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        He saw her sometimes. It began sometime around his thirtieth birthday, one day after work as he was in the afternoon rush hour train, heading back home. She was a plain, bespectacled schoolgirl. At first, he didn’t notice her. She often appeared in the corner of his eye, or hidden in the shifting crowds of the city, head buried in her handheld, hair thrown up in a careless ponytail, skirt kept at a modest knee-length. She remained unchanged, silent, a faceless background character in the solipsism of the man’s life in an ecumenopolis of countless billions.  

        It was a rainy afternoon that he first noticed her. The train’s passenger load thinned as it descended into the derelict bowels of the city where he made his home. Almost by accident, his eyes trailed up to the girl, one of the few passengers left in the almost-empty carriage. Here, where the shining metal facades of the upper city melted into dull utilitarian ferroconcrete, the warm lights of the carriage were the only source of illumination in a world made prematurely dark by the stormy sky, casting her unremarkable features in a brilliant orange-yellow.

        In a halted, desolate train in limbo between the undercity and overcity, staring at that mild smile, he became conscious of her existence. His reverie broken, he wondered what her circumstances were, what her life was like. He realized that she had parents, friends, acquaintances, that she was capable of thought just as he was. He looked out the window. He imagined that if he had the ability to see through the opaque drab grey edifices which formed the walls of the bottomless urban canyon he found himself suspended in, he would have seen millions, perhaps billions of human beings. The thought scared him, even if only for a brief instant, before he realized that he himself was also human.

        From that day forward, he began seeing her. It was never in proximity, but always close enough for him to be sure that it was her. A familiar profile would appear in his periphery here, or a frazzled black ponytail would bob its way across the compartment, lost in a sea of indistinct heads and hands there. He made a game of observing her movements, cataloguing her appearance and tics.

        On rainy days, of which there were many in his ward of the city, she would always be wearing that same lukewarm expression on her face, anticipating the damp coolness which came with precipitation. In the summer and in the winter she wore different uniforms – he watched her short-sleeved summer blouse which revealed her smooth, milky-white upper arms transform into a light beige cardigan as the days grew shorter and colder, with too-long sleeves that cut off at the tips of her fingers, the article threatening to engulf her handheld in a cocoon of wool.

        As for him, life remained the same. He watched as the girl blossomed into a fine young woman. She grew taller with each passing year, carried by a pair of shapely, slender long legs. Inevitably, the childlike fullness of her face evaporated, replaced by a sharper, more womanly look. Her thick framed glasses disappeared and on occasion, he swore he could see the faintest glimmer of lip gloss as she smiled as always on rainy days. The girl he had first noticed all those years ago vanished before his eyes, replaced by an adult doppelganger, and he felt a sense of loss although he had never truly known her.

        In those same years, he’d led a stable existence, and aside from feeling slightly greyer, nothing of note happened. His plain regulation-black Ministry cloak remained his perennial outfit, which he complemented with a comfortable hand-knit scarf and hat in the winters. He still lived in the undercity, and though sometimes he looked at advertisements put out by the Ministry of Colonial Development promising ample lands and open skies on an alien planet for anybody interested, and even daydreamed of one day leading a hermit’s life as a humble homesteader on a rugged, uncharted frontier world – he had even gone as far as fill out the required application forms in one fit of enthusiasm before dropping it in a subsequent flurry of pessimism, his fantasies remained as such.

        Fantasy was enough; life in the undercity, though not as perfect an isolation as a hermitage in the colonies, offered him solace. The trains passed the middling ferroconcrete towers which delineated overcity and undercity, and stopped, letting off the last of the last stragglers before turning and making the journey back to the top of the world. The unfathomably old brick and glass-faced skyscrapers (so they were once called, before the constructions of the present age had dwarfed them by many orders of magnitude) below were a concrete divide, never to be crossed by living souls. Beyond them, wandering those ancient, overgrown avenues and lurking in rotten old apartments were the mysteries and entities of ages long gone. Perhaps they weren’t real; he had certainly never encountered anything approaching the supernatural in his many years living in that great darkness, but the reputation was so strong that few ever dared to make the secondary descent, preferring to tell themselves that the city ended where their arcologies bottomed out.

