Cupertino

The road to Cupertino is not paved with stones but with thin sheets of polished glass, each scribed with an index number pointing toward a location that no longer exists. The air carries the faint, sharp smell of ozone, a byproduct of the cataloging engines that run day and night. The city is a reference to a perfect, orderly metropolis, a map drawn in the hope that its logic might one day manifest as brick and mortar.

Its few inhabitants are silent archivists. They do not build houses but instead maintain the great indexing machine, a vast scaffolding of copper wire and crystal lenses. Their sole task is to ensure that every object, every memory, every fleeting thought is assigned a unique identifier, cross-referenced against thirteen separate taxonomies of loss, and filed away in a library that has no doors.

Travelers who come seeking knowledge find only the index. The city of Cupertino was built to house a complete collection of the world's documentation, but the collection itself was misplaced long ago. Now, only the catalog remains, a flawless system for navigating a void.