Self-Referencing

Not intentionally. It just happened. Another teaser from Maroli Tango.

Chasm City, Anchor Freehold, Eeka

Chasm City was named for a deep rift in the planet’s mantle, beyond which lay a torn-up wasteland, thought by experts to have suffered a natural calamity in the distant past, dismissing an ancient oral history describing laser bombardment from outer space

A third of the city was built upon an impossibly massive bridge spanning the chasm, promoted by the architect as a platform for an airborne community, someday, when anti-gravity was invented.

Anti-gravity was a less-than-400-year-old myth, and now that he was about to stir the pot with a Secret History TV show, it seemed to Dori Fila that someone would soon get the bright idea of excavating the wasteland.

He told his Uncle Lem, “Don’t you think we ought to head that off with some sort of national parks decree?”

Lem replied, “Either that or start digging it up ourselves.”

The extended Fila clan was in town for the Secret History preview, playing at the Bridge Theater, sponsored by Fila Wholesale Grocers.

Dori was nervous about the event, in part because he was sure to run into his second cousin, who he’d once promised to marry.

They were twelve years old at the time. According to her brother, she was talking about it again.

Uncle Lem had a gaggle of potential series sponsors corralled in the theater mezzanine. Chasm City Coffee was passing out tee-shirts. The house lights dimmed twice. The place was packed. People were still looking for seats.

Secret History: Episode 1 – The Illusion of Gravity was graced with an exquisitely ordinary opening scene; a motor coach traveling south, carrying the soon-to-be heroic figure Rivan Saraf and his parents to a resort city where the mother, a famous vocalist, would deliver the last public performance of her career.

It was a languorous start. Furry people, descended from tree lemurs, on an alien planet, demonstrating how the story’s landscape could be familiar and fantastic at the same time.

Dori Fila had worried about pacing, but when the roof came off the technology building at Nalanda University the audience was on the edge of their seats.

While Dori was taking a bow, an attendee asked, “How could a collective of independent producers make something like this?”

He replied, “Our work isn’t about the artists who put it together. We’ll reveal ourselves after the story is told.”

Despite having not seen his kissing cousin for many years, Dori had fond memories and thought, if she felt the same way, she deserved to be sought out.

It was a joyous reunion and, to his surprise, he came away considering the prospect of courting her again.

Image by Andre Mouton from Pixabay