Nightmare journey

wishes, wish and wish, does the city, unable to fight the creeping sickness, city wishing, slowly dies.
    Dies within it, all its peoples, cancer spreading like a fire, only days until its fingers lie hidden in every neighborhood. Cancer growing, faster, faster, sealing windows, closing doors, crushing rooms and smashing corridors, shifting, changing, eating the city, vomiting death to all its peoples, faster and faster, like a fire…
    The visual impressions that flooded over the espers were vivid enough to make the narrative many times more terrifying than it might otherwise have been. The five seated on the rocking deck of the Hadaspuri Maiden not only saw the holocaust, but seemed abruptly thrust into the very middle of it, as if they stood amid the crumbling walls, shrinking corridors and hideous cancerous explosion of growth…
    The city dying, sees its peoples dying, knows they trusted it, loved and lived and trusted it, knows it cannot let them perish as generations passed before. The city dying, knows these people, city's people every one, are the last that it will nourish, knows that if it loses these, it will be alone forever, past the ends of endless time and then some, without love and no more to cherish, lonely, lonely, aching city, city aching, wishing doom.
    The city's brain is unaffected, unreined to its failing flesh, brain of city, all detachable, immortal even with no home. The city schemes to save some peoples, not their bodies, but their minds, schemes and thinks and sees to do, how to do it, save them all. In its brain, cells go unused, once the center of regulation, but no more body to control, could be used, the city figures, could be used to house other souls, souls of peoples, minds no longer fettered by the earthly flesh. Holding fast to its rotted body, the city brain seeks out its peoples, seeks their auras, mental nimbus, seeks, secures and saves them all, holds and cherishes, contains them, all its lovely, loving children, given new homes in its brain…
    Then, in moments, the deed is done, city and peoples all are one, all flesh gone but minds remain, in the city's living brain. But a strange, unsettling feeling, courses through the city's brain, beats and pounds, calls out in anguish, like a beast refusing chains. Panic is the rush of souls, meeting hence from different poles, born of different worlds and finding, love and living not withstanding, that they have no common ground, city and peoples all fall down, all fall down, all fall down, down, down, down and down, city and peoples all fall down…
    The last image of the invisible creature's projections was of a huge, convoluted brain, lying in a dark cavern, nestled in gossamer webs, pulsing with life but lacking any body to encase it.
    The image flickered.
    Was gone.
    Slowly the five espers regained awareness of the real world…
    Then the creature that has been plaguing us, Chaney said, is the living city itself-or at least the brain of the city that survived the body's death.
    More than that, Melopina expanded. It's also the consciousness of a goodly portion of the millions of people who died in the city's collapse.
    All of them mad, Tedesco 'pathed.
    But why did they go insane? Kiera asked. I didn't fully understand that part of it.
    The city made the mistake of thinking that since it had lived with people, contained them for centuries, it fully understood them. But it was apparently from another world-perhaps brought to Earth as a seed by our early space travelers-and it could not hope to understand the human mind. When it meshed with them, it drove them mad and pushed itself over the brink.
    Melopina added to Tedesco's explanation. And since the brain is evidently immortal, it has trapped them in that state forever.
    Kiera shuddered. Perhaps we should return to the craters, find the thing and destroy it.
    Tedesco: I don't think so. I don't believe it wants to die.
    Kiera: But what does it have to live for?
    Tedesco: It has its compulsion.
    Come again?
    Tedesco: The city's behavior pattern reminds me of an ancient poem that survived the Last War. It was called “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'' and concerned an old sailor who spent his life repeating the story of a disaster at sea, compelled to repeat it as a form of penitence for his own complicity in that disaster. The city is a modern mariner.
    I believe you're right, Jask 'pathed. I don't sense its presence any longer. I believe we're free of our unseen companion.
    It's