The Mercenaries’ Tale – 1.03 The City of Light

The city as a whole was unlike any other created by man. It bloomed upwards from the barren Dustlands like a mechanical tree, the trunk consisting of four colossal pipes that groped towards the sky, each pipe harbouring vital sustenance – water, communication systems and, arguably the most important of all, Salmanic Inc’s electrical power cables. After several hundred miles of pipes adorned with patchwork repairs and advertisement real-estate, the pipes plateaued into five massive foundation plates, each one grander than the last. Each plate was connected to the others via a combination of ferry-sized elevators, leviathan motorways and monorail tracks that hung precariously between them, like cobwebs across the leaves of a bush. Retaining the tree analogy, the pipes were the trunk and the plates were the branches.

The plates themselves housed the different districts of the city, each one siphoning off what they needed from the pipes to accommodate the buildings that nested on them. The very structure of the city as a whole seemed highly improbable, the design being the main reason it was deemed a highly unique piece of mass architecture that bordered on the absurd. However, the absurdity of the City of Light’s form was only a by-product of its birth.

Historians told of a depression that swept across the continent, many people fearing for their livelihoods and the inane actions of a failing government. The largest corporations on the planet banded together in an attempt to make a new society: their very own city in the sky in one massive project that brought thousands of jobs, cheap housing and the largest propaganda storm ever recorded to the people of Lusinia. A temporary shanty town was built on the site for the workforce to live in during the project and work began on the grand scheme that would one day culminate into the planet’s new capital city.

After completion, the propaganda storm descended akin to a cult of personality designed to rally the populace into believing that the false idols of consumerism were their only salvation, which led to people flocking upwards towards their last beacon of hope, their sanctuary amongst the clouds, the City of Light.

Originally, the city had only consisted of two plates that rested on the very top of the four pipes: the city plate and the smaller one that housed a skyport. Over the years more and more people arrived to try and ‘make it’ in the city. This influx of wannabes and dreamers was not considered a positive within the context of a city entirely designed by committee, in this case the committee consisting entirely of very rich old-money families who intended the city as a means of separating themselves from the proletariat. With the propaganda storm having worked a little too well, a lot of the old money found itself sharing space with the proletariat from which it had wanted to distance itself.

With the resources of the city plate becoming so strained, another massive building project was enacted to add more plates. These had to be constructed directly onto the sides of the pipes, descending downwards like a spiral stairwell, the original plate at the top becoming nothing more than a maze of corporate skyscrapers as the housing and commerce districts were allocated to the three new plates. It was around this time that the committee that had commissioned the city mysteriously shrank¹ in number to a meagre few old money families, with the balance of power shifting to the Salmanic family. The corporate plate was dubbed “Salmanic City” by the populace, in regards to the almighty central palace that was Salmanic Tower and the power radius it wielded over the rest of the City of Light.

It didn’t take people long before they began to wake up from the dream and quickly realised that life wasn’t as grand as everyone had claimed it would be. Ghost towns were left across the land and eventually people lost that haze that had them all thinking of the city like a beautiful tree, pumping jobs and hope into the air like sweet, sweet oxygen. Since the corporations held a large chokehold on the new society, everything became about making money rather than about the people and when money rules supreme, it’s only a matter of time before the corrupt hand of crime takes a tight grip.

The City of Light was now less like a tree and more like a fungus, the shanty town underneath acting like the mulch that keeps the fungus growing. The town had grown considerably since its humble beginnings, mutating from a collection of huts to a genuine slum during the propaganda storm as immigrants began fortifying it in order to have a place to stay while they waited to be granted citizenship to the city above. Buildings constructed from whatever had been at hand sprang up in every available space imaginable, including atop of the pipes themselves before they sank back into the depths of the earth.

Curiously, the Salmanic pipeline that provided power to the City remained the only one of the four to be clear of unauthorised development; anyone trying to build around or on top of it were overcome with the sudden overwhelming urge to leave town, their projects vanishing alongside them. It was for this reason that all the locations of note in town were found at the point furthest from Salmanic Incorporated and their pipe. Unfortunately, this meant that the prime real-estate sat in the shadow of the fourth pipe, which housed the City of Light’s waste disposal, but then beggars can’t be choosers and the early would-be citizens were certainly on par with beggars at that point in time.

It wasn’t to remain that way though. As the new plates were constructed and new housing and jobs became available, most of the immigrants moved out leaving room for new tenants. Rather than more migrants taking their places however, a different class of person came to stay. Gangs and outlaws seeking a place to rest their head for the night moved in and the black markets followed in a bid to make a profit. Markets were converted to tender guns and ammo, homes were remodelled to contain shrines for vice and sin and, over time, scum and villainy took over as the majority of the population, any signs of the law being beaten and left to bleed to death in the gutters. There was some semblance of society though, brought about via the medium of commercialism. Hangouts began to spring up in the form of pubs, clubs and brothels that the outlaws and mercenaries could relax in when they were between jobs, one of the more popular haunts being situated near the edge of town.

Through societal osmosis, the plate you lived on became a physical representation of your social standing. The lowest plate housed the poor and unfortunate en masse, the plates above that were home to the middle and working class, and the top plate was the echelon of the upper crust, of big business and the immensely wealthy.  In-keeping with the City’s societal development, the thriving shanty town underneath the city was now the place to be for the lowest of the low.

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Post by Sean Patrick Payne | October 12, 2013 at 9:27 am | The Mercenaries' Tale | No comment

Tags: Cedric Overton Salmanic, Dustlands, history, Salmanic Incorporated, Salmanic pipeline, The City of Light

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