Five chapters · one continuous descent
Night
Glow
A rain-lit fall through a city that never agreed to be one place. Everything you are about to see — the towers, the wires, the weather, the advertising that will not stop talking — is generated at runtime. No photographs. No footage. Only geometry, light and rain, moved by your scroll.
Chapter One · 下層
Ground
Rain
Street level is the only place in Rokujō where the sky is a rumour. Sixty metres of overbuild sit on top of it, so the weather arrives second-hand: condensation off the transit deck, runoff from the towers, a fine chemical drizzle that never fully stops. The neon does not illuminate the street. It stains it.
The city stopped being built and started being stacked.
Chapter Two · 積層
The
Stack
Above the shopfronts the district turns vertical and impersonal. Transit rails thread between cores at four levels. Freight drones hold station in the gaps. From here the towers stop reading as buildings and start reading as circuitry seen edge-on — lit rows, dark rows, a fault line of dead floors where a landlord stopped paying.
Chapter Three · 電脳市
Wired
Market
The market is the one level with a face. A hundred metres of projection surface, half of it broken, all of it selling. The big holograph on the east core has been mid-sentence for eleven years — the loop survived the company that bought it. Nobody turns it off, because nobody remembers who could.
Chapter Four · 上昇
Above
The Line
At six hundred metres the rain stops being weather and becomes a floor. The smog line is flat, lit from underneath by everything you just walked through, and the noise finally drops out. What is left is the orbital relay coming up in the east, a red disc large enough to be architecture, and the first silence in four kilometres.