page_0: "\"Beyond this point is a gaping chasm. Maybe it's one of your eye sockets.\"

You run your fingers over the sign outside your building, grimacing as you read the braille. If the Ocular Superiors are putting up warnings, it means new sinkholes have formed overnight. You only hope the delay will not make you late for court, where you are expected to pass ruling on a case of principal importance. Despite the best efforts of the Superiors, the detours they mark out for the blind must ultimately be laced through a City where buildings form and collapse like the surface of some alien sea. Inexpedient, but better than falling into a sinkhole.

Sinkholes have long plagued the City and are generally thought to be connected with its epidemic of blindness, though a more exact causal relationship has not yet been determined. All speculate, however, with such a surfeit of diagnostic power that the mystery itself has become integral to the City's economy. As an organ of the Baron's justice, you have remained prudently tight-lipped on the matter, though privately attribute both phenomena to the \"protobarons\" - what you get when the blind try to upgrade the blind into Ocular Superiors. Beneath the City's crust, the protobarons gouge out new sinkholes and fatten their grubs on the eye-meat of whatever falls from the surface."

page_1: "Subterrene monsters impinge on your blindsight as you grope your way down the alley, following a trail of posts and guidelines. A distant rumble is probably a new sinkhole forming, but it's nothing the Superiors can't handle. The highway is down literally, having subducted the water table, or so a sign informs you, adding that you would be down there too if not for your Ocular Superiors. You are rerouted on an unfamiliar course: over fences and through buildings, eventually up into the rooftops where the sinkholes are deeper. All around you, old growth superstructures are calving into the abyss, their girders stretching like taffy while chain gangs knock out hasty replacements. As you breach the City's canopy, it becomes impossible to tell if these sounds of armageddon are coming from the building next door or if they have traveled for miles.

Fortunately, it doesn't matter, because the vision of the Ocular Superiors remains dependable. When a sign enjoins you to \"Jump off the roof, you taffing lemming\", you do so without second thought, and the drop invariably proves to be safe. This is how it always was for you and everyone you have ever known. To disregard the Superiors is to have a death wish.

Detouring through a cathedral, you overhear a fragment of the sermon below: \"Blindsie be the Garden wall, and blindsie be the shrubs. Sees they not the patternings in which they art arranged, but undiminished be the exalty beauty of His design.\"."

page_2: "Syncretists*. The mezzanine greenhouse is another giveaway, though to you its stained glass walls differ little from concrete. You are not generally squeamish in such places, being prudently tight-lipped about all religious matters, but when you trip over a collection plate full of eyeballs (or are they prostheses? no telling what is organic any more), it nearly breaks your kayfabe. You hasten back to the rooftop cacophonocalypse, which is at least, by now, familiar. The facade is Low Poly Revival and resists your ascent but for the studs of a braille graffito left by a fellow traveler, which reads: \"The cure for blindness is SINKHOLES!\" That's more like it, you think, but once again you are prudently tight-lipped.

You descend a flying buttress, or one that is flying as the result of a sinkhole. At the end is another commandment from the Ocular Superiors: \"Take a leap of faith, like in that movie you didn't see\". It occurs to you that the City has evolved considerably since the Metal Age and the Age of Sanity before it. But this is no time to reflect on progress. You aim yourself forward and jump... -->




* (see \"One Man's Trash\", inverse winner of the TDS 20th anniversary contest)"