Prompt:
5s
There were spaceships going out of the city. Back and forth, like things sliding along a wire, but there was only a wire of force, of course. Part of the city, the lower part, was brightly lighted with what must have been mercury vapor glow, I decided. Blue green. I felt sure men didn’t live there – the light was wrong for eyes. But the top of the city was so sparsely lighted. Then I saw something coming down out of the sky. It was brightly lighted. And it sank straight to the center of the great black-and-silver mass of the city. w the city was deserted. There were machines going about the streets, repair machines, you know. They couldn’t understand that the city didn’t need to go on functioning, so they were still working. The city was clean and orderly. The city was divided into two sections, a section of many strata where machines functioned smoothly, save for a deep humming beat that echoed through the whole city like a vast unending song of power. The entire metal framework of the place echoed with it, transmitted it, hummed with it. The entire lower block of the city was given over to the machines. Thousands. But most of them seemed idle, or, at most, running under light load. I recognized a telephone apparatus, and not a single signal came through. There was no life in the city. Finally, I went up to the top of the city, the upper level. It was a paradise.There were shrubs and trees and parks, glowing in the soft light that they had learned to make in the very air. They had learned it five million years or more before. Two million years ago they forgot. But the machines didn’t, and they were still making it. It hung in the air, soft, silvery light, slightly rosy, and the gardens were shadowy with it. There were no machines here now, but I knew that in daylight they must come out and work on these gardens, keeping them a paradise for masters who had died, and stopped moving,
Artist