        At his stop, the city was at its seediest. Nowhere to be found were the sterile, brightly-lit and well-manicured parks and wide walkways of the overcity. Here, obsolete incandescent lamps cast long shadows over the inebriated rabble who stumbled through narrow, trash-chocked corridors. Neon signs jutted out from doorways, advertising cheaper beer and more beautiful women than their neighbors. One particularly scientific advert claimed that their sex ratio was among the most favorable in the ward, and that their machines kept their beer at the experimentally-proven ideal temperature for human consumption. He felt no desire to verify either of those claims.

        He wound through the maze of dive bars, brothels and love hotels, until he reached his destination. In a particularly dimly lit dead-end hallway, where the detritus from construction completed generations ago still lay scattered and undisturbed after eons, was a maintenance hatch. Somebody, bless their immortal soul, had broken the heavy padlock, which lay shattered and rusted feet away from the dented metal lid. Taking care to make sure that nobody saw him, he lifted it up gingerly, and crawled in.

        Directly below the hatch was a rickety length of maintenance ladder that ended quickly, replaced by a level asphalt floor, pierced at regular intervals by sturdy load-bearing pillars of ferroconcrete – it was the roof of an ancient building. From there, he entered through the gaping, decayed remains of a doorway leading inside, and took the journey down the resonant concrete stairwell halfway down to the twenty eighth floor, by his reckoning. There, he made his home, behind a nondescript, triple-padlocked metal door, in the refurbished remains of an ancient bachelor suite.

        It was by no means a luxurious dwelling; in fact, the dark, cold surroundings of the undercity made it a far cry from those ample-sunned domiciles with grand floor-to-ceiling windows exposing a breathtaking vista of shining spires as far as the eye could see which were the rule, rather than the exception in the overcity. The furnishings were spartan – they consisted of a solid wood desk and matching chair salvaged from an office on the thirtieth floor, and an air mattress held in place by a bed frame constructed from the splintery boards of wood which survived the ravages of time scattered around the tower.  

        His appliances were just as humble. Because of the isolation of his dwelling, he had to ensure that all of his necessities could be sourced from nearby, or were eminently man-portable. A hot plate and a miniature refrigerator to cook and store his sustenance sat on the genuine granite counter, a rarity in this day and age which he was particularly proud of, and kept polished and impeccably clean, as well as a space heater and a dehumidifier, which kept the space livable, especially in monsoon season. A bright construction lamp, which he had covered in a translucent, orange-tinted tape, sat in one corner of the room and cast an inviting glow throughout. All of this was made possible by an ingenious little setup of his, which ran power cables all the way from the temporary, long-abandoned construction camp on the fortieth floor – apparently, nobody had ever thought of disconnecting the camp from the city’s power grid after construction had finished, an oversight which he loved dearly.

        Outside on the cramped balcony of his suite, however, was his favorite creation. A wood fired bath, jury-rigged out of a stout barrel once used to age alcohol of some sort, raised above the ground on four hearty legs, connected to a wood-fired heater (though the difficulty of acquiring real wood meant that except for on special occasion, he had to make do with charcoal briquettes which blackened the heater with near-intractable soot - though sometimes he had the niggling suspicion that the soot had always been there). He had scavenged it, miraculously still-functioning out of the charred remains of a ground level terrace house, on one of his long treks through the undercity proper. From the crumbling railing which fenced in the balcony was hung a vital supporting piece of his contraption: a sturdy tarpaulin, angled like a rain gutter and feeding into a wide-mouthed plastic jug. On rainy days, the jug would fill at a prodigal speed, and on most other days, when the humidity was in full force, dew-like droplets of condensation would gather, and roll into the jug slowly. With much effort, he would fill the barrel one jug at a time, until it was almost full. Then, he would start the fire, and wait in anticipation for the bath to warm.

        On his days off, he spent hours in that barrel in a heat-induced daze, during which he stared blankly at the trains of the overcity passing overhead, or through a pair of beaten old binoculars at the undercity below, where faint pinpricks of light emitted by the lanternbugs spelled out a constellation of sorts, that vibrated and shifted frenetically, making out the outline of a man one second, a flower the next, and a bear after that, or they seemed to dance in formation, rhythmic, trance-like movements which had him pondering the existence of lanternbug sentience. The lights of the lanternbugs were joined sometimes, by the lights of other creatures who found themselves stranded in the all-engulfing black of the undercity. They were a rarity, though once in a blue moon, he spotted them, skulking about the floor of the planet, moving in packs.

