with amenity gardens, their soft lights staying on all night, inviting. Even so, enough darkness is achieved for a yawn of visible stars. The nights just starting and people gather on their terraces, clink glasses and feel entirely cared for, gazing at each other and their modern fecundity, with jubilance and safety, unprecedented. It took a complete raze and reforming to build such an abundant, hydrated metropolis, but it now manifests in this wanting-for-nothing river city, its flow a gateway between glacier and ocean. Intermittent casks of watery light decorate the Willamette as evening swimmers stir up the legions of bioluminescent plankton into lit and harmonious magic.
All the bridges above the main stem of the river wing brim with aerial walking paths that pulse blue with organic chandeliers made of the fungi vines. Groups of pedestrians make their leisurely way from one side of the watershed to another, some lingering there, taking in the scene, being with the clear water and the midsummer breezes. Veins of the river branch into all neighborhoods of the city, acting as a natural network of transportation. A city you can literally float across and around.
A buoyant waterborne party, complete with lounge and dance floor, crosses beneath the bridges, its music wafting, a soulful euphoric song. Modern clusters of twenty-second century humans gathered for some occasion, or none, bobbing through their city, sipping on effervescence. Someone atop it is laughing with their whole body, another is dancing, dressed as an angel. An organic barrier of ferns and moss divides the river into two lanes: transportation and recreation, with pedestrians filling both of the illuminated lanes. The revelers wave as they go by, with the soft splashes, all bodies held by the river, swirling beneath the skyline like future mermaids, giggling.
About the Wordsmith:
Emmi Greer (all pronouns) is a writer, editor, educator, and snack artist devoted to exploring the polyamorous relationships between language, art, and consciousness. They scribble poems, menus, and lots of snail mail in Portland, Oregon, and also curate and edit the local anthology publication Buckman Journal. She will probably see you at a reading soon.
