/lit/ - Literature

Teeg walked around the outer edge of the skywalk, his hand sliding against the smooth metal railing. He was twenty three sectors up, in the commercial district. He had just finished getting his license renewed and was now preparing to head back to his headquarters on the other side of the city.
He missed the cowboy days, before the profession of bounty hunting had become so regulated. He was one of the last to conform to the new ways, but when the federation started throwing 'rouge' bounty hunters in jail, he figured it would be beneficial to just bight the bullet and accept that times were changing. Here on earth the federation had too much control. You could try and resist, but chances are it wouldn't work out for you in the long run. On Mars things were different, or so he had heard. The same regulations were in place, technically, but there was a serious lack of federal law enforcement, meaning the cowboys were free to just continue on as they always had.
He looked over the railing of the skywalk. If you stuck your head out far enough, and looked to the side, you could look across the seemingly endless crevice between buildings that just went on and on until it disappeared into a thin ray of light. Looking up, you could see just a touch of natural daylight, peaking in between the steel behemoths that lined the earth. For the most part you would just see railings and maybe a person or two poking their heads out, same as you were currently doing.
You could look down, but you probably wouldn't want to. Most people who lived fifteen sectors or higher liked to just pretend that there wasn't a down, and who could blame them? Looking down was like looking into the deep dark caverns of hell, and if you ever were to actually go down there you would swear that's exactly what it was. Or it was at least as close to hell as your were likely to find here in the realm of mortals.
Hadn't god once punished mankind for trying to build a structure that could challenge the heavens? It was called the tower of Babel, if Teeg remembered correctly. Well, god must have lost that battle, some ten thousand years after the rebirth of his son, because that's exactly what mankind had done. They did it again and again and again, until the heavens themselves were the stomping grounds of men, and their towers raised from the earth with one elongated middle finger piercing the sky and shouting 'fuck you'.