Nobody knew how she had bought the thin forest of bell towers that pinned down the old city's neighborhoods; what was one more dark absurdity when the news were little more than their relentlessly creative enumeration? Where it was asked for she repaired the churches. Where it was not she left them in the untouched wreckage from the Children's Crusade, unburied corpses and all.
The bell towers she kept for herself. She had them fortified against external access, repaired every bell, and installed machinery to ring them as guided by algorithmic hours of her own choosing.
A bell, high above the river, to echo superstorm warnings from even higher eyes.
Where the old hospital had been, a different bell to mark the rhythm of each epidemic.
From a tower came the obscenely harmonious chiming of war, almost-war, would-be war, might-as-well, war, war. Another broke the rare silence with the single knell of a terrorist attack. Once-schoolyard bells called for far-away children as they hid inside their classrooms in repetitive terror. A discrete toll when banks closed. A hollower one when markets crashed. A bell in each neighborhood just for the lynchings. Strange pealings when invisible systems failed, their rhythms slaved to viral Fourier death rattles.
There were always bells ringing. Some people left the city to escape them. Not many: every place had its own insanity and the bells were not the worst. But there were other reasons to leave the city - to elsewhere or nowhere at all. There was a bell for most of them and one close to each cemetery.
She lived in her own tower at one end of the city. Tall and hollow (as she saw herself) it had no bell but from her bedroom she could hear all of them however faintly. The metallic choir grew complex and frantic month by month as the city's own sounds withered thin and dull.
One night she was woken up by the absolute silence of everything except the bell towers. Suspecting herself deaf — for she knew well she would hear bells in the loneliest spot of space or sea — she went to her balcony to look down to the city. The lights were familiar and the fires almost so, yet nobody moved and there was nobody she saw who could move.
With a word to her wrist she shut down all the bells in the empty city and went back to her bed. There was only one bell left ringing, soft, clear, ever-faster.