Posthuman Blues

Here's a fiction fragment that's been gathering dust (or its informational equivalent) on my hard drive. The intention here is shock value a la William S. Burroughs' "Naked Lunch." I wanted to render a weird science-fictional environment without being hindered by machinations such as plot and character; it's a decent writing exercise that forces you to think organically. Here we go:

The habitat's docking spires pierce the vast canopy of green membrane, needles through the viscera of an embryonic city. Gaping bone-white shafts lead to the atmosphere generators deep underground; passersby lounge at their rims, plucking drinks and syringes from the backs of giant modified insects. Multi-level stores and endless restaurants huddle around the sprires, connected by translucent skywalks that shine with the membrane's jade glow. The sun is a blotch of eye-stinging yellow-green, like a phosphorescent lesion on some exotic deep-sea fish.

Every available surface is thronged with a mishmash of pedestrians and small, unassuming vehicles that clamber over one another with adhesive tires, leaving trails of noxious resin that degrades into fine blue powder. Silvery robotic cameras dart about like birds, bobbing and weaving in vertiginous flocks before exhausting their fuel and falling to the ground, where they burst and are scooped up by patient custodial insects. Prostitutes with animated tattoos beckon from automatic sidewalks, striking poses, feigning copulation with ambling waist-high beetles with bar-coded shells.

Zoom out. The membrane flashes by and recedes into a dappled disk-shape, like an algal pond seen from a great height. All around it is red-orange desert and scattered rock. The spires poke through the disk's surface like hermetic wands, tips bristling with parked vehicles. Spindly helicopters with impossibly stretched rotors ply the yellow sky in winking convoys, their shadows thin and insubstantial on the Martian surface. Blimps, pendulous with imported coffees and raw meat and choice microelectronics, extend resinous antennae that curl around the docking spires like the arms of a drowning man around a passing tree-limb.

The membrane habitats dot the landscape, encapsulating craters, interconnected by satellite uplinks and whispering monorails...