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- Joined
- Sep 7, 2019
- Location
- Jurassic Park
November 9th, 2047
There were many vices to be had in the North Atlantic IceBurgh. It was true that the Bummock (the neighborhood below the water's surface) was a lawless place that wore its sins on its sleeve: under the table gambling, prostitution, and trafficking in junk augmentations, to name a few. Even the Metro, while ostensibly the cleanest running metro system in what remained of the developed world, ran on blood. Meanwhile, however, on the Dome its overly glossy skyscrapers reached to the heavens as the arrogant cities of old had, in the same old scramble for money and status that kicked everyone else to the bottom.
Had being the operative word. The combination of pandemics, floods, fires, food scarcity and severe water shortages in the 2020s that made billions flee their collapsing countries finally shook the United Nations into collective action on climate change. However, in 2032 the Sons of Jacob cancelled the US election that year and plunged the entire United States into a devastating civil war that the internally divided federal government barely won with the help of the remaining NATO nations in 2036, who then entered into a nuclear exchange with the Chinese Communist Empire. This long-feared World War III was the final nail in the coffin for nationstates as humanity knew them throughout history in the wake of a hundred million deaths in twelve hours and the resulting nuclear winter and instability, a period known as the Great Chaos.
The exhausted remnants of the United Nations and the world's governments and corporations desperately merged into seven regional megastates called Burghs. Thousands of the world's remaining elites pooled themselves into regional groups called the Eligibles, who then were the only ones allowed to elect Burgh Councils of thirteen members each for fear of mob uprisings. These Burgh Councils then built megacities corresponding to that region, also confusingly called Burghs. The Councils decided in advance who would get business licenses in these cities (with the most powerful of these new capitalists generating enough influence to buy their way into the Eligibles), then resettled the remaining refugees here as Employs, for instance on a floating iceberg city with no other life for hundreds of miles around.
The NA IceBurgh in particular traveled around the oceans, constantly refrigerating and reinforcing icebergs and other glaciers as well as engineering the North Atlantic Current to keep the world from flooding any more, and most of its Employs toiled in the Bummock day and night to support this effort. Then, to keep internal order at all costs, the Councils also cast those who would put even their vast hoard of resources over capacity back into the Wilds to fend for themselves until deaths put some openings in the Great Lottery. The Council put those who did manage to make it to safety under constant surveillance- with phone, vidnet, metaverse and other communications monitoring as well as through the muscle of the IceBurgh Regional Security (IBRS) sub-corporation and its contractors (who were usually the ones who dealt with the riffraff). Most on the Dome, however, were allowed to live in relative peace due to their status, so long as they never criticized the Council or the IBRS.
And yet 25-year-old Shiloh Mayer, who was decamping with her friends onto the top floor of a very much under construction hotel (the sixth one built in this neighborhood in the last two years) never ceased wanting to climb to the top of the scaffolding, even in the blasting near-Arctic air (for she was Irish and, after years of surviving the mega blizzards and the Second Troubles and only losing her left arm, it barely bothered her anyway) to admire the view at night. She and her three closest friends worked as Couriers, rats able to scramble across the glossy surface of the Dome while delivering crucial, private materials and messages (usually passed on by others from the Metro, with provenance that they, importantly, didn't ask questions. During the day, their body heat was easily maintained by the many hours of long, hard rooftop parkour needed to get these hot items off the street as fast as possible, and as much Szechuan food (or other street foods from around the world, such as Latin American shrimp ceviche or Ethopian beyainatu) as they could afford each day.
At night, when the temperature could drop to -40, their limbs and cores were preserved by varying but copious amounts of alcohol, weed, and MDMA; a couple foldable solar-powered space heaters they'd found in a dumpster and fixed up; and sometimes open showers for the vagrant that were desalinated and heated for four hours after sunset whether or not there were people using it, and that no one in the group had a problem with sharing at the same time; and of course, their shared body heat under emergency tarps. But when they had a big payday, they usually snuck into hotels like this through the top floors. As long as the Couriers ordered room service, most establishments didn't mind. In fact, some of their clients worked out of the motels and offered them a free night as thanks. Under the table of course.
"Wish you were here," Shiloh muttered under her breath, as she also scanned the street level more intently for...some reason that her best friend, Erika Sanders, couldn't understand.
The slender Eurasian runner slapped her friend on the back of her heavy sweater with a gloved hand and chuckled, "Look, I love ya, but can you come inside, Shy? Yasmine wouldn't've wanted you to freeze your ass off out here. Besides, I rather like your ass how and where it is."
