glimpsing the flat top of the sea wall behind us, the gentle trance of waves from the south china sea reverberated like a heaving against the black partition, violent turmoils that haunt the desert already blanched and disintegrating into the powdery air. we move in on the seabed where the incline starts to level, half turned boats litter the desert engulfing them into the dunes, the hull of a distant cargo ship risen on a bank almost traversing a monochrome wave as wind howls across the sands of the ocean floor, scuffing our steps every time we move behind the overgrown reefs, shambles of former sea life that just might crumble at the slightest application of force. the city seems vague, almost as if coming back to memory out of the rumble of distant motors, small arms fire flashes briefly around the area remote as abstract heat signatures in the opaque air, ignitions of gunpowder. we reduce our body temperature from the regulating fibre and activate optic camouflage, mimicking patterns of the coral reefs we hid near as a helicopter flies nearby from the pla searching for intruders before its bulb cockpit charges towards another direction, thousands of horsepower whirled the propellers reducing all nearby noise into a metallic reverberation before its gatling gun fires, blowing dust clouds that consume its distant prey: possibly ill-prepared smugglers as there had been rumours of overseas weaponry entering through the seawall. intel reports intelligence and observation groups using relief aid as cover since they were the few allowed into the city.

  grains of ocean floor sank as each footstep formed soft craters on the sand; radiating the heat that rippled the sky. i thought of the sea lapping around my ankles until i would be carried from the earth adrift across ocean seen in underwater footage on loop; televisions emitting blue from electronic stores where fish wriggled in an azure realm—someone giggles of their secret world with what they might never tell beneath that sly smirk that despite its silence still beckoned me to follow them as it drew me closer to some intimate revelation that, even if banal, still was something growing faraway, eluding any questions that trailed behind them, not unlike a mirage from the heat off sand in the desert. when the floods hit the asian peninsula, there was a distinct feeling that society lost its grip on the world as the once turbulent crowds now pause in shopping promenades, vendors barter from their kiosks in a slightly frantic pitch yet when their voices took breath between their lyric, they seemed to revel in the commotion that powered these city lights flush in fluorescent sign panels akin to a fantastic carnival where each soup or trinket delivered that day would be the last fragment of the world, its warmth or shape the final form it would take before everything would sweep away as naturally as sleep. rather than the future wiped away in these floods, things seemed to get more remote, receding into those megacorp buildings; red signal lights in the evening sky like some fruit grown out of antennas, communicating frequent dispatches transmitted in radio waves to various international headquarters that leave tears fallen from headlights of ambassador sedans and shipping lorries circulating in melancholic avenues of their perpetual departures that diminished the past thrashing into the frothing buildings that fell beside us along highway balustrades slicing across the earth. land: the support of ground based systems and flags wadded on the flagpoles outside of local bars teeming with an unending ruckus muted in distant rooms from apartment loft towers, seemingly utterly evasive of that wonderful cataclysm.

my unit from blue energy group’s reconnaissance division entered through the hong kong seawall via an unused pipe duct that would have routed water into the city for the reclamation process—our mission: to gather intel on the ruins’ flood damage and settlements within the area to inform the company’s revitalization plan for the city. with this, they hoped to be the first to hand this revitalization plan to china, compounding recent gestures such as keeping their business within asia and relaying intel to their ministry of homeland affairs about western competitors. when news of hong kong’s reclamation broke, an overwhelming tension filled our ceo, mr. kwok, who knew in that precise moment that he must be cautious on how to act with the opportunity of new land—headlines called it the age of the new world, claiming land from the raptures of nature that wracked the reserved urban geometry. his hologram that communicated this information with hesitant steps walking on air reborn from the passing calamity as we once again believed in the permanence of the office buildings in the city plazas, their featureless walls seized themselves from the freak cataclysms, windows illumined in sky blue days that would begin again with their unseen productions that influenced the tumult of pedestrians already giddy with wild rumour.

the day called “the heavenly descent”, despite the publicized use of weather manipulation devices that fired into the sky circulating a concentration of power into the endless downpour until shafts of sunlight melted the clouds, warmth sculpted the city from the falling sea level, revealing the foundations built underwater in a black boxed project which led to the seawall’s activation rising around the city almost in a natural sequence: the eventual territorialization upon their golden land.

pipeline strained by violent waves, a chamber with ghosts of unfathomable destruction that left red emergency lighting that threw our shadows into black beams twisting around the shaft, lieutenant cheung covers our rear guard for a figure that might obscure the light for an instant before a single burst of gunfire dispels all shadow, steel of the pipeline flickers without so much of remnant of the attacker. such motions tempered in our steps at measured pace—demarcating seconds—each action a separate moment that confirmed a clear course of actions, levelled weapons just a tic away from a firefight until we see a white circle at the end of the tunnel, the coming sun.

brandishing a modified m4a1 against the open area, i grasped the terrifying architecture of the weapon; jagged edges descend from the heel of the collapsible stock, grip twisted from the receiver where i rack the charging handle shutting the ejection ports with a 5.56mm round loaded from the stanag magazine, handguard serrated in rails wrapped around the barrel. lodging the assault rifle into my shoulder, the hybrid sight shifts almost in tandem with my eye movement, red reticule encircles a lone dot glimmering from the veils of sand howling off the dunes as if falling into a dream of a thousand firefights all leaving a heightened sensation allowing fluid movements along the desert. the reticule, an arcane symbol that would incant destruction upon a particular point, axis once thought abstract to realize the new world.