The City of Omni+Baal, or, Nature is an Infinite Dodecahedron Whose Centre is Everywhere and Whose Circumference is Nowhere. by Davis Schneiderman Copyright © 2004 This book is from BlazeVOX.org. All work in this edition under copyright. All rights revert to author upon publication. All rights reserved. Book design Geoffrey Gatza
[email protected] 2 Forestar Accommodations. Viewscreen rises. Omni+Baal is a trading post, border-town, and colonial fabrication on the edge of Megalopolis dominion. Infinite cameras and recording devices operate in perpetual motion, disregarding the laws of base physics, lodged in dirty public restrooms, chiseled between the standard-issue Gideon copies of the Upanishads, implicit in the dank of multi-level bureaucracies, surgically implanted into cyborg tsetse flies and malaria mosquitoes. To the east lie the contours I have come from, the final tendrils of the Alamüte- Megalopolis in sparser and sparser permutations, oases of similarity…workers bees form magnificent, celestial honeycombs in the sky…integrate their buzz into militant city-noise tapeloops. Due west contains the Cities of Unknown Quantity. Mongol territory. Rumors of government immunizations run rampant in order to best contain disease; and while officially denied, the Mongol Medicinal Ministry is said to be almost thirty years ahead of the Persians, the space program nearly fifty… Omni+Baal is the last spot where memories can be memories. As such, a comical place. Upsided by the specious reasoning that characterizes all transactions within the DOME, between questionable annexes bordering empty spaces, I realize that my passage through this town is no more random than the endless catacombs I have been trenching through these past 3 indeterminable months, no more accidental than the apples of delicate fiber perched in orchard limbs like static, frozen robins, the cornucopias of urn-shaped gourds adorning the bathhouses and ambisexual barbershops.