What happens if the wheel stops turning?
It’s impossible to tell if the station is half-finished, or falling apart.There are thousands of moving pieces that could break at any minute. Mechanisms spark and hiss. Electricity arcs towards you with each rotation. Switches, gears, and pulleys surviving through sheer will. Broken heaps that don’t know they’ve been abandoned. There wasn’t any planned obsolescence put in place before the fall.
The pipes, the blood vessels of this colossal wreck, feed into a rusted heart. The corrugated metal is discoloured by the salt, crusted in the atmosphere. The walls are wet from the humidity, like the room is sweating. Scattered stones on the beach stoically show how to deal with the weather. They’ve been unbothered for decades.
The station has been here for a century. But the beach has already been poisoned by this industry. The sand is smeared black and grey. The coral has been punctured by concrete and rebar. Her retaliation has been slow, breaking each building down with every morning tide, perhaps because she measures her plans in millennia.
This might have been a palace in another life. Palm trees gently gesture you inside domed walkways carved from the cliffs. Rock gives way to right angles with views that once held the splendour of long dead gardens. Evidence of the human spirit remains. An effort to organise the elements into progress. To graft something new onto the mainland. Because with metal and stone and tools and time anything is possible.
The wheel and the breeze and the rhythm of the blasts lull you into an uneasy hypnosis. Maybe this is the engine of the city’s subconscious. Without this perpetual motion everything else would fall apart. The centrifuge’s gravity holds you together. It pulls you to the middle and keeps you there. But it offers you only rust, not diamonds.
Because nature eventually reclaims what man has forgotten. The signs are here already. Slumped piles of dirt from shifting edges. Corridors blown apart to form new openings. Cracks that will inevitably hold leaves, vines and shoots. Leave it to its own devices for long enough, and life will start to grow again.
One by one the lights will blink off, the switches will fail to fire their circuits, and the final shards will fall from the frames. Notches that mark the slow decline and the inevitable end.
But one thing is for certain. This wheel will still be turning.
Either in defiance, or in denial.
Unaware that we don’t need it anymore.
Share this post