        Sometimes they would be youths in a great shivering throng joined in a test of courage of some sort – though as a student he had never been personally invited to one of those subempyrean jaunts, he had heard stories in his later years attending “suggested” drinking parties, told by respectable middle-aged bureaucrats, lips loosened by alcohol, recounting their own tall tales of the horrors below the overcity and their various sexual exploits - it seemed that for them, the undercity was simultaneously a great Dionysian orgy and the deepest, most demonic pit of Hell (was there really much of a difference?).

        The boys in the groups always jostled about with machismo, telling raunchy jokes with a volume so great that like sabers the hoarsely-shouted obscenities cut through the dull blanket of silence which reigned supreme in the undercity, all the way to his place on the balcony. Perhaps they felt the need to appear fearless in the company of their peers, though without fail, the loudest jokers were also the more scared, as they shrieked with abandon, louder even than the young girls, whose presence the entire enterprise depended on – after all, who in their right mind would risk life and limb in those low parts of the planet if not to impress their peers of the fairer sex? – when benign swarms of lanternbugs approached them, mistaking their electric torches for the luminescence of a plump old lanternbug queen.

        On other days, it was a different species of creature, much wiser and yet, more foolhardy at the same time. The work gangs, rough men who shaved as regularly as they showered (that is to say, never), superstitious, honest and simple folk, who swore and spat, but believed wholeheartedly in a God who had passed on to the realm of bedtime stories and fantasy fiction for the higher classes, especially the middle class bureaucrats who swore by the three truths of their enlightened age: family, academia, and government.  In a way, he respected them more than that class of glorified bean counters and paper pushers, of which he was a member – they understood that happiness lay not in accolades and glowing performance reports made by superiors, not in the rotten “meritocracy” the Imperial apparatchik swore by, not in “heartfelt, frank philosophical conversations” (better described as self-absorbed monologues exchanged in quick succession) held over the cafeteria buzz, but in smoking, drinking, and singing. These were men who recognized their mediocrity, their ignorance, and the ignorance of humanity, and embraced it wholeheartedly.

        They moved with purpose through the streets, not caring to showboat as the youths did; they had their jobs, and they wished to be rid of them as soon as possible, to return perhaps to the comfort of the overcity, to relax knotted and sore muscles made over the course of a hard day’s labour at the bar.  Always, they were followed by a great convoy of thick-tracked vehicles come from somewhere, carrying tools and supplies for the tasks at hand. Their eyes would gaze upward, staring at the emaciated faces of antiquity which hedged them in on both sides in a canyon of artifice, half in reverence, and half in fear. When they reached their destination, they got to work, singing a steady cadence which placated their uneasy psyches and kept their hands moving at a constant pace, performing the painstaking task of surveying and placing support pillars in those ancient dwellings, and damming in entire floors and sections of buildings with concrete if it was deemed necessary by the severe overseer accompanying them on their thankless endeavor. Shortly after their work had completed, he would watch as cranes were set up, and the erection of yet another arcology – an insignificant addition to the lush thicket of the overcity – began.

        The rarest creature of them all, however, he never observed personally, but he felt most intimately familiar with it regardless. It always appeared in the dying days of summer, when the last rays of the yellow sun hanging high in the sky penetrated even the dankest, deepest corner of the undercity, revealing pale-capped mushrooms sprouting from the cracks of the decrepit pavement, and great mutant vines which meandered up the abandoned cityscape seeking warmth and light, feeding off of the rich black earth which peeked out from time to time underfoot, a wholesome soil left to fallow for uncountable centuries underneath the concrete crypt mankind had buried it. It always amused him somewhat, when he thought that just as he watched, there could have been a kindred spirit watching him as he weaved his way through the city, wandering and journeying his way to his destination – the coast.

        The coast was his second-favorite place. Not for the crowds (although he took pleasure in watching them as well), of which there were many, especially in the late stages of the summer months, but for the view – a vast, unending horizon of blue against blue. In an earlier era, when the undercity had been the overcity, the city had been a busy cargo port and a centre of maritime commerce, and though there were no longer any pirates nor gritty fishermen who made port in the city, and no bawds to solicit, there could be seen the blocky outlines of hulking cargo ships in the distance, navigating themselves towards the equally titanic receiving docks, shaped like great grey cubes which broke the skin of the planet, pushing up out of the formless beaches of the shore.

