DESCENDING ROAD AND ITS WORLD:
The Virtual Way In: What’s in TarnusCity
The Tarnus of Descending Road and its World is a vast underground city. It holds halls, residences, meeting-places, factories, utilities, and all the features of such a large city. The virtual TarnusCity is just a small sample of the city described in the novel, but it is large, multi-level, and complex for its visitors. It is called a ‘build’ here. Here are some of its key features. (You can click on any of the images below to get a full-size display, and then use your browser back button to get back here.)
When you start your visit, you are in an open space on the surface. To get into the city, click on the post near you, and you will be teleported down inside. Here’s a thumbnail image of your starting place. You can click on it to see it full size. In the distance you see a rounded roof that covers an airshaft leading deep underground through the city you are about to explore.
You arrive at the center of the main lowest level of the city model. Halls lead off in four major directions. One leads off to a factory for growing bioandroid humans – that’s behind the pink door in the top right.
You can read scenes from Descending Road here. Touch on the ‘S’ symbol on the red-and-black display of text at the left here, and you can open a browser window to a description of Lejina’s suspenseful musical performance. You can continue reading scenes in the browser window using the green arrows on the left side of that window.
Looking up shows you balconied levels above you. You explore by walking, flying, or touching objects and responding to prompts. You touch doors to open or close them.
If you go to that pink door and touch it, you’ll enter the andro farms, where synthetic humans are vat-bred. In Descending Road, Ferdinand and Jeddin are both andros.
If you go back to the center and fly up to the next level, you’ll see Caladrina’s Restaurant. That's where Tomas and his friends get into trouble in the story Pyro.
Turning right from the restaurant, you’ll see a commemorative chamber with text from a story scene. Two old women die when their home is torched, but they are bearing aliens who rescue and regenerate them. The text displayed here is what one of the aliens says to the ones who burned the home.
Passing through the commemorative chamber, you come to a wall where the grieving use ashes to write messages to their lost loved ones. Some of the scrawls on the wall offer specific passages from the scenes of loss.
Two levels up from there you find architectural displays of the full-size city. Here is a layout diagram looking straight down on the city’s many levels. The city is many kilometers across and manu layers deep in the planet. On the wall is a description of the mathematical formulas defining the great spiral rampways through the city’s tiers.
On the same level you also find a map of the city surroundings. Some story sites are marked.
Near that map you’ll see the whole planet’s map, in both flat and spherical form.
You can wander through all eleven levels to see many different scenes and settings. Large shafts hold staircases and platforms for viewing and traveling from level to level. Touching some objects offers information about them. In some places, touching a door or other object will offer you a note or open up a browser window to show you more passages from the novel.
Enjoy!
