Skyward - (NaNoWriMo 2013 Novel)

The Layers of MegaDo (and Merriness) - (Nov 7, Thursday)

As it became clear that the MegaDos were the way of the future; as progress and growth began to centre on them, and the city beyond their walls was

left to stagnate and crumble, the prices for housing units started crawling further upwards. People sold whole houses in the rapidly-deflating real estate market to scrape together barely enough currency to buy a single, shockingly small unit with little more in it than a bed, basic washlet unit, and a culinary/sanitation pod. The MegaDo world was a communal one, where personal space was limited and recreation space was shared.

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The MegaDos has been organizied so that their physical structure reinforced the social hierarchy to which their creators subscribed. The higher your floor, the higher your social standing. The affluent occupants of the upper levels were rewarded with actual windows that had a chance of catching actual sunlight, rather than the digitally-synthesized facsimiles of sunrises and sunsets that were projected on the vidnows of the lower floors: simulations that had been generated based on actual views that used to exist in the buildings of the core before it was overhauled and thrust upwards with the introduction of the MegaDos. The projections of one floor's bank of vidnows would synch up, providing the entirety of that floor with a continuous view of a given vista. Were you to walk past the vidnows, the paralax projection technology would even allow the scene depicted to shift reallistically in the way that it would if there was actual perspective involved. However, the projections were never consistent between floors, and if you travelled to a higher floor and looked to the vidnows located in the exact same position, there was no guarantee that you would see the same vista, except from a greater elevation. The projection system's paralax engine was capable of accommodating for responsive perspective shifting, but it had been found early on that citizens were happier with varriety and realism. They would much rather have a different view every day from their same self-contained world, spread over the few levels of the 'Do that they frequented for work, school or recreation. All that realism bought them was one more thing to become bored with, and when your citizens spent their entire lives cooped up in the world's most advanced, self-sustaining hamster cage, the powers-that-be seized on any easy opportunity to curb psychotic outbursts of cabin fever. So the vistas of each floor's projections would rotate daily to keep things fresh.

As synthetic as they may be, the vidnows were still favourable to the commerce levels of the 'Dos, which saw their outer walls covered with screens that alternated betwen projections of the current values of various products and stocks on world markets, and frightfully twee inspirational imagery of bald eagles seizing salmon from moutain lakes and slogans like "Keep moving. Keep innovating."

Below the commerce levels were the industry layers and the Ag-Grow farming blocks. These layers were down far enough that, in 'Dos that had been conversions and not purpose-built, the industry layers were often retrofitted into the legacy floors of the skycrapers and corporate towers that had preceeded the MegaDos and had had the additional, state of the art floors bolted on to their crowns. The retrofit had gutted the legacy floors to their bare concrete and glass, then filled them with the systems required to perform their functions, but those systems were practical ones: the minimum required for those functions to be completed. The legacy floors didn't have screens in the place of windows, and the windows they had inherited were sealed up behind thick layers of structural flexcrete, both to insure the structural viability of the MegaDo floors added on to the buildings, and as an added layer of defense. This wasn't much of a loss since the legacy floors were so far down the greater totem pole that their windows would have been useless for all but the greyest, most diffuse of natural lighting. Their proximity to the ground also made them more vulnerable to attack from The Wild below or from Sky Pirates striking from neighbouring buildings.

In place of windows or vidnows, the legacy floors sported vertical, luminous strips where windows should have been, and these strips were programmed to immitate the waxing and waining of daylight in real time. The strips had been engineered to emit the correct type of light to provide those civilians who laboured in the industrial layers with the vitamin D that would normally come from sunlight, but this technology had been built into most of the lighting present in the MegaDos.

Below the industrial layers, was Waste Processing and Material Reabsorption.

Below Waste was Immigration.

The Immigration layer saw very little use of late, but it had been the level that a good number of the inhabitants of each MegaDo had come up through. It was also the level through which they exited if they ever had the misfortune to commit an exilable offence.

In the early days, when the majority of the residential and commercial space had been filled in the MegaDos by paying tennants, it was discovered that the 'Dos still needed a goodly amount of labour to keep them humming along. The majority of the processes that kept the actual MegaDos running were self -sufficient and self-repairing. These processes kept the air circulating, kept the lights on, kept

There were no windows in the Immigration levels; no vidnows, and no daylight strips. There was only low, overly amber lighting, and steel. Steel walls, floors, and fixtures as steel was easier to clean than concrete. In theory that is. With the stink and darkness of the surfaces in the immigration levels, one would have to wonder if they had ever been cleaned. The levels had been slapped together hastily when it became clear that they'd be needed, and they were meant more as waiting lobbies than as permanent housing

To save on manpower requirements, the lower levels of the 'Dos were fitted with unidirectional ingress points referred to as Immigration Gates. They included logic and dexterity controls to ensure that creatures of The Wild couldn't unexpectedly stumble in, and, should you prove yourself human and capable of passing the gates, you could no longer exit through them once you had entered. This was made clear to all immigrants who attempted to pass them, it was communicated to them in a multitude of languages to avoid confusion. It was the first test of immigration: the question of how bad you wanted it.

Individuals who passed the immigration gates were, more or less, safe in the Immigration levels, and, so long as they had brought food and drink, they were welcome to remain there for as long as they could stand it before one of two things happened:

A) The fairly complacent and chronically understaffed immigration staff chose to make their monthly rounds of that particular

These days, the immigration levels were seldom used other than for expulsions. Technically, they were still observing their original purpose as the only entrypoint to the 'Dos for prospective immigrants. However, with nearly five decades having passed since the final, official recognition of the MegaDos as autonimous city states, it was rare that migrants ever find themselves shoring up in a MegaDo's immigration level. The decades had served to solidly segment the population into withins and withouts. If you had the luck to have wound up within a MegaDo, you did everything in your power to claw your way up through its layers: out of immigration, up through industrial, and into commerce and residence if you proved clever enough. The upward momentum of the 'Do society was as unidirectional as the immigration gates. Once you entered, you didn't exit unless you were expelled.

This isn't working.

The Wild

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Ok. so. today was not a day of epic inspiration. Today was a day of writing, then a lot of work, then some writing, then volunteering and photography with some good, Japan-initiated friends. We had some great career and networking time, followed up by some merry time in an alley in a country where such things are sometimes frowned upon. This is not a day of epic free association. This is not an amazing day of beautiful words. This is a day of pedestrianism. This is a day of trying, simply, to make it to the deadline; of forgetting the deadline in the face of good friends, who are as mad as you are, and who long to return to an archipelago on the other side of the world, where drinking wine together from a communal bottle in the back alley of a condo building is not only acceptable, but encouraged; a cohort of ruffians who help you travel back through time, to a place where your life was open and free and every minute an adventure.

That experience is one that changes your life. It is an experience that expands your perspectives; that doesn't so much make you country of birth invalid as it does make it smaller, makes it incapable of eclipsing a world view that has come to encompass a whole lot more.