Pilots of the Marble Parliament

In the shadow-cloaked avenues of Londinium Magna, where marble columns met gaslight and toga mingled with top hat, the city had long surrendered its soul to bureaucracy. Here, every cobblestone was registered; every breath catalogued under the Imperial Decree of Ancestral Remembrance—a law designed not to remember, but to regulate forgetting.

Marcus Tullius Gage, a middling official in the Ministry of Identifications, had once been someone. A descendant of senators (or so claimed his meticulously stamped lineage papers), he now spent his days in a cubiculum overlooking Fleetus Street, rubber-stamping denials for identity applications that arrived by pneumatic tube.

The real art of survival in Londinium Magna was not to be someone, but to appear as if you were. And so each evening, after surrendering his signet ring to the office lockbox and exchanging his laurel-edged cravat for a regulation grey cloak, Marcus retreated to his rooms above the ancient Mithraeum—where he could at last pursue that most fashionable escape: flight simulation.

He had spared no expense on his desk—a genuine marble slab discarded from Augustus’ Folly—and upon it he had clamped two sleek mechanical arms: not relics nor Roman nor Victorian, but modern marvels from the workshops beneath Paternoster Square. The Hikig 2 Pack Desk Mounts gripped his joysticks with imperial resolve; each evening he adjusted their height to align with the battered armrests of his imitation trireme captain’s chair.

Here, soaring above digital fogbanks and pixelated aqueducts in an eagle-crested dirigible, Marcus could almost recall himself: a general surveying Gaul or perhaps a poet above the squalor. The stability of those mounts—how they held firm even when an enemy war-blimp sideswiped him in midair—lent an authenticity the rest of life lacked. The city outside was all shifting rules and arbitrary decrees; here, at least, there were boundaries and consequence.

It was during these sessions that he found himself most truly present. He would sometimes invite colleagues—Augustina from Records or Lucius from Proclamations—to join him on tandem flights. The mounts’ adaptability made switching controls easy: Augustina preferred left-handed maneuvers; Lucius flew right-handed and always crashed spectacularly. Yet all agreed—the realism was uncanny.

And yet one Tuesday night (for Tuesdays in Londinium Magna were especially bleak), Marcus discovered an unfamiliar looseness in his left mount. Mid-dogfight over simulated Hadrian’s Wall, his joystick slipped—not enough to crash outright, but enough for uncertainty to take root. Had he forgotten to tighten the quick clamp? Or did someone tamper with it?

Paranoia was currency in their city; Marcus inspected for sabotage as one might check for lice or revolutionary pamphlets. He found nothing save a single fingerprint smudge—his own—left during a rushed installation before last week’s audit.

He tried to ignore it. He tried to lose himself again in flight: swooping beneath digital bridges while bureaucratic memos flashed across the city’s vast sky like thunderbolts from Jupiter himself. But each time he reached for that left stick and felt it wobble, Marcus remembered not only who he had been—but how little remained.

At work next morning, Lucius noticed Marcus’ distraction. “Rough night above the clouds?”

Marcus shrugged. “The world refuses to stay fixed.”

Lucius grinned—the grin of a man content with loss. “That’s why I never bother adjusting those mounts,” he said. “If we’re destined to drift—why fight it?”

But Marcus could not accept that drift. That evening he reinstalled both mounts with ritualistic care—checking their grip against the marble desk as if sealing an oath in lead and wax. He felt foolish: pinning so much upon two clamps and a joystick when outside men vanished into crowds and women erased their names for safety.

Still: when he next took flight—in single combat against a faceless praetorian—it was as if something had returned. The cockpit thrummed with possibility; every button press echoed with intention. Here was power; here was stability denied him elsewhere.

But as dawn broke through coal-smudged glass, Marcus realized what it cost him: each successful flight restored certainty only within these bounds—and left him emptier beyond them.

Later that day, when Augustina asked if she might borrow one mount for her own simulation setup (“My desktop is hardly worthy,” she admitted sheepishly), Marcus hesitated before agreeing. For when she departed—with half his certainty clamped under her arm—he stared at the lone mount remaining and understood at last what he’d traded.

To fly was not to recover oneself—but only ever to simulate remembering.