Shiloh rolled her silver eyes at Erika as the other woman referenced their non-binary patron who, when they first arrived off the boat two years ago, had sheltered them and taught them the art of couriering- and sapphic pleasure. Erika's flirting was usually meant to lightly tease and make the melancholy woman laugh, which it did. However, it often led to sex, which they had done regularly in those halcyon days when the group just started forming, after Shiloh broke up with her boyfriend Kevin, but before Erika opened herself up to Michael. Shiloh exclusively had sex with Erika after Yasmine died, though not as frequently as she would've liked these days with Erika also taking the newest member of the group, a man in his mid-30s who preferred to only be called Z, under her wing sexually within weeks of his arrival in August.
Shiloh had consented to that as long as the other twains never met with her (for she thought that that would complicate things too much, and so a spoke polycule was formed). As a result of that and initial suspicions about anyone new (especially someone who hid their full name) entering their sphere, Shiloh had only started to warm up to Z, mostly because of his raw free running talent that impressed her by rivaling her own. And she saw why Erika liked him- he was a looker.
"What she meant to say," Michael Augustin sighed in his deep Haitian voice, wrapping an arm around his Irish friend, who leaned her head on his shoulder, "is that we miss them too. But you knew they never liked to see anyone down for long. So, let's live while we're still alive, and enjoy our time with our new friend! That's why I hope you'll be cheered by this!"
Michael flourished a yellowing portable DVD player in his hands, along with a couple movies (both items probably reclaimed from some dump, which everybody knew and nobody needed to say), and Shiloh sniffed, "He would've loved that."
"So? How about it?" Erika grinned. "Let's relax, get jacked out of our minds, and watch some stupid movies."
"I know what my vote is," Michael chuckled, then pecked each of his "two best girls," as he often called them, on the cheek. He would do this to Z, who had very clearly, and so it had become an expected and welcomed sign of affection among all of them. Something resembling normal for the foursome had been built out of little rituals like these.
"Now c'mon! Z's probably checked us in by now and is waiting in the room," Erika urged.
For a moment, Shiloh felt secure again while the rest of them headed back down the rooftop stairwell and followed them, preparing to forget her troubles with copious drugs, as well as relieve…stress later. With her hand, since her favorite toy was broken. For Shiloh, tonight that would be a solo operation, since she was tired, and Erika respected that since that sometimes happened even to the polyamorous and hypersexual lithe woman. And yet she still envied that Erika and Michael would probably join together without a care in the world once the movie was over, while she would be left to awkwardly retreat from Z. If they all didn't fall asleep from the drugs while holding each other, that was.
There were many vices to be had in the North Atlantic IceBurgh. It was true that the Bummock (the neighborhood below the water's surface) was a lawless place that wore its sins on its sleeve: under the table gambling, prostitution, and trafficking in junk augmentations, to name a few. Even the Metro, while ostensibly the cleanest running metro system in what remained of the developed world, ran on blood. Meanwhile, however, on the Dome its overly glossy skyscrapers reached to the heavens as the arrogant cities of old had, in the same old scramble for money and status that kicked everyone else to the bottom.
Had being the operative word. The combination of pandemics, floods, fires, food scarcity and severe water shortages in the 2020s that made billions flee their collapsing countries finally shook the United Nations into collective action on climate change. However, in 2032 the Sons of Jacob cancelled the US election that year and plunged the entire United States into a devastating civil war that the internally divided federal government barely won with the help of the remaining NATO nations in 2036, who then entered into a nuclear exchange with the Chinese Communist Empire. This long-feared World War III was the final nail in the coffin for nationstates as humanity knew them throughout history in the wake of a hundred million deaths in twelve hours and the resulting nuclear winter and instability, a period known as the Great Chaos.
The exhausted remnants of the United Nations and the world's governments and corporations desperately merged into seven regional megastates called Burghs. Thousands of the world's remaining elites pooled themselves into regional groups called the Eligibles, who then were the only ones allowed to elect Burgh Councils of thirteen members each for fear of mob uprisings. These Burgh Councils then built megacities corresponding to that region, also confusingly called Burghs. The Councils decided in advance who would get business licenses in these cities (with the most powerful of these new capitalists generating enough influence to buy their way into the Eligibles), then resettled the remaining refugees here as Employs, for instance on a floating iceberg city with no other life for hundreds of miles around.
The NA IceBurgh in particular traveled around the oceans, constantly refrigerating and reinforcing icebergs and other glaciers as well as engineering the North Atlantic Current to keep the world from flooding any more, and most of its Employs toiled in the Bummock day and night to support this effort. Then, to keep internal order at all costs, the Councils also cast those who would put even their vast hoard of resources over capacity back into the Wilds to fend for themselves until deaths put some openings in the Great Lottery. The Council put those who did manage to make it to safety under constant surveillance- with phone, vidnet, metaverse and other communications monitoring as well as through the muscle of the IceBurgh Regional Security (IBRS) sub-corporation and its contractors (who were usually the ones who dealt with the riffraff). Most on the Dome, however, were allowed to live in relative peace due to their status, so long as they never criticized the Council or the IBRS.
