Beautiful exits from collapse
Chapter 4 of The Cities That Dream. A cozy existentialist solarpunk novel.
Cass arrived in Berlin two weeks later with perfect skin and tired eyes.
He had said let’s grab something the day before, then cancelled, then said it again. This was normal. Cass was always between flights. His company, or movement, or fund, whatever word he used that month, had begun in Los Angeles and spread through people who liked to say they were building exit paths from collapse. Private climate. Private mobility. Private education. Private health. Private culture. Private security. Private everything.
They called it sovereignty.
I called it being rich enough to stop meeting strangers.
We met on a roof near Moritzplatz. The roof had been made beautiful in the new way. Sedum mats. Glass rails. Battery cabinets disguised as benches. Small trees in huge tubs. A view over Kreuzberg, warm in late light.
Below us, the street was untidy and alive.
Cass looked down with something close to affection.
“I understand why people love this.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. It makes disorder feel moral.”
I smiled despite myself.
“You still speak in investor weather.”
“And you still speak as if poverty produces wisdom.”
That landed. Cass knew where to place the blade. He had earned the right to use it. We had spent ten years going at each other about exactly this and had each gotten worse at pretending we didn’t enjoy it.
We stood beside a row of panels tilted west. The sun made them look like dark water.
Ruth had sent me the scans that morning. I swiped them up between us. The two drawings opened in the air, full size, the paper grain catching what was left of the sun.
Mine: trees, tables, tram, solar rectangles. Cass’s: flying cars over a shining city, everyone above the ground.
Cass went very still.
“I forgot this existed.”
“Did you?”
He pinched the small blue cars open. The flying cars wobbled, a child’s hand visible in the slightly uneven lines.
“My father had a car like that. A Thunderbird. He won it in a poker game and lost it the same way. Six weeks.”
I waited.
“I put it in every drawing for two years.”
Below us, the woman on the next roof shook out a sheet before clipping it. The snap of the cloth carried up.
“What happened to him?”
“Nothing dramatic. That was the problem.”
The roof wind moved between us. Someone below shouted in Arabic. A bicycle bell rang.
Cass looked at my drawing.
“You stayed on the ground.”
“You left it.”
“That was the point.”
I thought of Los Angeles as I had seen it once from a hotel roof. Pink light. Palms. Glass. Smoke in the distance. Traffic below, endless and stubborn. A city that had learned to make apocalypse look cinematic. There had been a dream there too. Reinvention. Sun. Bodies. Music. Immigrant kitchens. Desert prophets. Surfers, hackers, actors, cult leaders, runaways, children who wanted to become impossible versions of themselves.
Then the dream had been eaten. Filmed, funded, optimized, made into decks, platforms, compounds, lifestyles, subscription freedoms. Kept shiny after the blood left it.
“You think I gave something up.”
“I think you kept the wrong part alive.”
“Which part?”
“The escape.”
Cass swiped the drawings away.
“People want escape.”
“People want in. They stopped believing anyone would let them.”
For the first time that evening, Cass looked unsure. Then the uncertainty closed.
“You know what I like about you?”
“What?”
“You still believe vulnerability scales.”
I looked down at the street. The bakery was closing. A man held the door for a woman with two children and a stroller. A dog barked at nothing. The city lights came up one by one, drawing power from rooftops two streets over, the coop grid humming along under everything like a second city we had built without noticing.
“I believe it has to.”
Cass smiled. “That is almost religious.”
“Religions promise guarantees.”
“And you offer no guarantee.”
“None.”
“Then why keep doing it?”
The question had no drama in it. That made it harder. It was the kind of question Cass asked when he had run out of moves and wanted, despite himself, to know.
I watched the sheets on the next roof fill with wind.
“Because the alternative is ugly.”
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© 2026 S. V. Linden.
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