Talenkynic remembers Zylmor

The tension inside the bubble of Dromdrevc was exhilirating. After years of painting portraits of politicians and rulers I was alive. My natural artform of landscapes, based only on images created by others on Zylmor or still images captured by what you would think of as photographs but with more depth was despised in the city. My family lived on the far continent in the open, I communicated through mind-talk weekly, mother complained about the dust, father moaned about poverty and my sibs, Tessina and Zeuteronomy chatted about friends I had known, at the time of the genocide I had been exhiled from them for seven of your years and had grown from the child prodigy of eight to an almost fully developed female of fifteen. The last year had been particularly fraught with anxiety to escape as my time of captivity was over as soon as I reached sixteen. Credit-bars were delivered monthly to my life-parents as payment for the enslavement of their youngest child. As a small child Dromdrevc was awe-inspiring, a giant atmospheric bubble guarded against the elements, tall towers of housing units, business blocks and in the centre, a tower of shiny metal that reached up to the very tip of bubble, it was in here, the Royal Campus that I was to live and work. Work, I discovered was not to use my natural talent of reproducing vast canvases of landscsapes from memory or mythology, but was to catalogue an ever increasing number politabubs and the ruling charters. Charters were families who could prove their lineage back to the beginning of time, there were usually three or four clans living in the campus, they were a vain bunch, each portrait was proudly hung in the main concourse and because of their jealousy, repeats were frequent. One man-crown had a portrait booked every season, every colour found in Dromdrevc had been used in his costumes, each one more extravagant than the last as his girth also expanded. It was in his chamber I first heard about the Concavity, and the Galymonter people who yearned the power of Concavity. Galies as they were known had come from the neighbouring planet of Prusson, at first wanting to trade and as the polit-bubble was on seasonal break the Charters met with them and thrashed out a trade route between the peoples but their vanity made them show off the Concavity Orb, and exaggerated the properties of the laws of the index of refraction, with the wave velocities over-rated. I had never believed in the power of the concavity orb and had joined with other non-believers, we met in the concourse only three of us at a time and discussed possibilities. We were the brightest minds on all of Zylmor, punished we felt for being so intelligent by enslavement as children. We pondered on if this was to knock our inquisitive minds to an imaginary block as the tasks we were given numbed us. Piotreya, an inventor of vast electrical circuits spent her time making and changing light sources for the Charters and Yandryl was poet and playwright, he voice could lift you to the highest peak, he wrote ditties for the politabubs and their families so instead of being stirred by his words we slept by them. We had all completed our formal education in our early years while our sibs were still studying, attaining levels of expertise we had mastered at three or four. The Charters did not like us meeting together, so we kept the meeting light, with fake linguistics to suggest a frothy impromptu tryst rather than the reality of theoretical discussions on propulsion, experimentation and the politabubble. Each of my portraits contained a symbol of rebellion to inspire the unruly. Piotreya linked systems together until she had voyeuristic control over the whole subsystem within the bubble ans within each ditty that Yandryl created was one phrase that did not fit but was code for our mini rebellion.