And yet 25-year-old Shiloh Mayer, who was decamping with her friends onto the top floor of a very much under construction hotel (the sixth one built in this neighborhood in the last two years) never ceased wanting to climb to the top of the scaffolding, even in the blasting near-Arctic air (for she was Irish and, after years of surviving the mega blizzards and the Second Troubles and only losing her left arm, it barely bothered her anyway) to admire the view at night. She and her three closest friends worked as Couriers, rats able to scramble across the glossy surface of the Dome while delivering crucial, private materials and messages (usually passed on by others from the Metro, with provenance that they, importantly, didn't ask questions. During the day, their body heat was easily maintained by the many hours of long, hard rooftop parkour needed to get these hot items off the street as fast as possible, and as much Szechuan food (or other street foods from around the world, such as Latin American shrimp ceviche or Ethopian beyainatu) as they could afford each day.
At night, when the temperature could drop to -40, their limbs and cores were preserved by varying but copious amounts of alcohol, weed, and MDMA; a couple foldable solar-powered space heaters they'd found in a dumpster and fixed up; and sometimes open showers for the vagrant that were desalinated and heated for four hours after sunset whether or not there were people using it, and that no one in the group had a problem with sharing at the same time; and of course, their shared body heat under emergency tarps. But when they had a big payday, they usually snuck into hotels like this through the top floors. As long as the Couriers ordered room service, most establishments didn't mind. In fact, some of their clients worked out of the motels and offered them a free night as thanks. Under the table of course.
"Wish you were here," Shiloh muttered under her breath, as she also scanned the street level more intently for...some reason that her best friend, Erika Sanders, couldn't understand.
The slender Eurasian runner slapped her friend on the back of her heavy sweater with a gloved hand and chuckled, "Look, I love ya, but can you come inside, Shy? Yasmine wouldn't've wanted you to freeze your ass off out here. Besides, I rather like your ass how and where it is."
Shiloh rolled her silver eyes at Erika as the other woman referenced their non-binary patron who, when they first arrived off the boat two years ago, had sheltered them and taught them the art of couriering- and sapphic pleasure. Erika's flirting was usually meant to lightly tease and make the melancholy woman laugh, which it did. However, it often led to sex, which they had done regularly in those halcyon days when the group just started forming, after Shiloh broke up with her boyfriend Kevin, but before Erika opened herself up to Michael. Shiloh exclusively had sex with Erika after Yasmine died, though not as frequently as she would've liked these days with Erika also taking the newest member of the group, a man in his mid-30s who preferred to only be called Z, under her wing sexually within weeks of his arrival in August.
Shiloh had consented to that as long as the other twains never met with her (for she thought that that would complicate things too much, and so a spoke polycule was formed). As a result of that and initial suspicions about anyone new (especially someone who hid their full name) entering their sphere, Shiloh had only started to warm up to Z, mostly because of his raw free running talent that impressed her by rivaling her own. And she saw why Erika liked him- he was a looker.
"What she meant to say," Michael Augustin sighed in his deep Haitian voice, wrapping an arm around his Irish friend, who leaned her head on his shoulder, "is that we miss them too. But you knew they never liked to see anyone down for long. So, let's live while we're still alive, and enjoy our time with our new friend! That's why I hope you'll be cheered by this!"
Michael flourished a yellowing portable DVD player in his hands, along with a couple movies (both items probably reclaimed from some dump, which everybody knew and nobody needed to say), and Shiloh sniffed, "He would've loved that."
"So? How about it?" Erika grinned. "Let's relax, get jacked out of our minds, and watch some stupid movies."
"I know what my vote is," Michael chuckled, then pecked each of his "two best girls," as he often called them, on the cheek. He would do this to Z, who had very clearly, and so it had become an expected and welcomed sign of affection among all of them. Something resembling normal for the foursome had been built out of little rituals like these.
"Now c'mon! Z's probably checked us in by now and is waiting in the room," Erika urged.
For a moment, Shiloh felt secure again while the rest of them headed back down the rooftop stairwell and followed them, preparing to forget her troubles with copious drugs, as well as relieve…stress later. With her hand, since her favorite toy was broken. For Shiloh, tonight that would be a solo operation, since she was tired, and Erika respected that since that sometimes happened even to the polyamorous and hypersexual lithe woman. And yet she still envied that Erika and Michael would probably join together without a care in the world once the movie was over, while she would be left to awkwardly retreat from Z. If they all didn't fall asleep from the drugs while holding each other, that was.