Tags: nudity, re-edit

I spent the rest of the afternoon walking the various streets of the city, familiarizing myself with the architecture.

Houses were all identical and didn’t have windows, which seemed rather odd.

At first, they reminded me of something I couldn’t place my finger on until it clicked in my mind that these houses were actually made of shipping containers covered with what appeared to be bricks made of mud, some of which were still bare or partially covered.

The original builders of the town probably didn’t have much resources and possibly decided to build their houses from the containers used to drop on the surface the various tools needed for the city.

Space containers were wider than standard inter modal Earth containers and certainly sturdier.

The settlers simply cut a hole in the ceiling to install a ventilation unit, and on one of the sides to add a normal house door. I had heard that many original settlers converted their now useless containers into temporary housing but I had never heard of permanent houses built with them and certainly not in such a wide scale!

In the beginning, they probably kept them as is, but decided to pile mud bricks on the sides to make the city look nicer. Perhaps the bricks even helped with insulation: I knew the weather was rather constant, but nights might be chilly and the sun constantly shining on the dark containers might turn them into toaster ovens during the day.

The city itself was simple. Streets were unpaved and there were no cars or vehicles within the city.

I did see a few trucks and buses parked on the outskirt of town, but this was otherwise a pedestrian city.

The only really modern part of city was the 2 elevated monorail tracks which were perpendicular to one another. One stretched on both sides of the city along with what I believe was the equator while the other one only stretched North. I made a mental note to ask if there were other cities on the planet.

Three trains were parked on the equator and one train on the North-bound rail. It made me wonder how three trains could exist on the same rail. I could see two, one going in each direction, but if two went East there was no way the furthest one could return before the second one came home. It seemed possible however to drive past the station, so that a East train could go West if no train was in the way.

The two tracks didn’t meet so trains couldn’t change axis but there was a platform between them to allow exchange of material directly from one another. The platform was “wide” enough on the east-west axis to board, well, four trains!

The 8 streets leaving from main plaza didn’t have labels on them but it didn’t seem to be a problem. Each house door had a unique number hand painted. All of the houses on the same street had the same final digit.

One street only had house numbers finishing in 1, while another had house numbers ending in 5 and so on.

The first house on the left on the first street was house number 11. Next to it was house number 21.Their neighbors were house number 31 and number 41.

After a few houses, the streets were far enough from each other to allow houses to be placed in the “backyard” of their neighbors.

As such, house 71 was located between house 51 and house 91, but behind them, with only a few feet between house 51 and 91.

After 10 houses, the numbers continued with 101 and 111 and eventually, houses were located three levels deep so that there were 3 and eventually 5 houses located away from the main street between each pair of street side houses.

The last house of each street was still in the three digits meaning there were less than 100 houses per street and thus, less than 800 houses in the city, not enough for a population of 4000 even if a lot of those were kids. Plus, each house was too small to allow a lot of kids to live in. There was perhaps only enough space for one bedroom.

At the end of many of the streets were big buildings, usually a little further apart from the last house to allow for future growth.

At the end of street #1 was of course the space port complex with it’s huge warehouses and automated facilities such as the town clinic. It was so wide that is even reached to the end of street #2.

At the end of street #3 was the school. I was able to walk in the vast corridors and saw that even young girls didn’t wear clothes, but oddly enough in the older classes, boys were absent. The school seemed to teach elementary school to both boys and girls but to offer high school only to girls.

At the end of street #6 was a warehouse containing grains and even refrigerated rooms with meat and fruits. Nothing was locked and there was no security guards anywhere.

Street #8 had a huge dormitory whose purpose escaped my mind until I saw the nursery. One of the nurses informed me that kids in the city slept in the common dormitory and not with their parents.

At first I was horrified that kids didn’t get to know their parents well, but I realized that I had spent my life in a separate house from my parents raised almost solely by a nanny. I was assured that parents still played a part in their kid’s education but that with this method, women could have a lot of kids without hurting their share too much. There were other buildings to explore but when I came back from the dormitory, the old lady asked me to join the city at the banquet, at the city hall located at the end of street #4

Series Navigation

«Harmony Chapter 5: CustomsHarmony Chapter 7: The banquet»

Tags: nudity, re-edit