We will began at the top and work our way down.
The upper atmosphere is empty.
Below, there are satellites. One of them is much more expensive and silent than its friends. It is watching very carefully.
Down beneath that, where the clouds brew, there is an unusually high-flying bird, on its way up to see its own kind of god. Its wings are clotted with condensation and ice crystals. It is moving extremely quickly and does not wish to slow down.
Under the ugliest clouds and above the scenic ones is an underpriced plane filled with overpriced tickets. One of them is not mediocre, and is watching their phone carefully. It is much more expensive and silent than all the others aboard.
The scenic clouds are billowing in a surprising new breeze coming up at an angle that is very nearly absolutely ninety degrees, stained with burned dust and ashed stone. It’s red and black and is turning them sunset colours far ahead of schedule. They don’t mind. They are peaceful clouds, and will accept this change as they have all others. A restful nature.
Beneath the billowin – no, no, no, they’re BOILING now, surely – underside of the scenic clouds is a scream. It began on the planet’s surface and was followed immediately by several lesser screams, but it is so much larger and faster and stronger that it has outpaced them all by leaps and bounds. Unlike its predecessors, it was never constrained by living lungs and hot dead air.
Rising rapidly comes the shockwave in the scream’s wake, frightening birds, scalding clouds, and burning away at seventeen different frequencies. On one of them, the expensive and quiet satellite can almost detect it as something more than nothing, or less than that.
Rising up is the rubble. Tons of rock now lighter than air, and tons more that’s still heavier but being made to forget it, for a moment, a minute. There is debris in there that’s not natural, crafted by clever little hands. Shovels and spades, laptops and toothbrushes. A jeep, or derivative thereof.
Under the rubble and in the rubble and around the rubble as it floats are the lighter things. The birds, mostly. There are still many more of them around than they are given credit for and they are moving very quickly because they would like this number to increase rather than decrease which it is in immediate danger of doing. As it were. They know what’s at stake here.
Clinging to the remnants of real, solid rock below the wingbeats and panic-song are a few diggers. Most of them are innocuous, as far as scientists can be. The worst they’d planned here was to sneak an extra can of beer if they felt they’d done an extra good job that day. Their heads are full of geological strata and their pockets are full of rock samples. One of them has an expensive and silent phone in their pocket instead. It is not as helpful as the rocks.
Underneath them, trampled by sun and sneakers and a few hundred years of fearsome wind and rain, are the mineral-hardened remains of the carcass of the far-flying bird’s great-great-great-great-ongoing-great-aunt. In her day she was queen of most of what she surveyed, and that’s never quite changed. She’s definitely still the prettiest thing on the mesa. Assuredly. She is dead. Assuredly. She is not pleased. Assuredly.
Farther down is stone, the planet’s abraded, hardened scabs. Rehealing eternally as surely as it is picked over. Shoved into the mantle and born again. Ground down from mountains and built up in estuaries. The kind of immortality that’s more fleeting than being alive at all.
Far beneath is a newer wound, where hot fiery blood burned out and cooled to a smoulder. It was guided there by something more determined than chance. Once-liquid lava, now a casket.
Below that, more basal than the basalt, is the exterior carapace.
Beneath that is the upper epidermis.
Beneath that is the start of the flesh and the blood and the long, slow booms of the heart that drives it.
Beneath that is another heart. Hearts. Too grand a frame for just one.
Beneath that is a long slow dawning confusion and an anger built out of fear.
And just above that, of course, is the scream again. Breaking barriers. Breaking up.
It’s all about to go quite out of order.