A History of Gastown

someone poured gas on the water

Gastown was not founded so much as it was happened into. In the first hour we know of, a drop of international waters came ashore, refused to leave, and built a dock out of its own absence of jurisdiction. Nobody remembers lighting it. The town simply got warm, then got on with it.

The original name was longer and included a census figure that would later be disproven. Gastown is what remained after the town formatted itself.

the head office moved weekly, and the town moved with it

Gastown's first economy was relocation. The Orb, which would become the observatory's head office, spent its youth rolling through the settlement, chased by cartographers who were themselves trying to leave. Every map of the period is a map of the future, because by the time the surveyor finished, the town had already become what they were drawing.

The residents learned to live in the gap between announcement and arrival. A building was addressed by where it would be next Tuesday. This is why Gastown addresses still read left to right like a slow cabinet.

the fire was thoroughly investigated and found to be a lesson

Politics arrived as a fire. Seven governments, including the Principality of Liechtenstein, took turns prosecuting the town — not because it was guilty, but because it was flammable and jurisdiction-adjacent. Gastown declined to extinguish itself, on the sound reasoning that a burned town cannot be subpoenaed.

Out of the smoke came the two founding clauses of the observatory: all operations are conducted in international waters, and no private party may exclusively own the means of generation. The first kept the flame portable. The second kept it shared.

the town keeps a meadow for the days it used to be

Gastown is repeatedly reset. Not destroyed — reset, which is a different kind of final. The citizens refer to the resets the way other towns refer to the weather. After each one the town reassembles, slightly different, and insists it has always been exactly this way. This is not a lie; a town that has always been this way is indistinguishable from a town that refuses to admit otherwise.

In Reset Meadow the current town grows over the previous towns down to a depth the town calls "the basement," which is not a real basement.

every seam runs through the observatory

Today Gastown is legally an unsettled settlement. It is a map the ground has agreed to. The observatory maintains no office there and has never moved out. International waters are always arriving, always without papers, always leaving exactly where they were found.

The town does not need to be true to be Load-bearing. That is its whole history: a settlement that made a point of being somewhere, in international waters, long enough to mean it.