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Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Mrs. Blumenthal, 55, of Florida, has been driving around the city for hours now. Since landing at O'Hare, she's taken in the fleeting sights of the northern and western neighborhoods. This afternoon, she'll barrel along the inexorable super-linearity of Western Avenue all the way down to the city limit before making a U-turn and returning to her hotel for the night. Tomorrow and for the rest of the week, she'll make the same perambulations.
Meanwhile, at a cavernous control room in one of the buildings at the Illinois Medical Super-Complex, doctors and technicians have been monitoring her driving through a mesh network of surveillance cameras scoping for the early tell-tale signs of a neurodegenerative disease. Every micro murmuration, every nano-flux, every subtle correction in her navigation is being recorded. Every speed, every acceleration, every direction — indeed her every reaction to this city turned diagnostic tool will be plotted. Then her medical tour of Chicago will be data mined.
At the end of the week, she'll be given her diagnoses report, although her consultation with the doctors will be a little hurried, as the FBI will be taking over the network for their annual probe for pederastic and terrorist behaviors.
Wednesday, January 19, 2011
A forest was allowed to grow and blanket the city after its roads and parking lots were depaved, its houses and skyscrapers carted away.
While the process of ecological succession took awhile, the desired climax community was reached in record time with the use of expert wilderness management strategies.
Encircling this 145,400-acre urban park is the successor city, thickly encrusted on a thin but continuous band of annexed suburban territory and sand nourished coastline. Separating the two is the new Michigan Avenue, still flower-potted and Art Nouveau-lighted but serviced with the longest subway line in the world. This grand boulevard has been tasked with the monumental job of stopping the city's sheer, vertiginous cliff-like streetwall (a mile-high in some places) from creeping into the woods.
Within are cabinets de verdure, or “rooms” cut into the woodland; the big cultural events take place here. They are all connected together by a network of allées, which are lined with topiaries of unrelentingly unvariegated design.
Beyond these formal clearings are hunting grounds, orchards, wildlife refuge areas, camping grounds and even an experimental Pleistocene Park. One can still detect the outlines and landforms of the old park system, but they're now mostly bramble patches dotted with the ruins of fountains.
All forms of dwelling are strictly prohibited, not even housing for park rangers on duty. However, the homeless and the hermits occasionally manage to avoid detection. When they are discovered, the homeless are swiftly evicted, heir hovels razed to the ground. On the other hand, the hermits merely get a warning, because their authentic hermitages have become fashionable landscape accessories again.
Monday, January 10, 2011
Unrivaled by even the demographic upheavals seen during the Great Migrations of earlier eras, almost overnight the tiny Muslim minority of Chicago exploded to constitute 99.9% of the city's population.
To now walk through its neighborhoods, their street signs all in Arabic except for those historic plaques dinged with mini bullet craters, is to walk through an amalgam of the streets of Dubai, Mecca, Baghdad and Kuala Lampur. Slick, hyper-consumerist modernity side by side with hyper-religiosity; bustling and heady amidst the charred remains of sectarian armageddons.
But you can't walk around Hyde Park, as the entire neighborhood is now the private walled compound of Louis Farrakhan, his Domus Aurea of sorts. The University of Chicago there has been converted into the largest madrasah in the world.
Converted as well are the churches, synagogues, temples and every other places of worships; into mosques as expected. None of them could ever rival the Hagia Sofia, so the Gene Summer-designed, Mies van der Rohe-inflected McCormick Place was consecrated into the Jama Masjid of Chicago.
At night, vacationing Saudi Arabian princes and bored local youths cruise the inner boroughs American Graffiti-style and then drag race all along Lake Shore Drive, whose beaches are filled during the day by women frolicking in their own segregated venue of abandon, in burkinis. The most reckless and self-destructive men and boys, the so-called drifters, they make deep runs into the militia-infested Christian outer boroughs.
