Schematix

The road to Schematix is not paved but drawn; one follows a line of charcoal dust that leads across the salt flats to a harbor of grey water. The city is an archipelago of basalt platforms, each just large enough for a single drafting table, connected by narrow bridges of iron. From the shore, the only sound that carries over the water is the crisp, constant scratching of ten thousand styluses on tablets of black slate.

The inhabitants of Schematix do not trade in goods; they trade in the plans for goods, in the schematics for desire. A merchant might arrive with a bolt of raw silk, but he leaves with a diagram showing how to convince a person they cannot live without its touch. Another brings a sack of saffron and departs with a blueprint for a hunger only that spice can satisfy; a third brings a new gear for a machine and is sold the seven arguments that prove its necessity.

The citizens themselves are gaunt, subsisting on ink and weak tea. They care little for the objects their work brings into being in faraway lands. Their entire world is the flat surface of the slate, the patient etching of a line, the cold logic of a scaffold built to hold a belief.