In their greed, the corpo pigs did the impossible. The world was heating up. The skies were choked by smog. Animals and plants died in mass extinctions. People struggled in the streets while resources dwindled. Yet, profits steadily rose.

  All signs pointed to collapse. The world should’ve ended back then, the profit margins plateauing before plummeting, global net worth nose diving from profit to loss, sinking all the way down to zero… We’re supposed to be dead, all of us, yet here we are.

  Somehow we survive, as if the wheels of industry simply will out our continued existence.

  And so, it’s pitch black under the smog strangled sky. The city lights mark the ground in radiant colors, and buildings sing in hissing steam columns and buzzing neon signs. The city stretches out like lines of sparkling water on a black slate off beyond what the eye can see.

  It’s a mess of bridges, impossible high rises, and shambled dwellings stacked atop one another, rising over their counterparts like trees in the jungles found in old magazines. Each structure is vying for the top spot in the sky even at the cost of all the others.

  What came before is simply built over instead of toppled. Old buildings are filled with cement and turned into support columns for new ones, burying any poor squatters unlucky enough to still be inside. Some special derelicts are simply encased in hardened steel, sealed airtight and set to become foundations for pillars that hold up the city from beneath. For those forgotten and left behind inside, it is a death sentence.

  The streets are no better. Cracked and broken, hobbled together by insane engineers, they stretch row after row into the distance in whatever direction you look. When a new level is added to the city, these old roads are entombed, or fashioned into deep forgotten tunnels; their roofs become the new streets.

  Underground, the city digs deep into the earth layer after layer. No one knows how far down it goes. Many of these levels were abandoned or flooded long ago but others still bustle as undercities for the people living below the surface.

  It’s all one giant car park, a living breathing megalopolis where the old are trampled and built over with asphalt, and the young reach for the skies.

  And right in the middle of it all is LowTown “the LowDowns”, or Harmony, as the suits call it. A place where the normals live. It's a sprawl fit for the underclasses, of which there are many. Tweakers, junkies, vagrants and vagabonds; gangsters, hardened criminals, street scum; and the everyday poor, the bread liners and those just doing their best, all mix and mingle into a giant pot of toxic class stew.

  There’s chaos in the highstreets tonight. Sirens wail, and choppers fly overhead with white signal lights shining as they search the low city. Riots in the summer heat keep the police busy. Guns, firebombs, protest signs, violence is in the air... I can smell the blood.

  Somewhere in all that mess a bomb goes off shaking building windows and kicking up dust; a great orange fireball rises over rooftops and disappears in an instant.

  The Civvies are protesting. In giant masses, they crowd the streets. Smoke bombs and molotovs ignite over riot vehicles. Glass shatters. People shout at the top of their lungs.

  In a small abandoned cafe, lights filter through damp shades, illuminating a dingy diner table in the middle of the room. Surrounding it are squirrely men in large coats and jackets. Scars mar their faces. Sneaky, shadowy, and conniving, they plot in the chaos.

  “We can make it tonight. Put the bombs in their offices.”

  Another condemns him saying, “That’ll never work. We need more than a few badges to get inside.”

  Suddenly light filters in through the blinds casting white shadows over their faces. Shooting a glance out the window, their hearts work overtime, fear pumping through their veins. Were they caught already? But the light moves on. They live on the knife’s edge.

  Somewhere else, someone rushes through an alleyway, a man of forty-four years, with a woman in hand half his age. They knock over a trash can in their hurry and step on a bum’s ankle by accident. He curses, but is too strung out to really believe it happened.

  The pair come out on a nearby street. The streetlights are dead and the road is empty. In the next moment a spotlight flashes down on them, exposing the pair to the night. These aren’t police lights.

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  Armored vehicles pull out from the dark and surround the pair, but the two are already on the move. Sprinting, they race for an alleyway that leads to the next street over. Bad move.

  The ground beneath the man’s feet turns to clouds of dust, and he cringes as bullets tear into his trench coat. In the next moment, he is on the ground. The woman holds his bloody hand but he pushes her away.

  “Go,” he yells. She rushes into the alley alone.

  Assailants in black riot gear edge closer with cautious steps before wasting the dying man in a hail of gunfire. His body is hidden behind a cloud of smoke before a hot breeze blows it all away.

