Green Vortex Fantasy City Countdown Timer

This one is not a photograph and I am not going to pretend otherwise. It is digital art, a painting of a man in a suit standing on a hill with headphones on, looking up at a sky that has torn itself open into a green vortex, and behind him a dark city sprawls to the horizon with its windows lit like a field of scattered stars. There is a giant gear-ring hanging in the sky on the right, half transparent, which makes no logical sense and does not need to. What I like about it is the posture of the figure. He is not running. He is not even taking the headphones off. He has his hands at his sides and his head tilted back, and he is simply watching the impossible thing happen, the way you might watch weather. That is the most human reaction in the whole picture. Everyone talks about the green vortex. Nobody talks about the man who decided it was worth looking at properly. The city below, meaningless and enormous, keeps its lights on regardless. The headphones, I decided, were for music, or for a voice, or for nothing at all.