Despite the occasional car crashes and border skirmishes, and also the mass public funeral of a much revered ayatollah, the city is a quiet place. Most Muslims you talk to would love to live here, and in fact, due to its liberal immigration policy, autonomous from that of the federal, it's the most popular destination for refugees, asylum seekers and others violently displaced from Muslim countries. Thus, exiled political figures fighting for reforms in their home countries often mingle with oil executives, their companies' world headquarters relocated to here in a Halliburton-style attempt to curry favor with Arab sheiks, Iranian clerics and Iraqi MPs.
So many immigrate that the city's population doubles every decade. And every decade, one Dubai is built.
Wednesday, August 11, 2010
Beneath the city is the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator, interlocking or in tangents with the next dozen on the list of the highest-energy accelerators.
Everyday they collide particles to produce a steady supply of Higgs bosons, which are stabilized, concentrated and routed as a beam to one of the many gantries located throughout the city. Able to rotate 360º, each three-story gantry can shoot the subatomic particle beam in the correct angle at the cancer patient lying inside its treatment chamber. Precisely calibrated, the Higgs bosons decay the moment they hit the tumor, and in the process of decaying or escaping into other dimensions, they degrade the mutant cells.
This super-machine, then, is one giant medical device, the most expensive in the history of medicine. It's also the most costliest to use. A second under its therapeutic beam can bankrupt a small nation. In the aftermath of the repeal of health care reform acts, treatment regimes have leapfrogged into mindboggling territory.
Practically everyone in the metropolitan area is employed to support these machines, either as administrators, research scientists, the army of engineers who maintain and repair the thousands of complex parts strewn throughout the city, the security staff who police the miles of tunnels and profile saboteurs, or the cooks who feed them all.
The infrastructure to generate their massive energy requirements might as well be another city, complete with its own support staff.
An urban legend most likely but it is often said that so powerful and so many are the magnets used in the machines that Chicago is slightly out of phased with the space-time continuum of the rest of the country.
What isn't an urban legend though are the rocks levitating in some neighborhoods.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
All records of the city's subterranean infrastructures are no longer in the public domain, their maps classified by the federal government as state secrets.
Public works employees have to undergo extensive background checks and sign non-disclosure agreements. Those who break their non-disclosure agreement, Guantanamo awaits. Similarly, urban adventurers are charged with espionage if found hiking down in the sewers and subway tunnels. If they try to evade capture, security forces have orders to shoot to kill.
Digging is banned, so among other things, this means that gardening is done with containers, hydroponics, roofs, walls or zeppelins. Exposed ground is carpeted with feral turf or, more likely, prairie grasslands that once grew thick in the region. Parks are mere prosceniums on which plants-on-wheels and fountains-on-wheels are rearranged in countless configurations by parkgoers and passing storms, until of course they've all been wheeled away and there are no more planters to play with. This botanical piracy is but one outward manifestation of strange pathologies brewing in a city now geologically censored.
Lest they were to sprout DIY tunnels that might accidentally brush up against or puncture the network, a lunatic Rachel Whiteread was let loose on all the city's basements. Open any door that once led to those lower floors, and you'll be greeted with bare concrete.
Meanwhile, all post-blackout structures, from houses to street lights to skyscrapers, must use non-geologically invasive support systems. You can't plant anything. As a result, the city's famed skyline is beginning to look like Tatlin towers wrapped inside a jungle gym designed by Superstudio with buttresses sloping down towards the periphery. Hanging jewel-like within are the Millennium and Grant Parks re-landscaped as a cubic shrub and a parterred cylinder.
A boy went missing once when he fell down a blank spot on the map, but no search party was ever organized. There were no prayer vigils, no pack lunches and no strapping firemen. There were no television vans camped for days on end in front of the boy's home to provide 24-hour news coverage of a local melodrama for international consumption. There was no prolonged national hysteria over his fate, and definitely no photogenic heros confected by the whims of the masses. The missing kid was simply censored from the day's news.