        He remembered the first time he came to the shore. It was his last year as a student, at least before he joined one of the Imperial Academies. He had been invited on an afterthought, a well-intentioned attempt by some busybody or another to see the entire graduating year crowd onto the tawny dunes of the coast as one unified entity. Finding himself idle and without entertainment that day, he went with as much trepidation and grudgingness as a natural outsider such as himself could muster at such an event.

        On the way to the shore, the train made a winding descent, to his surprise, and initial fear, into the undercity, which they had to pass through in order to reach their destination. In his salad days, the place was still a fearful one, and that sentiment had been echoed by his peers: the carriage, humming with excited conversation, about plans for the future, regrets and fond memories, hushed itself as the train lowered, and the outside world grew dimmer and dimmer, revealing the sight of a phantom city, hollow windows gazing at the students like the empty eye sockets of skulls, rotten old doorways, under which sometimes sudden phantasmal figures would appear and disappear with equal spontaneity (these, he would find out in later years, were simply constructions of an uneasy mind), and balconies, still populated by forgotten trinkets and the encroaching vines which struggled to climb to the light and warmth of the overcity.

        From the warm, comfortable vantage point looking out on the desolate scene before him, the man, still a boy at this point, was entranced. He stared at the landscapes passing by, familiar and yet so very alien. Had this beautiful scene always existed? Had it just been obscured by time, denied by a life spent in the tedious, sterile walkways and gardens of the overcity, overshadowed by the titanic constructions of modernity?

        He was taken by surprise as the buildings, in their sinister, tenebrous splendor evaporated, and light flooded into the compartment once more. The conversations, left off mid-sentence as they entered the undercity, picked up again with uneasy laughter, silently swearing to themselves that when they returned the same way, they wouldn’t be twice dissuaded by the same scenery, which in hindsight, hadn’t scared them at all.

        The group disembarked from the train at its terminus station, a boardwalk built atop a forest of robust wooden piers. The sun beat down on them unforgivingly, and here under the open sky, there were no buildings to block its path. He looked out at the sea, a salty alkaline pool of pure black which waxed in and waned out, dyeing the coast a deep chestnut hue each time. Above, the sky was a pale blue slate, on which several wisps of cloud hung languidly, kept stationary by the stagnant summer air. The sea sagged under its own weight and disappearing into the distance, where its bulk had collapsed the scaffolding of existence itself. Despite that, the people on the beach seemed not to worry; they kept closer to the water, and where the yellow sands ended and grey concrete began with the undercity, they looked towards the abandoned avenues with a primal fear, unsettled by its very presence, and turned to avoid it.

        The adolescents claimed a spot in the packed beach, marking it with picnic baskets brimming with ice packs and lunches prepared by loving, motherly hands, draping cheerful geometric cloths on which they lounged over the ground – there were enough to make it resemble a week’s end market from some quaint, half-forgotten old world fairytale, he thought as he took his shoes off, and sat in the sand, feeling the hot grains press against his bare feet.

        He watched as two high metal poles procured from parts unknown were erected, and a net fastened to their tops, which were hooked. Two teams were formed, and a lively ball game began. Sweat beaded on foreheads and ran down outstretched limbs, glistening in the sun. The meaty smacks of the ball making contact with forearms resonated, joined by a chorus of labored grunts and mirthful laughter. Sometimes, a bystander, walking by and spying the game would join in temporarily, making a vital save, or serving a ball which had landed wide of the court back into the game, which nobody took seriously enough to keep score.

        Elsewhere, a watermelon had been split open, and ripe blood-red slices were being handed around by a particularly matronly classmate of his – of all his classmates, she had been the only one to talk to him, though he secretly suspected that the gesture of kindness made her as uncomfortable as it made him. He took a slice wordlessly and bit into it. It was sweet, and its cold juices ran down his hand, dripping onto the sand and leaving small, perfectly round brown craters. He marveled at the displays of exuberance surrounding him, the sounds of jokes and easygoing conversation, pretty, lithe creatures who smiled gracefully and shaded themselves daintily from the sun, and their masculine counterparts, who seemed unimaginably virile to him, with their barrel chests and muscular arms, as they milled about in their swimming trunks, lazily enjoying the late summer day.

