Chapter 75: The Strip Between Worlds and the Toothy Men Who Wait There

Chapter 75: The Strip Between Worlds and the Toothy Men Who Wait There

Ecumenopolis 4 — the planetary colossus named with all the creativity of a bureaucrat choking on his own tax forms — was, like its six kin, a monument to contradiction. One of the seven glittering nails in the coffin of the Spartari solar system's ecological sanity, it loomed like a world halfway between divine ambition and cybernetic madness.

Ronnie had done a solid job painting the place with words on our approach, but words, even well-placed ones, are like trying to describe a hurricane with a haiku. Seeing the planet in person was something else entirely — something that pressed up against my eyeballs with the weight of scale.

At the equator, Ecumenopolis 4 bloated out at 150,000 kilometers of full planetary waistline. And the world, rather poetically, had split itself in two — not by politics or faith or language, but by aesthetic schizophrenia.