My random pick chose Productive, which has already been continued a bit – The Grey Line (lj), Productive, and The Governors (LJ), Right and Wrong.) So I picked up another story in the same theme.

They were building a new city.

They was the unknown, the unclear, the mysterious They from Centon City, the Administrators, the Governors. They was unclear, was over there, was amorphous.

But They were definitely building a new city, and everyone – everyone being the people that were nearby, in Weston, in the Villages, in the tiny settlements along the Silver Road – everyone was a little bit confused. There were five cities, one for the center and one for each compass point. What was this Far Weston? Why were they going further out?

There was grumbling as the land was cleared, grumbling even as the Supervisors – and very few people were old enough to remember the last time there had been Supervisors, when they broke the ground for Norton so many years ago – passed out the pay, dressed in their expensive suits and their silk ties and never getting dirty.

There was grumbling as the road – the road, the Silver Road – was gated at two ends to make the edges of the city walls. There was grumbling as the river was very, very carefully moved ten feet to the North, so that it would not flood on the land of the new Far Weston. There was grumbling as the Factory went up, and as fields were replanted with crops to feed Weston.

There were no grumbles heard from the former villagers, for the new city was being built on the site of a former village. They did not work the fields, they did not clear the land, and they did not line up for jobs at the Factory. They simply vanished… and there were no grumbles about that, either.

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