        Finishing the slice of watermelon, he got up, and walked over to a garbage can on the far side of the water, where he deposited the rind. Here, only a few loitered, cooling themselves off where the buildings of the city rose and obstructed the sun, uneasily eyeing the avenues which lay behind them in an ominous sort of tranquility, the sort of calm one would expect right before the coming of a particularly strong rainstorm. He felt magnetically drawn, however, to those mysterious alleyways where so few dared to venture, because they seemed like wet, lush and lonely places, far from the parched wasteland of the beach, where he was choked among a great flock of his kind. He ambled onto the concrete, feeling his flip-flops slap against it loudly, and crossed into the undercity, aware of the worried eyes fixated on his back as he did so.

        It was greener than he expected. From a distance, while he had been on the train, the undercity seemed barren, save for a handful of enterprising vines. From up close, he saw that it was an overgrown jungle, Jurassic and savage. Where the concrete had split open from the stresses of time, tufts of mushroom and hardy cave lichen had sprouted. The buildings which confined him on two sides were not bleached old skulls; they had been taken over by new occupants, and were now covered by a healthy carpet of moss, or were buzzing hives for fantastical creatures which resembled the will-o’-the-wisps from a distance, but with closer observation, appeared to be bioluminescent insects.

        He wandered aimlessly about, stumbling over stray pebbles and stones which the weak illumination failed to reveal, gawking wordlessly at the sights of the undercity. An incognito crack, like the report of a rifle sounded from somewhere, and it jolted him back to his senses. He was overtaken by his animal instincts, and turned tail to run maniacally from some unknown predator. The sight of him, flip-flops disheveled by the rough contours of the ground and drenched in a thick layer of sweat as he panted and wheezed must have shocked a great multitude when he burst out of the gloom of the undercity and onto the beach. By then, the sun had already begun its descent from the heavens, and hung low over the ocean waves which reflected and refracted its fiery red glow. A chill had come on, and his classmates, exhausted by their day of celebrations and discouraged by the early-autumn weather that had come with the early-autumn colors, were beginning to leave in jovial packs of three or four; close-knit cliques of friends and lovers enjoying the last days of their youth.

        Exhausted, he collapsed on the beach, not caring about the harsh granules of sand which stuck to his limbs and clothes. He stared at the sky and his chest, which rose and fell gently with his breath, half rose-tinted by the setting sun to the east and half black-blue to the west, where he could make out the pale outlines of storm clouds gathered in anticipation of the first rainfall of the fall season. The haze of conversations carried itself to his ears, sloshing over the sound of the waves crashing against the shores. He sat up, after an indeterminably long period of time, when the loudspeakers perched atop a towering pillar of wood announced that the last trains were shortly bound to stop at the terminus station, and that all beachgoers were strongly advised to board, lest they wished to be stranded. The great red orb suspended in the sky had entered its last stage of the day, sinking below the ocean to its home under those serene, mysterious waters. He was home the next morning, bleary-eyed and smelling of the sea, but he was happy.

        It was in that summer that he’d been infected by an unknown urge, perhaps bitten by some mysterious, undiscovered species of undercity-dwelling bug, or possessed by a stray spirit of one of the many ex-residents of that space – the details didn’t matter so much as the symptoms did. Even as he attended his new courses at the Imperial Academy, or when he’d been admitted to one of the ministries and assigned a housing unit, the same itch persisted in the back of his mind. It manifested sometimes as dreams, in which he vagabonded across a dreamy, airy version of the undercity of that summertime romp, populated by strange alien animals who spoke to him, and warmed by the now omnipresent sun which stared at him like the pupil of a long-forgotten pagan god, monitoring his every action. Other times, it was in his idle daydreams, as an innocent memory of a kinder time, which inevitably came up as he sat in on “not mandatory but recommended” social functions where greying civil servants banqueted lavishly and told one another stories they had accrued in their many long years of life.

