Ancient cities are fascinating to explore, and it’s always amazing how much archeologists are able to glean about what life would have been like based on fragments of cloth, scratches on stone, and other artifacts their excavations unearth (even if sometimes those inferences are closer to storytelling than hard scientific reasoning). To explore these places either directly or indirectly is to, in a way, experience a place which no one has experiences for sometimes thousands of years. In other cases, though, those ancient cities are not abandoned places being rediscovered thanks to new LIDAR insights or terrain surveying techniques. They are places people are still living today. Many major cities around the world have been inhabited long enough that their current incarnations are built upon layers and layers of the same city from previous ages, sometimes going back for thousands of years. In the Middle East, there are cities which may have been continuously inhabited since almost ten thousand years ago, and archeologists can dig down through those layers of human history like geologists study layers of sedimentary rock. It seemed like a great idea around which to build a story.
There are a few directions the idea can be taken, and I considered (and made a start at) several before settling on what might be one of the least likely ones. First, and probably most obvious, is to write a straight archeological story. It doesn’t have to include Dr. Jones and his hat to be an exciting story that way, and it could include a variety of literary techniques, like providing historical fiction snippets whenever the archeologists interact with an artifact. Another approach would be to remove the medium of the archeology and interact with the different layers of the city directly. I could see a sort of literary short story collection in which each entry is an independent story set in a different period of the city throughout history. For extra points, the stories could overall form a meta-arc for the reader. This would require significant research and be a fairly intensive project, which wasn’t what I was looking to do – not to mention that the idea is a little more on the literary side of things than I prefer to write.
On the more speculative fiction side of the fence, the obvious choice is a time travel story, whether fantastical or science fictional in trappings. I think the Doctor Who franchise may have done something like this at some point, although the Doctor’s frequent inability to steer his vehicle and the show’s typical format of focusing on one time/place in each episode complicate the implementation. I strongly considered trying my hand at a cerebral time travel story, and wrote a few starts to that effect, but I found the time travel aspect to be distracting from the story I wanted to tell. So, I put the story on a spaceship instead.
Sounds crazy? It is. I have no idea how something like this would ever actually be built. Oh, it’s probably possible from a pure technological perspective – that’s just a matter of scale for the most part – but from a logistical, economical, and social perspective? Highly impractical and unrealistic. The Writing Excuses podcast often references the idea of a “buy” – you get usually one big, completely unrealistic thing that readers will accept without questioning too much if you introduce it early enough in your story. Since I don’t make the background or construction of the city-ship significant to the story in any way, its existence is the buy. When you start reading, the story is set on a massive, self-sustaining spaceship consisting of levels of a city stacked atop each other, each isolated and controlled to represent a given technological and sociological era roughly correlated by century. It simply is, and there’s no need to wonder how or why. In early drafts, I tried to provide some of the backstory – it was an experimental, generational ship travelling between stars, getting its gravity on each level from its acceleration, and the experiment would end when they reached their destination, and the external conflict arose from not wanting to end the experiment and reach their destination – which failed utterly. The setting here just needs to be accepted from a storytelling perspective.
None of those early drafts made it past a scene or two. Lacria watching the purge is a core scene, one of the first I came up with for the story, although it wasn’t originally the opening scene. Nostrum sabotaging an inventor, Lacria chasing off a criminal, and their argument came a little later but also appeared in other drafts in various forms. Nostrum at the café actually predates this story entirely, and is a variation on a scene from a time travel/multiverse hopping story I started over a decade ago and never got past three scenes. For several iterations I attempted to make either the alien artifact or the approaching human vessel the main conflict in the story, but those efforts never quite worked. It wasn’t until I made those into peripheral conflicts and focused the story around the disagreements between Nostrum and Lacria that I was able to write a complete draft.
It’s a weird story, and it doesn’t really capture what I was originally after, which was the exploration of a city’s evolution through its layers of history. I may return to that idea in another form someday to scratch that itch. This story is closer to a classic time travel story, despite there being no time travel, and it’s written differently from how I usually write stories. It jumps from short scene to short scene, with sparse descriptions. My goal is to invite the reader to into conversation with the story and allow them to fill in the blanks. It’s not something I can see doing for an entire novel, but I think it makes for something interesting and different for this particular short story; you’ll have to let me know what you think of it in the comments.
I did few revisions once I had a finished draft, just cleaning up the language in a few places and correcting a handful of typos. This was a nice indulgence and a way to get back into regular writing, but I want my focus to be on finishing Golems and Kings and then getting into revisions for Impressions. So, please forgive the roughness of the story in places; I’m sure I could make it stronger if I workshopped it and did proper revisions through a few drafts. I think it’s an interesting and enjoyable story to read, even if it’s not what I originally intended to write. Let me know what you think.
Three lines of colorful scarves emerged from the shadow of the city gates into the harsh, white light of day. Scarlet poppies whirled from the walls to shower them, stark against the sandy, face-covering hoods worn by the stiff men who filed out the gates behind them, knuckles white on their weapons. Lacria stood in the shade of a stairwell and watched the colorfully clad heads stop in the sand. Painful though it was, it was easier than watching the people celebrating on the walls with tears in their eyes.
In the crowd of pale colors and flowing garments, a man in a tailored jacket the color of the best farm soil leaned against a wall beside another stairwell, gray eyes peering out from beneath a slim, pale brow. People didn’t so much avoid him as they avoided focusing on him. He was an aberration, something which did not belong in their environment, a mystery they could not explain and so chose not to notice. Lacria noticed. She saw him move when he sought to escape the blazing heat of the day, a line of deliberate motion in the chaotic crowd. With a final glance for the sacrifices now locked outside the city, Lacria followed the man.
She caught him at a small gate in the city’s rear wall, kept locked and seldom used. No one else was within three streets of them.
“Wait.” Lacria pitched her voice differently and shortened the word, affecting the accent of a higher floor.
It stopped the man; he turned and seemed confused when he saw Lacria, who passed for a local. “Yes?”
“What floor did you come from, the twentieth?”
“I…don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Right.” Lacria gestured at the gate. “And I suppose you’re just an ordinary Kalnite dressed like that, about to leave the city, which only the sacrifices do in the Purges? About to walk across the desert to where the sky meets the wall and you can take the lift to a different level of this damn ship?”
His eyes narrowed. “You know?”
“I know. What off Earth are you doing here, dressed like that? It’s anachronistic.”
“I’m the Storyteller.”
Lacria stared at him. “I thought that was an urban legend.”
“With a grain of truth. We should talk, but not here. Meet me at the top in, say, an hour?”
“You still haven’t answered what you’re doing here. Do you just come down to watch the Purge for fun?”
“No! It’s barbaric. I was here to check something for the top.”
“The higher floors aren’t much better,” Lacria muttered. The Storyteller opened his mouth, but she preempted his objections. “Fine. I’ll meet you at the top.”
Click here to read the rest of Metropolitan Strata.
IGC Publishing 
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