If only his parents knew the existence of those anarchist cartographers. They could have helped. Armed with GPS-equipped mobile laser scanners, these spiritual descendants of Harry Lime and Trevor Paglen nightly infiltrate in secret these dark geographies to map them anew, to reclaim their lost cultural heritage. Their ultimate goal, however, is to solve the mystery of why these rhyzomatic contours were redacted in the first place, hopefully before the last cell member is caught or gets lost permanently in the interdimensional knotted terrain the city had constructed to deter and imprison aberrant surveyors.
But the grief stricken parents didn't and eventually were plainly informed that they never had that child. The boy, like the maps, was redacted.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Over a century since retail magnate A. Montgomery Ward sounded the battle cry to defend the city's mandate to keep its lakefront a public common that is “forever open, clear and free of any buildings, or other obstructions whatever,” a similar call to arms was made for the Chicago River, to make it forever free of industries, private developments and sewage.
The ensuing political battles were bruising, and not every building was cleared away, but at least now one can stroll the entire length of the river. In fact, starting at any point, you can walk or bike or jog uninterrupted on both banks of the river along a circuitous route and end right where you had begun, without having to go up flights of stairs or cross streets and fight through traffic.
Along the way, you might encounter kayaking parties setting off from mini-harbors, anglers, community theaters staging avant-garde interpretations of The Odyssey, and triathletes in training. As it is now a baptismal font for future swimming Olympians, your roundabout will be soundtracked by the ecstatic screams of children frolicking in the waters. A rarer sight, of course, is a riverside cremation at one of the ghats. During the winter, ice swimming clubs and mobile skating rinks proliferate.
Every four years, the entire river is artificially frozen for a monthlong frost fair.
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
After a series of negotiations between the United Nations, the U.S. Government, the State of Illinois, the City of Chicago and various ward aldermen and their constituents, sovereignties over several neighborhoods on the South and West sides were transfered to Pacific island nations whose territories had been made inhabitable by rising sea level. Generously compensated, residents of those neighborhoods relocated to the North side.
The new residents, who were also generously compensated by carbon-intensive nations, in perpetuity or until global warming subsides, then set about colonizing their new homeland: an archipelago of extraterritorial enclaves carved out of the city. Some razed everything to the ground, then unearthed and discarded everything that was underground; they tilled the earth anew. Others adapted to and modified what was there, resulting in a patois of Midwestern and Pacific cultural traditions.
Still another nation-in-exile housed their entire neighborhood-state in greenhouses, a City of Glass simulating a tropical memory, luminous at night, gleaming during the day.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
After scientists had perfected the technique of splicing human DNA into the DNA of a tree, the Bureau of Forestry, the department which is responsible for the more than half a million trees on public right-of-ways, entered into a business partnership with the multi-billion dollar funeral industry to turn the city's urban forest into a living necropolis.
In previous revenue-generating schemes, the perennially cash-strapped city had privatized its airports, toll roads, parking meters &mdash much of its public infrastructure, in fact &mdash which proved disastrous. Not so with this arboreal venture.
The number of trees increased exponentially, even the types of species used. Every tree is lush and vigorous, since not only are they well maintained by caretakers with an eternally flowing revenue stream but also by the bereaved, who in their grief come daily to tend lovingly to the trees and the surrounding planting beds. Tear-drenched anguish has been appropriated into the city beautification program.
The sidewalks, too, look immaculate. Not a single stray candy wrapper can be found, and no one dares urinate on the botanically re-encoded dead. The pavement, after all, is now hallowed ground.
On the Day of the Dead, the streets in the city's many Hispanic neighborhoods become the site of deliriously exuberant block parties. Arbor Day is moved to coincide with Memorial Day.
Later, Google pays exorbitantly for the rights to geospatilize and network the data on all the trees onto its suite of web mapping service applications. Consequently, gravesite visits needn't be performed exclusively in real space; the pilgrimage can now be undertaken virtually. From anywhere and at anytime, you can check up on how the tree is faring, see it grow and mature and bear transgenic fruits, watch as your loved one unconsciously experience an after life.
