The Seeds Within

The sun did not die. It was priced out of reach, then taken.

They hung the mirrors first: vast, slow, obedient plates in low orbit, angled by contract. What light they caught they sold downward in measured allotments to the Solar Estates, those glass lungs of the Elite, where noon could still be purchased by the hour. The rest of the planet received the remainder — a colour that was not colour, a brightness that did not warm. Then the smog grids went up, not as weather but as policy, a standing architecture of particulates held in place by the same will that held the mirrors. The masses learned a new grey. Children born after the last unfiltered dusk did not have a word for gold that meant the sky.

New Avalon had been a city of windows. The windows remained. They looked out on nothing that could be called day.

Steel stood. Glass stood. The river under the east viaduct still moved, but it moved like a cable, thick and utilised, carrying runoff from the Mitro-Fuel depots and a shine that was chemical rather than sky. The people who had filled the towers had been reclassified. Those who could sell what was left inside their cells went to the intake halls with a stamp on the wrist and a number that expired. Those who could not sell it worked the yards, the conduits, the substations where the harvested charge was refined and metered and sent into the bodies that had replaced a labour force the world could no longer breed.