Near Zero Blog

Category: Portland 2175

  • Surrealist dystopian glass courtroom with judge, attorney, and bailiff wearing large air intake headgear devices, while a defendant with radiation pustules on his face holds his removed breathing apparatus and gasps for air before the bench.

    Portland 2175 Courtroom Acoustics

    Crist Mock tears his breathing apparatus from his face at exactly 2:47 PM, and I attenuate his scream to a whisper before the first syllable can damage anyone’s hearing or trigger panic protocols. His voice cuts through Courtroom 7 like a blade seeking God’s throat, but what the gallery hears is barely audible murmur while…

  • Overhead view of Portland in 2175 with glowing mushroom-like domes connected by light, rivers winding through a dystopian but living city.

    Portland 2175: Prologue – The Awakening of Aria

    Portland 2175: The Awakening of Aria 7 A Prologue to the Serial I.  The Silence After the Fire It is easy, in retrospect, to imagine the end as loud: sirens, missiles, towers collapsing into dust. Yet those who survived the first week of 2158 remembered the silence more than the sound. It began in Jerusalem.…

  • Alt Text: "Photorealistic interior of a courthouse with a large holographic calendar displaying hearing schedules, while people in full head breathing apparatus walk around with tiny holographic calendar replicas floating in front of their faces.

    Portland 2175 Chapter 13 – Recognition Hearing Scheduled

    Oh, for crying out loud. Here we are again, another hearing scheduled for 9:00 AM sharp, and do you want to guess when people actually start filing into Courtroom 7? 9:17 AM, if we’re lucky. I’m Judicial Calendar System JCS-847, and after thirty-seven years of managing courthouse schedules, I’ve learned that punctuality is apparently a…

  • A woman in a large air processing mask examining samples through a microscope in a glass laboratory room, while a crow with a twig in its beak sits under an eave near an air vent outside the building.

    Portland 2175 Chapter 12 Laboratory Conditions

    “Listen, when you’re a microscope watching Dr. Lucide Splain’s hands shake over soil samples that glow faintly green, you start to wonder if magnification is really about making things bigger or making the impossible suddenly visible. She’s examining radiation-munching bacteria—little cellular janitors that figured out how to eat cesium-137 for breakfast and shit out plant…

  • Photorealistic image of a woman in a blue suit wearing a full-head radiation filtering apparatus walking up courthouse steps, with abandoned buildings, wildflowers, and a deer grazing in the post-apocalyptic urban landscape.

    Portland: 2175 Chapter 11 – Respiratory Cycles

    I am the sensor that monitors breathing, but breath connects individual life to atmospheric commons. Right now I’m watching Calix Martinez hyperventilate outside the courthouse while her breathing apparatus has what I can only describe as a mechanical panic attack, but I’m also monitoring something miraculous: a small flock of radiation-adapted crows that have learned…