Meanwhile, I think I've been seeing birds that aren't there. I'm pretty sure archeopteryx are extinct, right? & I know Brooklyn has flocks of parrots, but I am not sure about protobirds. Droves? Swarms? What is the collective noun for a bunch pf archeopteryx? Hateful, beady little eyes. Birds are the first murderers you know. Well, birds & dinosaurs, kind of the same thing. Before them pretty much everything else didn't have what it took to really do it properly. Fish & bugs can kill, but are too clinical for it to be murder. They don't have the right wetware to tangle with the issue. You can smell it on avians & their ilk, though. Caught in the baffles of their feathers. Funerary scents hanging heavy as clothes on them. I wonder what the last creature to murder will be? I wonder if it will be a robot. I like to think so. Or a ghost, maybe.
A tesla of archeopteryxes?
...archeopteriyces?
City magic has been strong; fingers fumbling through the circuits of the streets, eyelashes over the rails in its guts. Seeing the real buildings; when the shadows of the Chrysler Building & the Empire State Building cross you can see the Babel Exchange, six hundred & sixty-six stories tall. When there are clouds hiding the top of the Flatiron, you can see the Shape of the Watchtower lit up by lightning flashes. One second in Gotham there are devil dinosaurs slipping on pearls in the teleport tubes, in the next in Metropolis robots skitter around gargoyles of the Men of Tomorrow. You know, sometimes piano music plays. Spotlights focus on figures shaking guns at the heavens. I think the Idea Cities might become the companion-spirits of the Machina. It might be thus, or at least-- architecture.
