Earth: 2265. Nuevo Venice exists on a dying and decaying
planet forged from a myriad of industrial catastrophes, unimaginable
natural disasters and terrible wars. Society has collapsed. The world
economy is in ruins. Billions have perished in an increasingly unstable
and flooded environment. Those that survive find themselves in a
strange new world, where the powerful and elite inhabit the highest
floors of the city skyscrapers, where they live in exquisitely designed
homes, filled with innumerable technological amenities. This new
configuration of society lives in denial of the plight of their fellow
men, where the middle class laborers are forced to live in unpleasant,
barely habitable center levels and the dying and sick poor unfortunate
wretches exist in a dark and wet rotting underworld far below.
Three levels of society live one upon the other, barely interacting.
The air grew hot and thick. The ice melted. The oceans rose. The rivers overflowed their banks. The waterfronts were lost and soon the newly placed dikes were overtaken as well. It was clear that drastic measures would need to be employed. The higher the water rose the more people were displaced. Homes were lost on the lower ground and then the city streets were flooded. The first floors, the second floors, soon the third floors would be claimed and never was there any sign the oceans would recede. People just kept moving up and adapting. Streets were bridged and motor boats became the taxis limos and luxury sport cars of the new more aquatic world but nature was harsh and the oceans chewed and ripped at the old buildings. The steel and concrete super structures held for centuries, slowly rusting and encrusting with trash studded coral and toxin engorged barnacles, but the thin glass and metal exterior walls often jaggedly disintegrated at the tide level exposing cavernous spaces within. Here the “wets” moored their floating shanty villages. The above few floors, forever waterlogged, were progressively rotting away, dangerous and inhospitable, yet the growing number of displaced people still carved out soggy uncomfortable living space here. This was a desperate level of society, and many a bloody brawl was fought for squatters rights to even these barely livable interiors.
Still a few more floors above, the conditions grew a little more tolerable. A grey salty mold permeated the air and walls but a less wet lifestyle could be maintained.
Still it was the precious generators now situated atop the old high rise buildings that allowed them power, and although the space was near priceless in the top suites, the wealthy occupants that rented them appreciated having control over the electricity generators and, unlike the lower levels, got first rights to the limited supply. Here at the top, safely above the turbulent, polluted sea, an elaborate series of trussed bridges were built connecting tower to tower. The top dwellers drove out on them in their small plastic personal transports and felt that they were the pinnacle of society with their state of the art adaptation to the problem. But this would not be so.
The displaced kept coming and soon there the overcrowding had drastically lowered the quality of life for the upper echelon. But the ultra rich and powerful had foreseen their own discomfort, and had much earlier enacted an architectural solution so grand as to positively dwarf the royal Dubai metropoplex of the late 21st century. Yes long after the powerful and decadent Dubai fossil fuel dynasty had crowned the earth with the highest structure ever built at that time, exhausting the physical limits of the most advanced and strongest materials known to humanity, an entire 1.3 kilometers high, The United Empire of America several centuries later would employ the same tactics in constructing a vastly superior structure that would rise high above the oceans swallowing the old metropolis below. Construction began late in the 22nd century just before the waters began rising and the foundations covering entire groups of city blocks were in place as the waters overtook the streets of Manhattan.
Years would pass the waters would rise society would scream violently for living space and all the while the mysterious monoliths would rise ever higher. Above the churning waters and the wretched barnacle slums, above the soggy crumbling older buildings and up past the crowded levels of the weathered glass and steel towers, and still higher above the rooftop elite who had spared no expense in establishing a webby metro canopy level for themselves. The gigantic structures towered above all of this. But what were they?
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