        All of that eventually culminated in action, though it hadn’t been one climactic effort; his hermitage had been the fruit of long, concerted labors, spaced out through an interval of many years. It had begun with a hesitant initial surveying, followed by minute chores spread out irregularly, carried out in moments of motivation and inspiration. Even as his pace was glacial, he felt himself accumulating a mountain of smaller pebbles, and the cold, haunted room which he had stumbled upon on his second journey below the city and decided to take as his home began to change into something hospitable, even desirable.  

        In the regularly scheduled social events which seemed to punctuate the ends of those selfsame weeks, months, and years more reliably than the progression of any clock or calendar or the arrival of higher-ups for periodic performance reviews lay his greatest ennui, of which he had few. Nowhere did he long more for the solitude and silence of his promised home in the undercity, which had begun to take shape in a vague, embryonic form, than he did, mere steps away from the arcane old maintenance hatch which led to his personal kingdom below the overcity, in private rooms situated in noisy bars surrounded by drunken coworkers.

        There, he never had to speak: it was the only mercy afforded to him. Without fail, the others always had enough to say for the both of them. He would smile, a practiced expression which was vague enough to be interpreted favorably regardless of their story: for the ones with unruly children, it would be an understanding, but not patronizing gesture. For the ones complaining about fickle wives and girlfriends, it would be a knowing smile, perhaps alluding to troubles of his own.  For the ones who proudly spoke of a son’s admission to a prestigious Academy, or a daughter’s beauty, it would be an appreciative look, perhaps one of humble admiration. In any case, he was an enigma to them just as they managed to be to him even as they revealed the details of their lives to one another; they knew nothing about him other than that he was always punctual, sometimes smelled of smoke, and made for an attentive and understanding listener.

        Those nights seemed to drag on forever, filled with bland appetizers and chilled beer, empty calories and emptier conversation. They always seemed to end the same way. Somebody, usually younger and eager to impress, or older and occupied by other troubles in his life, drank too much and passed out. Eventually, somebody else would notice him and point it out, and a roundabout conversation as to who would take him home would be held, nobody wanting to end the festivities prematurely, to leave the warmth and light of the gathering for a quiet, dark train with an unconscious stranger, it felt too intimate, inappropriate even. Finally, a senior – he was always older, for some strange reason – looking heroic with his distended belly and his balding silver head would volunteer himself for the task, and, supporting his downed junior over his narrow shoulders, left a room of approving glances.

        Perhaps feeling sheepish of a companion’s departure, the group would dissipate with astonishing speed afterwards, yawning and thanking one another for their presence, the closer acquaintances making plans for meetings over the weekend. The youngest would linger the longest, their appetites were greater and their enthusiasm not yet blunted. Some of them continued the celebration elsewhere, at strip clubs and brothels. Between him and those rather carnal comrades of his, there was a tacit agreement, that neither party would ask the other about where they went after the meeting had ended – theirs was just a professional relationship, after all. Regardless, he had seen the looks of puzzlement on their faces as they departed, one after another, until only he remained. Exactly what, they wondered, was so shameful that he would have to wait for all of us to leave before going to do it? Speculation over his tastes were probably a popular item of speculation among those lurid fellows, he would think amusedly as he crawled through the maintenance hatch to the undercity.  

        Of course, he had thought of visiting a brothel many times before in his moments of desire – in fact, his position lent him a significant advantage to making those thoughts become action – he lived near the very bottom of the overcity, where the reach of the law was tenuous at best, but every time he came near, the thought became repulsive to him, he broke out in a cold sweat, began to shiver, and felt an overwhelming nausea which drained the color from the world and made the walls seem as though they melted around him into one great grey puddle pooled at the bottom of the world. It puzzled him as he must’ve puzzled the brothel-goers, who had never seen even a peep of his cloak as they catcalled and caroused their way from establishment to unsavory establishment.

        Late summers seemed to be a season of change for him, ever since that first trip to the beach had set the precedent. It was in the late summer that he last saw the girl, who’d been such a fixture in his daily life. The time was late, in the transient moments of the day’s autumn, and the carriage had been emptier than usual. He sat diagonally across from her; close enough that he could make out the finer details of her face, but far enough that from her vantage point, he was simply another tired old man appreciating the fine scenery which passed them by, and on that day, it was indeed quite beautiful. With late summer came the rains which heralded the arrival of cold weather and washed away the last of summer's dying warmth, light showers in the evening with the sun’s retirement, pouring from cotton-like strands of cloud tinged pink by the sunset. The sky on those magical afternoons was a radiant purple which had no equivalent in the gaudy neon signage at the nadir of the overcity, or in the atrophied remnants of nature which occupied the streets below.

