Scenes

Moments from the world of 2714, and the writing each one came from.

A note on the pictures. I’m not an illustrator, and I haven’t commissioned an artist yet. If the books find readers, that’s the first thing I’d change.

So the images below are AI visualisations. I make them from passages already in the books — never the other way round — and I label every one. They are a way of showing you the world, not a claim about how it looks. The writing is the real thing; the pictures only point at it.

I use AI to help with my editing. The words are mine.

— Andrew

A terraced harbour city rising through smoke and fog above dark water, lamps burning along the quays, figures at a rail in the foreground and a boat under way.

Freeport Nine wakes

Freeport Nine wakes in layers. Bakery flues first, then kelp fryers, then voices thick as smoke. Condenser towers breathe over the basin. Three low notes from the harbour tower, muffled by fog, and the shift changes at first light.

Under everything, a low note.

The year is 2714. The world has drowned twice, and what followed was rebuilt from brass, steam, and breath.

AI-generated visualisation

A narrow underdeck corridor lined with brass pipes and hanging lamps, a grated floor running away into warm light, two figures walking ahead.

The drop that stopped

Most people live their whole lives on the Hum and never think about it. It sits under the pumps and the pipes, steady as a sleeping animal.

Then one morning, deep in the underdecks, it rises half a breath and slides back.

And a drop of water stops falling.

AI-generated visualisation

Dock cranes silhouetted against a bruised green and gold sky, chains hanging still, their reflections unbroken in flat water.

The copper storm

The storm did not blow in. It assembled.

First the taste of metal on the tongue. Then static lifting along the knuckles. The cranes stop mid-swing, the water in the basin turns the colour of a tarnished coin, and everyone at the rail goes quiet, because in Freeport Nine people know what happens when the air changes its mind.

AI-generated visualisation

A brass relay horn mounted on a brick wall beside a large clock face, dust falling through a shaft of daylight into a wood-panelled chamber.

Hold to silence

The relay horn above the Council clock had been dead for years.

Then, halfway through a hearing, it began to hiss. Six low pulses, unevenly spaced, almost musical. Dust fell from the speaker grille, and every head in the room turned.

Through the static, a voice: hold to silence.

AI-generated visualisation

A flooded black chamber with two vast barnacled doors jammed half open, blue-green algae lamps burning along the walls and their light trembling on the water.

The Brass Gate

Freeport Nine has a formal harbour mouth. It also has the old westworks: disused heat channels that once carried turbine overflow out beneath the harbour wall. Half the city believes those routes collapsed. The other half charges coin to pretend they never used them.

At the end of one channel is a black chamber, lit by blue algae lamps that have no right still to be burning, and an old flood lock jammed half-closed, barnacles thick along the seam.

It does not look like a gate. It looks like a throat that has decided not to swallow.

AI-generated visualisation

A ship's rail and capstan in the foreground, rope coiled on a wet deck, and beyond it a raft city of lashed hulls, cranes and flags under a pale sun.

The Drift

At first they look like wrecks. Then the wrecks acquire ropes, lamps, flags, smoke, voices.

The Drift rises out of the water in pieces: barges lashed to scows, dead hulls opened into workshops, crane frames welded into bridges, old ferry decks stacked side by side like hands trying to make a city.

Freer than most, they say. You pay the right thieves, you can call anything freedom.

AI-generated visualisation

More scenes go up here as they appear on Instagram, never before.

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