Wheeled City welcomes visitors with a clear declaration of its customs. They are expressed in the way that space pertains to one's body.
Essentially – an older man would quietly confirm while resting his body on a walking cane – there are only two accepted ways to perceive
and think of Wheeled City: vertical and horizontal. All other orientations have over the years been carefully subdued and eventually vanished.
This process has had many underlying causes, the official reasons, however, being (an ostensible) need to care for the (supposedly) troubled ones.
In numerous narratives woven here in most diverse, yet structurally quietened dialects, this stilted care is seen as a result of the authorities' ambition
to straighten what to their eyes appears as unnaturally twisted, non-native, and thus potentially deviant. This reduction of everyday life
to vertical and horizontal rhythms, speeds, and efficiencies was originally intended not only to do away with old existential knots brought along by new residents but
also to pre-empt the emergence of new ones. However, this vision has meanwhile transformed into a tool of
dominance; it reached minds and hands of those for whom such reduced orientations constitute the ground rules for living and its sustenance.
Consequently, boxy, metallic camps erected in the most fundamentally followed doctrine of horizoverticality started encircling Wheeled City.
Weary, colorful flags of diverse lands representative to the twisted pasts of their residents, have over time given room to inelastic
masts topped with repetitive banners announcing the ultimately unified future of places like Wheeled City.
Every once in a while, a rope that secures the position of the banner would bang against the mast introducing a series of vertical accents
to a sustained horizontality of the uncrossable, sonic barrier made of omnipresent engines.
Exposed to their prolonged din, one would conclude (too quickly, however!) that this din conglomerated and took over forever
the patchy and unsystematic soundscape of the community, leaving its members completely helpless and fully complacent to the gridded order.
But the longer one stays here, the bigger chance for a certain paradox to be discovered.
This seemingly unvanquishable grid of horizontal and vertical orders makes a shield for hushed,
yet still audible micro-currents of joy with their sources located way beyond the cold grooves of aluminum sheets,
concrete walls, mesh security fences, and a dense commotion of datasets in transfer.