Skyward - (NaNoWriMo 2013 Novel)

Idea Dump: Above and Below (Nov 4, Monday)

It was the only way out.

The Subway tunnels had been one of the first things to be locked down when the virus started being reported in the mass mediafeeds. The panic on the streets made them almost impossible to navigate, between all the abandonned cars, bikes, and electric scooters. Not even the loudest and most obnoxious of emergency vehicles could get through the near total gridlock.

In all the post-apocalyptic vids that were shown on the mediafeeds, you always saw the populace fleeing the cities, without any good reason ever being given for it. Bumper to bumper traffice extending to nowhere. That wasn't the case in reality, though. Everyone headed to The Core. At this point a fair number of Megados had already been built, and the rumour that was spread on the Medifeeds was that the megados were free of Virus, that the advanced air-cycling HVAC systems were built vaccuum tight, with hepafilters and UV radiation screens. Most people hadn't a clue what any of it meant, or how that protected them from the virus, but they flocked to the megados anyway. Those who had money paid whatever was asked for the remaining units. Those who had little snuck in with actual tenants or pooled what resources they all had together to make a down payment to get up into the megados and out of the streets.

But when the virus first struck, the megados were not yet fully self-sufficient. Their inbuilt nutrient farming levels were still getting up to speed for the thousands of tenants, so tones of livestock and raw produce were still being shipped into the core every day to feed the ever-growing urban population that was pouring into the newly minted towers. With the roads snarled by panicked public, the megado corps convinced the city to allow them to requisition part of the subway schedules for subterranian shipments by modified freight cars. At first, they requisitioned only the overnight capacity of the lines, between 2 and 6am when they were not normally running for commuter traffic. A few of the megaAgros were close enough to subway terminuses, and the others trucked in their product to these terminuses to load them onto the subcargo vehicles.

However, they only ever needed more livestock and produce, and the hours for which the subway was requisitioned by the corps grew slowly, encroaching on the normal commuter schedules.

Eventually, citizens who were still trapped in the suburbs caught wind of how The Core was keeping supplied while stocks in their groceries dwindled. They broke into the subway stations after hours or sought to derail trains on the above-ground sections of the tracks. It meant that the MegaCorps had to deploy their private defence forces to protect vulnerabilities in the subteranean supply network, and whereever they didn't have the manpower, they simply decided to use explosives instead, collapsing unneeded station entrances along the lines to deny disenfranchised citizens access to the underground tunnel system.

For this reason, the tunnels are now one of the safest places you can be when not in one of the sealed MegaDos. Sure, the occasional bit of Wild will sometimes manage to worm its way into them, but you never have to deal with any of the trully monstrous muties that are encountered on the surface.

(come up with something huge and hideous for them to encounter: a transport filled with genomodded livestock that got shunted down to Lower Bay and forgotten about; the alpha predator that managed to break free and eat all its companions, only to take up residence in Lower Bay as its lair. Near-blind, slithering pig thing.)

Thanks to tech of the day, there are still dim lights left in the parts of the tunnel system that were left intact: some kind of micro, deteriorating radioactive reactors (the kind of thing they use to power the mars rover, just mass-produced in a kind of lightbulb).

(PATH is sealed up first so that Core dwellers can travel from one building to the next without going out onto the out-of-control streets. Core starts shutting itself up slowly: creating a gated community of towers in the city's core.)