2096 AD
The skyline was carving up a dark grey curtain embroidered with the grim glow of neon lighting against the fiery blush of dawn which had drawn upon the glorious overpopulated, overbuilt titan of Neo-American city states: The New York PolyCentre (or in short: PCNY), the urban agglomeration of nearly one billion people all living in multiple levels of the city, for as decades went, new New York cities, so called "New York Levels", were built upon those already standing.
And so became the city almost as vertical as horizontal - a true network, a buzzing beehive, a collision of courses, a synthesis of cultures, products and factions. A city so multi-dimensional, it has practically reached a self-autonomy as a singular unit of geopolitical and financial influence on Earth as well as intergalactically due to its massive ownership of the majority of space ports, docking and refueling stations across Earth's western hemisphere.
Indeed, many such technological, agricultural, industrial, or other types of guilds managed to gain control over meaningful posts on city councils and later voted on implementing a declaration of independence, slowly but effectively transforming larger conurbations all over the world into a network of independent City States, whose councils cooperated and communicated on an intertwined basis. City States, I tell you, what with its entirely own government, police, policies, tax territories and borders, self-financed and self-produced army... you get the idea.
"That was what the world looked like in those days - terrifiedly large and overcrowded so as to ironically unconsciously pushing itself into being rather isolated and segregated from the whole, decentralized, yet organic." - Neom Chimskayevsky, Converting Dissent, 2104, 159
A true vision of the future. The definition of opportunity. The crisis of identity. The seed of either a bloody revolution, a dawnful evolution... or something in between.
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