  A moment later, the man’s killers hoist the young woman out of the alley, dragging her into a nearby car. It drives away into the chaos of the low streets where all things are lost, never to be seen again.

  LowTown. Something is always happening there, but no one ever knows what. …don’t let tonight’s violence persuade your opinion of it. Ask anyone who lives there. It’s the place to be.

  In the north, a mountain of smokestacks edges LowTown. It’s an industrial zone and it stretches for miles. Two weeks out of the month, the smokestacks spew putrid black smoke. The other two weeks, giant fire pillars twist and bend out of their tops, heating the city, and lighting the sky in a nasty dull orange haze.

  Vegetation doesn’t grow in the surrounding soil anymore, so the hills to the west are blank and gray, the color of static. Almost featureless, only contour lines shape them, burnt through by acid water from filthy rain showers. The hills in the west create a border for the city where beyond is no man’s land, a vast stretch of wastes no one’s gone into and come back out alive.

  To the east is Midcity, or Ambition if you're a midtowner. That’s where the normals work and some execs and low-rung suits live. It’s all boring financials, full of white-collar crime, corporate greed, and extraordinarily monstrous office structures. Research centers, high government, military police… anything with real value resides there, but it’s only a boring middle ground, a gate between LowTown and the real city.

  Buildings taller than any you’ve ever seen poke against the clouds there. Entire districts, entire sections of the city, live in their shadows. At night, the whole sector glows gold. Its aura can be seen all the way in LowTown, past even the tallest buildings in Ambition.

  We call it Gold City, a place most only see in dreams and hear about in rumors.

  That place is beyond me. I've heard it's all backroom deals, hush money, corporate orgies, and gold-collar crimes. But bad things happen in the shadows if you know who to ask. Mass slave trading. Corporate murder. All manner of reviled perversions.

  Doesn’t matter to me, though. People like us don’t concern ourselves with that side of the world.

  What’s beyond Gold City? I don’t know. Probably more of the same. Another midcity. Another LowDowns. Repeating and stretching forever, for all I know.

  To the south, MidCity breaks into smaller business sectors, poorer neighborhoods, and mile wide corporate office complexes before turning into a stretch of super highways that reach down the coast. I was born down that way, though I don’t remember exactly where. I’ve lived in the city my whole life.

  Not in LowTown though… No. To the southwest of LowTown is a stretch of dilapidated city more akin to a bombsite than a city zone. Spires of stone pierce through the disease, standing like crooked bony fingers out of the rubble. These are remnants of old superbuildings that once were much like the ones in current-day Gold City. The streets are ash, or covered in piles of broken stone, and any structures left standing have long been abandoned or burned out.

  There is no government here. Vicious biker gangs roam the streets and kill whomever they please. At night, drug fueled cannibals rove through the wreckage, picking off strugglers and those who wander too far from the pack. And everyone else survives the best they can in extreme poverty. Only the strongest, or the fastest, survive.

  And it’s where I was raised.

  Long ago, this place was named Cherry Hill, but now… Warzone, Wasteland, the Pits. Whatever shit name you want to give it I’m sure would fit.

  I’d call it hell, and if anyone’s ever seen it, hell would look like this. Murder, slavery, perversion, drug trafficking… that’s just scraping the surface. I saw a man last week tied to the back of a motorcycle and dragged around the streets until the rope snapped. And when his ride was over, they poured gasoline on him, burnt away what little life he had left. Why, you ask? No reason. No goddamn reason at all. It’s worse than the wild west here. It’s post-apocalyptic.

  They say something happened to Cherry Hill a long time ago, but nobody knows what. It used to be the city center, much like Gold City is today. I don’t know if I believe any of that.

  To me, it’s always been nothing but a concrete jungle never kept up with, breaking down over time, and dying all on its own. Personally, it doesn’t look like something bad happened. It looks like it’s still happening.

  I see the same rot in the rest of the city too, a decay festering in the back alleys and understreets. And it progresses every day. Cherry Hill, I guess, is just ahead of the curve.

  I suspect that one day the whole city will be just like this. Maybe that’s what it deserves. Shit. That’d be something to see, those corpo suit freaks scrounging in the dirt like the rest of us. But none of that matters to me. I won’t be here to see it.

  I’m getting out. Just wait and see.