Part I: Civilian

1.

Concrete, glass and plasteel buildings sprawled for kilometers in all directions, but especially down. Greater Sydney, Australian Sector wasn’t as congested as Hong Kong or New York, but its fifty-one million inhabitants seldom felt the sun’s warmth. There wasn’t anything wrong with the sun or its ability to shine upon the populace. Ozone depletion, long a concern of earlier generations, had been taken care of a century ago. Nor was smog any worse than it had been at the beginning of the Twenty-first Century. The problem for sun-lovers had taken a different turn.

To feed Earth’s hordes took more land than the world had and more than all the resources of the sea-farms. Thus, a hundred agricultural gigahabs orbited the planet. And even in the middle of the greatest civil war the Solar System had ever known, laser-launched transports went up and came back down every hour of the day. To save land the cities burrowed into the Earth rather than sprawl outward in ever widening circumferences. If humanity hadn’t taken this radical turn, concrete, glass and plasteel would have covered the entire planet by 2349.

Greater Sydney boasted fifty-nine levels, neither the greatest nor the least among the planet’s megalopolises. Mole-like machinery eternally chewed into the stygian depths, expanding and mining, growing the city at a pre-determined rate.

Most of the fifty-one million inhabitants carried their Social Unity cards with pride. They had been taught that the Inner Planets needed people who could work together for the good of the whole. Loners, hermits and individualists who were found out—and eventually they all were—underwent strenuous re-education or a stint of labor-learning in the algae tanks.

Sometimes, however, even in this age of social paradise and raging civil war, certain officials took advantage of their rank or failed to perform zealously all their duties.