         His glance had met her eyes by accident, as he watched her porcelain cheeks, half-glazed by the faltering beams of light which saturated through the windows of the train, where tiny beads of precipitation scintillated gently from the world speeding by outside. She smiled at him, catching him off-guard. He realized that they were the only two people in the compartment, as he returned the smile with a subdued upturning of his lips. The train glided into an arcology, and the outside world dimmed momentarily, before returning in the orange-yellow glow of the station lights. The doors of the train slid open with a pneumatic hiss to a desolate platform, before closing again.  The automated voice of the train announced the name of the next station, as they started off again.

        The drone of metal on metal filled his ears, but over that, a strange, muted cotton-like consistency developed. With a start, he noticed that the girl’s lips were moving. He leaned in closer, realizing that she was speaking to him, and apologized, telling her that he couldn’t hear her properly over the sound of the train. It was an impromptu sort of declaration, made out of her own excitement and the queer sense of intimacy which being the only two travelers on the train lent the situation. She began again, smiling exuberantly, and told him that she was graduating.

        Graduating. The word struck him, reminded him that time marched on to a steady cadence, that nothing was eternal. In the window behind the girl, he saw his own reflection. A man well into middle age stared back at him, with crow’s feet on the corners of his eyes and a subtle hint of grey in his thinning hair and unkempt stubble. It surprised him that he was no longer the supple youth which existed in his memories. How had he grown old so quickly? It felt as though he had barely lived, passing each year by uneventfully and peacefully, taking each day with as much of the same laid-back tranquility and nostalgia as he had the last. He set the thought aside momentarily, as he congratulated the girl, smiling again with his thin lips – lips not of a young man, but of a defeated old crone, he thought as he did so.

        She glowed proudly in that praise of his, and announced that she had gained acceptance to an Imperial Academy, and would be going as soon as the two week long autumn break ended and classes resumed. He recognized the name of the institution she said she would be studying at – it was his old school. He mentioned it to her, and she responded with wide-eyed surprise and enthusiasm. It was as though they had suddenly become old companions in a matter of seconds – though for him and his quiet observation, he had felt that way for a long while – as she asked him about his experiences at the school, about how much he had enjoyed the courses, advice for studying, or what life was like there at the Academy.

        He felt quite overwhelmed as he replied to her questions, drawing on memories he had long suppressed, though the act itself gave him a strange sensation – was this what it was like to have a child? Eventually, the seemingly-inexhaustible fountain of questions finally dried up – her enthusiasm made him feel even more morose and archaic than he actually was. Seizing the opportunity, he asked a question which had baffled him and his silent observation for many years – what exactly was she reading on her handheld?

        The question seemed to catch her off-guard, as she had grown accustomed to listening to his hesitant, half-coherent memories and offering spontaneous suggestions which she hoped would calibrate his incontinent recollection while he struggled to remember details. To his surprise, she answered bashfully, with little of the adolescent fervor she seemed to be brimming with, telling him that they were mostly Old Earth classics, largely forgotten to the masses. She told him that she had always loved old things, ever since she first glimpsed slices of the undercity from a train carriage much like the one they were sitting in right then during her early childhood as she was taken by her parents on a seaside excursion. The coincidence of that amused him, and he asked if she had ever walked through the undercity.

        She replied no, that the darkness and the lifelessness scared her too much, and that she had too few friends to organize a trip, even if she wanted to. However, she added, that she wanted one day to visit Old Earth, and to see the ruins of the great cities spoken about in her literature. To that, he commented that it was very far from the edges of the empire, and doubted that she could ever make it so far. That seemed to set her in a foul mood, and the conversation died off shortly after.

        The last words which she spoke to him were as she alighted from the train at her stop, as she swore to him that she would one day visit Old Earth, and prove him wrong. The sheer petulance and childish innocence of her statement caught him off guard. As he watched her back shrink to the size of a hazy dot in the distance, barely visible in the twilight, another strange sound filled the now-empty carriage. It took him quite a while to realize that he was laughing.