The Fall of the City of Steel

Corruption

Soren Caster hated his job. He sulked at his large, grandiose black wooden desk as he signed papers that someone had sent him, approving something inconsequential.

It was not the bureaucracy that Soren hated; instead, it was the web of corruption he had been roped into. Contrary to what some of his lower underlings thought, he did not lie at the web's center. At that center lied a computer.

* * *

"A computer?" Acridoidea repeated, looking to Emilia.

"What on earth is a computer?" Emilia relayed.

Soren sighed with irritation. "A computer is a device that can perform computations," he defined obviously. "It's like a calculator, but it runs on electricity and takes up several floors of a skyscraper." Soren looked up to a gallery of baffled faces. "Surely, you've used a calculator before, Miss Pershing?"

"I have," Emilia confirmed. "But... what kind of maniac would use a number-crunching machine to run a city?"

"It does more than crunch numbers," Soren explained. "Its systems are so advanced, it can process speech, and it has either a vast built-in vocabulary, or the ability to learn. Make no mistake, though; whoever is responsible for plugging that cursed thing in was an irredeemable madman."

Everyone looked to be as close to understanding as they would get.

"Alright then..." Soren continued.

* * *

Unlike the rest of the collectively vast crew that kept the city operational, Soren took orders directly from the machine.  But he was not content to reap the rewards of corruption; nothing could spare his conscience from all the damage he did. Unscrupulous factory bosses- relics from his father's era, Soren had once hoped- paid the government to turn a blind eye to the drudgery that powered the city in its own lower levels. Slaves kidnapped from the indigenous tribes labored and sweated to produce the city's raw materials and goods. The crimes of the police force were covered up, then swept away.

Worst of all, this system not only subsisted, but thrived. Citizens of the city had no trouble ignoring the problems beneath them. They reveled in the luxury and prosperity and, when it was challenged, they fought to protect their utopian lie.

The plight of the poor in the lower levels troubled Soren the most. With a heavy sigh, he leaned back and reflected on his past for what was approaching the two-thousandth time.

Soren was born in the lower levels to a pair of poor workers. His father was killed by a mugger before he was old enough to remember him, and his mother succumbed to some disease when he was thirteen years of age.

* * *

Acridoidea groaned and laid her head in her palm.

"What is it?" Soren grumbled. "You don't believe me?"

"No," Acridoidea corrected. "Just once, I'd like to see someone whose family life isn't as messed-up as ours."

"No one here qualifies?" he asked Acridoidea. "What about that little boy next to you?"

"His older brother was executed less than ten hours ago," Emilia explained.

Jerry nodded sourly.

"Oh no," he moaned, hanging his head. "You're Jeremy Gottlieb, aren't you?"

"Did you tell him my name?" Jerry demanded, looking up at Acridoidea.

"I didn't tell him it was Jeremy," she defended.

"You're the younger brother of Damon Gottlieb," Soren recited, "who was KIA in a dogfight with a police unit. He was trying to stop his parents from being framed and hauled off on suspicion. In a way, he succeeded."