Prologue

Welcome back to the story. Where we last left off, I'd tried to walk a straight line, gone underground, nearly been trapped in a dungeon, barely escaped with my Drive intact, and wandered down to the harbour with my tail between my legs.

This task technically bookends all the others- I collected proofs for it on my way from task to task. Consider it a chapter to establish the setting of my SF0 stories.

Additionally, in most cases, I didn't actually go into the sites and wander around. These are, after all, active construction sites, and they are usually closed off for very good reasons. In a few cases, I was allowed by some very kind supervisors to head a couple of meters in and snap a few shots.

The stories ought to be read in the order "Straight Line", "Trespassing the Future", "First Sight", and "Trespassing".

This is part two.

II

Welcome to the most common sight in Halifax.



It's kind of an axiom around these parts that the roads are distilled shit. Dartmouth is the worst, but Halifax isn't great either. Potholes abound, construction and redevelopment is constant, and usually it is done quickly and sloppily. Add to the stack that our mayor is a thundering wooden-head with a bowl of porridge for a brain who won't spend a thin dime (if the city had a few to rub together) to fix things up, and driving in the Municipality rapidly becomes an exercise in seeing how long your suspension will hold out before it finally takes its toys and goes home.



Bottom line, its rare to go on a jaunt through the city and NOT see a place that you won't be able to go in 10 years. And since I had a little extra time on my way back from work, I decided to walk around a bit and show you a few of them.



You don't have to look far. The moment I step out of my office I am assaulted by visions of the past collapsing around my ears. Like an invasive disease, the future has broken into my workplace and begun propagating itself through the veins and flesh of the university. We'll recover, in time, but, like any illness, we will never be the same. But we will be immune, until the strain mutates and we find ourselves plagued again.



It may seem as though I have a dismal view of the future, but that's not the case. I just find the imagery terribly apt. Time affects us all, the unstoppable roll of the future demolishing parts of our lives and forcing us into putting up new ones, most good, some bad, many neutral. We inherit it at birth and we pass it on to our children. And, if given an even break, it will eventually kill us. All things besides, when you look at the persistent scaffolding and covering on buildings as you walk by, it's hard to miss their resemblance to tumorous growths, feeding like parasites on the city's history.



Perhaps I'm just jaded. Around here, construction doesn't always equate to good stuff happening. In fact, it usually heralds inconvenience, traffic, noise complaints, and so on, all in aid of new pavement that's going to be torn up in a year or so anyway. The fact of the matter is that I could stand on any stretch of road in Halifax and call it a place I won't be able to go in ten years. These patches of road will change so much, year to year.

Construction is a particular sore spot around Dalhousie. Rarely does a year go by that a patch of University property doesn't get obliterated in the name of Progress. The skyline is consistently marred by skeletal hulks, sentinels marking the locations where the battles between past and future have been fought, and the future has, as it always does, emerged victorious.



The rubble of what was once an active building, alive and full of light, scatters around their heels. Rarely do they spare a look for that which was, once. In this have they made their victory.



I leave the landing site of tomorrow and try to find my way back into today, but even my exit roads are incomplete, gaping scars in the landscape exposing the gravel lifeblood of the streets. Loud orange pylons cry out to passersby to avoid these pitfalls, but I'm in no mood to heed them.



Even as I leave the construction areas, I see small, temporary structures, erected in the wake of the construction, ready to disappear at a moment's notice once the bloody work of that which will be is completed.



It's not all so grim. After all, not all that gets demolished is alive and meaningful. Sometimes that which is replaced deserves its fate, decrepit and old, blighting the landscape by their presence. In their place, new buildings will arrive, fresh and ready to bring new life into the city. From the heart of the city to the borders of my forest, new ground is being laid, ground that will see yet the passage of years, the joy and sorrow of those to pass over and through it, and, in time, its own eventual demise and replacement.



Regrettably, though, this story doesn't end on a nice note. The fact is that Halifax is a port town, and the bitch is that in the world we live in, port towns have hard times ahead. The old sea level's cranking up, and the folks at the top don't much seem to care. In ten years, it's hard to say how much of our little town might have done the old Atlantis Shuffle. The problems of the world are not yet irreversible, but so few with the power to reverse them seem interested in doing so.

Humans go farther, build higher, and look ever more upward to the heavens, because we can and because we know we need to. In so many ways that's what makes us beautiful. I'll never be able to hate that in us. But there are days like this one, where I wish we could have stopped, so long ago, and charted a different course through our collective Bureaucracy of Desire.

In ten years, these buildings may be gone, replaced by newer, bigger, better constructions.

In ten years, the city may be gone, replaced by Halifax Bay.

I stood on the banks of my city, and watched the future roll in.

Epilogue

You know the man and the city, now see the rest of the adventure! My story of this adventure-filled July afternoon continues in part three, "First Sight".