The tower pierced the sky like a spear thrust towards the heavens.[1] It glistened in the sun, impossibly tall and thin, seeming to sway though Keri knew this to be an illusion, an effect of her biological brain attempting to process a structure far larger than anything should be.

She'd heard of it, of course. Everyone had. It came up in the spheres at least once in every meta-thread, or had before the Conception drowned everything else out. It was a popular topic on the con-threads, the conspiracy boards that took so much of people's thought-time. According to many of those threads the thing should have come crashing down years ago, and it was only a matter of time before it did, wiping out a significant swathe of the western seaboard. The fact that every engineering and structural-integrity algorithm proved it would stay standing even when the land around it had eroded into unrecognisability only strengthened their convictions.

The space elevator. Well, a space elevator. There was another, Keri thought, but she was unable to remember where. She made a mental note to download the knowledge next time she linked in, performing the simple, curious cognitive flexing of the mind that stored the request safely in her subconscious to be automatically acted upon the next time she accessed the spheres.

They had left the city hours behind, borrowing a small two-seat car from one of the public vehicle storages, Keri putting in the destination at Cassandra's request.

This area was a wasteland now, where once it had been full of manufacturing plants and hydrogen processors. With the ever decreasing population there was simply no need for the current number of production zones, and barren areas such as this were becoming more and more common.

They were still a good couple of kilometres from the elevator, but it dominated the horizon, surrounded by only bare earth and dust. There were even a few spindly shrubs scattered across the view, a rare sight and example of the battered natural world clawing back some remnant of its former realm. The dead soil beneath their feet would make any such reclamation the work of aeons, if it were possible at all, however.

The clouds of the morning had dissipated, leaving a clear, early-evening sky everywhere except around the tower. There, convection currents and the smashing of thermals against its metal surface caused thick wisps of condensation, trailing eastwards from where they formed in a long tail. It looked as if the space elevator was sailing, forever cruising through the sky towards the ocean ahead, so tantalisingly close yet forever out of reach.

They pulled over at the side of a long, ill-maintained highway deserted of everything save potholes and stood next to each other beside the car.

"Beautiful, isn't it?" said Cassandra in a half-whisper. It was the first time Keri had heard a note of such sincerity in her voice.

It was, she guessed, especially the way the sunlight reflected off its silvery sides, but she still didn't understand what it was Cassandra was trying to show her.

She asked.

"We need to get closer," Cassandra replied. "Maybe then you'll work it out."

They got back in the car and Keri set the coordinates for the base of the tower, clapping her forearms together to bring up the blue lines of light between them, a map made of photons.

As they drove the final stretch her Corps began to vibrate.

"Don't," said Cassandra, reaching a hand over to grasp Keri's in a powerful grip.

Keri met Cassandra's gaze and paused. Slowly, reluctantly, she opened her palm, relaxing the muscles that tensed just a little more would have activated the Corps and sent her floating off between the spheres.

Her palms itched, as if they were trying to close by themselves. Keri took a deep breath and forced herself to look forward, staring at the tower as it grew wider and darker on their approach.

She stamped out of the car the second it brought itself to a stop, struggling to keep rising irritation from showing. She wanted to get online. Needed to. What were they doing wasting time at the forgotten relic of another age?

As if she knew what she was thinking, Cassandra drew up beside her and spoke.

"No one comes here anymore, now," she said. "I don't think they know it's real. Not truly. It's a... story. They think it's the remnant of a pointless dream."

"Well, it kind of is," replied Keri, and she didn't manage to keep the frustration from her voice. "Seems pointless to me."

"And why do you think that?" asked Cassandra, jumping upon Keri's words as if she had been waiting for them.

"Well, it was never used, was it? All that time and effort, and all to stand here, rusting."

The tower was different up this close. What had been a slim needle from a distance was now wider than many habitat blocks. And it did look as if it were rusting. Well, not rusting, of course; the alloys that made up the base of the structure did not react with oxygen, but it was certainly tarnishing. Decaying. It hardly reflected any light, dull and dirty and coated in the sand and dust of a thousand miles around. Piles of it had built up against the sides, pouring in through the open gateways and glassless windows to cover what they could see of the interior, swathed in shadow.

There were still lights flashing along its sides, of course. Just like most other structures, a large amount of the elevator's outer layer was composed of metal-organic framework, the titanium-based materials that sieved CO2 from the atmosphere and produced power to be fed into the grid. This curious form of metallic photosynthesis provided nearly the entirety of the world's free power, these days.

"They couldn't build this today, you know," said Cassandra, eyes following the tower as far as her neck could bend. "It was built by things like him."

Mention of the Butcher sent a chill down Keri's spine, and she looked nervously around. There was nothing on the horizon in any direction, save for the ocean far off to one side.

"All the more reason to forget it. This is a symbol of the Butchers," she said.

Cassandra gave a thoughtful hum.

"They may have built it, but the idea was around far before their time. You know, people stood on the moon before bio-augmentation was even a thing. Strapped themselves into chairs atop masses of volatile liquid and blasted themselves into the air on a pyre of explosions. Now, though..."

"Now we don't need to do that," said Keri.

Cassandra's eyes left the tower and stared at Keri.

"You truly believe that? You truly think this wasted world is all we need?" she asked.

"But it won't be only this world for long!" said Keri, surprised at the sadness in her companion's voice. "Very soon the..."

"The Conception? The singularity?" snapped Cassandra. "The world of the mind? This alternate intelligence that is going to lead us all to the promised land?"

Keri half-raised a hand, mouth opening to protest, but Cassandra kept going.

"We've given up. Instead of venturing out, we've turned inwards. We've forgotten what it was that got us this far."

Keri stopped her.

"That's not true. The Conception is the next step. With the birth of the AI we will be able to travel further than we've ever been. It will allow us to break the barriers of the flesh, to free our minds from the limitations of the material world, to expand our consciousness to new levels, to..."

"It will be a prison," said Cassandra. "A prison we locked ourselves into. Did you ever hear the story of the Tower of Babel?"

Keri was caught off guard.

"The... I'm not sure. I mean, I know the name. And Babel beer, of course..."

"Ha!" sneered Cassandra. "A brand name! We don't care anymore."

"Look, calm down and explain things, would you? I can see you're worked up about something, but I need you to tell me what it is," said Keri, forcing calm into her voice.

It seemed to work. Cassandra collected herself.

"The Tower of Babel was a story in a few of the canonical texts. In it, a united humanity builds a tower. The greatest on earth. They build it higher than anything that had ever been built before, and they do it together. But their god is a jealous one, and he destroys the tower. Not only that, but he fractures its people, creating all the languages of the world to divide them and ensure they will never be able to unite again."

She leaned against the car, voice falling low and tired.

"The moral is supposed to be something about arrogance and the folly of overreaching yourself, but that’s so stupid. Of course we strive; all things strive."

She looked up at the colossal structure.

"We built our tower, but we didn't need the gods to tear it down. We did that ourselves."

[1] Well, not the heavens, as explained before. But at least towards what had once been thought of as the heavens.