Free ODD? by Jeff VanderMeer

entire sky is covered by one single uniform cloud, very high and utterly opaque. The darkness does have a cloudlike feltiness, and a murky quality that clear, windswept nights never have. All the same, the air in the streets is intoxicatingly fresh, cool and invigorating. The effect it has on his companion only goes to show that this impression is more than imagination. From a nearly somnolent trudging, the man’s step grows lighter and more dancer-like pace by pace. His carriage is more erect, and his eyes more bright. The village, what’s more, is answering his liveliness with lights and by some other, subtler effects X. can only just dimly take note of, but which do make it clear that activity of some kind, some happy bustling, is stirring in the houses.
    Lights dart out their flashes across the reviving village. Shadows lean and pivot against the ground, but the beautiful darkness of the night is not dispelled by these lights, which have no glare. It seems instead as if the night has flung open its windows here and there among the outlines of the buildings. There are no figures to be seen, but the hum of activity, still not quite audible or at least so quiet that it doesn’t disturb the pleasing silence of the night, is growing. He looks at his companion, who has unlaced his arm from his and is looking around himself in a transport of happiness, rubbing his hands together, then opening his arms in an invitation to embrace him, directed not at X., but at the town.
    “It is all the work of machines,” he says.
    “What, all this?” X. asks, waving at the village buildings.
    He turns, smiling broadly, and nods.
    Disappointment sweeps through X..
    “I had thought there were people here, greeting us,” X. says sadly.
    “No!” he replies, his gaiety still increasing. “Only machines.”
    “It seems . . . inappropriate somehow. These quaint, rustic buildings. That they should just be masks for some impersonal machinery.”
    “You would expect that in a city, wouldn’t you?” he asks, still gaily.
    “Well, yes! The modern city is nothing but machines.”
    “The modern city . . .”
    He says this in a tone that suggests more to come, but adds nothing. When he does speak again, it’s as if he were making a rejoinder to someone in another conversation, and now his voice has a bitter, recriminating tone, even if it has lost none of its gladness. It’s the embittered tone of one who can accuse another from a position of unquestioned innocence.
    “Modern cities . . . cruel cities . . . cities of weakness, cities without ritual.”
    “Yes,” X. says, eagerly. He wants to hear more.
    “When you dream,” the man says, suddenly addressing X. directly, “you dream of the city of reason and ceremoniousness.”
    “Of liberty and rest,” X. says.
    “Of order, uncoerced and spontaneous as a dance.”
    “Ordered with the precision of an improvisation.”
    “You can hear the singing of those machines which mankind slanders as being alien and inimical to it, and to nature itself, when it is by human hands that the innocent particles of nature are transformed into machines, and set to work by the application of natural principles. Machines are made in the human image. Man does not imitate them!”
    A weird light plays around his features as he says this. While he never ceases to look human and natural, at the same time there is a temptation to see his face as a hollow glass mask with luminous gases inside. As that luminescence grows, more lights come on all over the town, and X. begins to realize they are connected.
    “You are . . .” X. says, and stops, unable to manacle together the words he needs.
    “I am,” he says, nodding, evidently guessing X.’s thought. “Do you think this is something?” he asks, with the air of someone who is about to unfurl something more astonishing.
    The other can only nod.
    He tugs at his tie, undoing it, and pulls it from his collar. Then, twisting his hand around