Heliopolis

amart29 (68)in #esteem • 7 years ago

Greetings to everyone, the following story was inspired by the digital art of @xpilar, I invite you to visit his blog. The picture that motivated this story is the following.

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Heliopolis

His work in Heliopolis was about to conclude, the terraformation of this world had been possible, too many factors made it very difficult to use it to house life forms, the temperature of its surface was higher than seven hundred and twenty-three Kelvin, due to an intense greenhouse effect resulting from its dense atmosphere, formed mainly by carbon dioxide and methane, in the dense clouds of hydrogen sulphide floated.

However, attempts were made to take advantage of the resources it provided. In its atmosphere, thanks to its density and two dark energy reactors, Laputa still floats on the cloud layer, one of the four cities that once crossed the skies of Heliopolis. Today its formerly gleaming dome of translucent polymer panels is cracked in several sectors, letting in the toxic atmosphere, its buildings, abandoned and partially demolished, are a sad reminder of the splendor that once lived.

Heliopolis was the center of an intense population dynamic, its cities were constantly visited by workers and merchants from all worlds, who came mainly to buy and trade valuable metals, iridium, palladium, gold and platinum were abundant in the infernal surface of the planet. During the sixty-three hours of their day, mining robots extracted metals that were then processed and sold in cities floating in the atmosphere.

Today, only Laputa remains in the air, and so it will be until its engines fail, and ends up falling catastrophically on the burning surface. In the abandoned world, the only remaining witness of its troubled past is JOSEPH, a floating probe of atmospheric control, today floating in its usual and monotonous course, observing the abandoned world.

Its rounded and flat profile body is suspended under a semi-solid synthetic fiber dirigible, which keeps it afloat. Driven by a tiny cold fusion reactor, it will soon run out of fuel, ending more than eight thousand years of continuous service.

When its energy is depleted, the routine of disincorporation will begin, it was placed in its programming, as in its other sister probes, all of them disappeared today, to avoid that when suffering a serious breakdown it continues floating without a fixed course, becoming a risk for other probes or vehicles.

JOSEPH witnessed the glory days of Heliopolis, when its cities floated noisy, in a continuous celebration of the fortunes that were negotiated in it, big hotels and amusement centers filled the peripheries of the central nuclei of the cities, thought to profit with the fortunes of the merchants and tourists that frequented them. Meanwhile, in the very core of the floating cities, gigantic robotic processing plants were in charge of processing the metals that were transported by elevators from the surface.

When the extraction of these materials in asteroids and other less hostile worlds became cheaper, the wasteful and luxurious lifestyle of Laputa and her three sisters came to an end, when the exploitation of metals ended the processing plants were no longer necessary, and since there were no metals there was nothing to negotiate. The cities were abandoned and with the passing of the years, one by one, they collapsed to the surface of the planet as well as the probes that, like JOSEPH, monitored and controlled the atmospheric conditions.

The reserve of fusionable material in the JOSEPH reactor has been exhausted, its engines have stopped and its systems begin to shut down, in a last attempt to maintain its information, a packet of data is transmitted unsuccessfully, to a control satellite, now inactive and in orbital decay.

Finally, as the last task in the list of tasks to be carried out in its useful life, JOSEPH activates the disincorporation routine, before definitively shutting down, its systems stop completely and an automatic valve responds to its last instruction, opening and letting the helium escape that keeps the synthetic ovoid that transports it afloat.

Little by little its height descends until it crosses the cloud layer and enters the infernal low atmosphere, where rains of hydrogen sulfide evaporate before touching the burning soil, rich in metals, where rivers of molten lead run and form large flows of grayish liquid, which flows slowly, until it accumulates in lakes where, sometimes, it can filter back to the earth to form a cycle.

JOSEPH slowly descends on one of these still lakes of molten metal, the polymer of his dirigible contracts and wrinkles like a carbonized paper, while his body, of an aluminum alloy, remains afloat in the dense metal, like an abandoned boat. Its circuits are cooked inside and the remaining material of the fusion, in its exhausted reactor, burns until it causes a burst, which spreads its scorched electronic viscera over the surface of the molten metal lake.

The last witness of the glory of Heliopolis has fallen, its glory has been completely forgotten, there is no one alive who has known it, there is no computer system or active memory bank left that has known it, there are only historical records about it, records that are not the object of study of any faculty of history, of the academies of the many worlds inhabited by humans, Heliopolis will be forgotten, as at the time the Earth and the solar system were also forgotten, being today, for the history of humanity, only its world of origin, with nothing more to add in this respect, with nothing more to add to it.

Text of @amart29 Barcelona, Venezuela, September 2019

Heliopolis

Heliopolis

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