Overwhelming gravity.
From the very center,
Of the lowest floor,
Of the tallest city
In the world.
And not just gravity from the earth’s pull because of this city, but the gravity of the situation.
Few have ever ventured down into the heart of the bottom floor, and even fewer have escaped from it. It is a floor for the self-centered, greedy population of the city who only wish to control humanity from the bottom-up. This solemnly insane community have evolved to withstand the new pounds of gravity because of how much closer they are to the earth. But they’ve not only become closer to the earth, but closer to a truth almost all of them try to discover and obtain for themselves. Much like alchemy.
Not only is there no light, but there are no maps of the bottom, or few bottom floors either. The unimaginably thick support beams that hold up the entire city start at the bottom floor, essentially creating mini-mountains. Unbreakable, but absolutely climbable and habitable for living around. The roads that form from these irregular structures are an original kind of labyrinth, making almost unwalkable paths stretching from one side of the city all the way to the other. You would be hard-pressed to find yourself a car, so the journey would have to be ventured on foot or perhaps bike.
While the bottom floor is like a physical dark web of information, because of the little light that reaches it and the suspicious activity it beholds, it is also a sad place. Most of the people there are abandoned, and want to escape from the world because of the monstrosity it has become. Perhaps they’ve lost jobs, or friends, or family, or even themselves, and have come to the bottom floor to live “free”, the only cost of fending for themselves. But maybe some people went to the bottom for it’s gentle eeriness and close silence. The distant, echoed sounds of the bottom floor could comfort them into staying on the first floor of it all.
But the biggest and most alluring rumor of them all is of a particular, empty place, under a particularly, small hole. Said to be one of the most beautiful places on the bottom, because it is the beginning of the only uninterrupted hole that stretches from the very bottom of the city to the top. For the few minutes where the sun lines up with the hole, miles of sunlight go through all of the innumerous floors, and land on the bottom floor. For those few minutes, someone or something could look up and see the brilliant sun, under a mountain of humanity’s stackable technology.
Isn’t that beautiful?
Life was annoying.
For me, at least. And at this specific point in history.
But then again, throughout all time periods in history, the way people have lived has been imperfect, and seemingly unsolvable problems have arisen which would slowly be solved to the point of the solution becoming obsolete, and being superseded by more important problems, which would accelerate the cycle.
But hell, I’m no philosopher.
I’m just a 30 year old Acer Widget that lives on a high enough floor to get a department store job, a decent apartment, a few low class friends like me, and some other nice luxuries other not-as-wealthy citizens didn’t get. And what can I say! I’m content.
My name is Acer Widget, by the way. Don’t know if that was clear, or you thought that in the future there was a race or species called “Acer Widget”. I just like talking in third person sometimes.
And welcome to the future! I was never a good writer, so I don’t know if that was clear either. The year? It was the nice, prime number of 2141. Which I initially thought was going to be nice, but as you can tell from my introduction, did not end up as such.
You know how parents always tell you to be optimistic and look on the bright side of life? “Never let anything get you down! Stand proud and happy through it all!” Well as a message from the future to you, that stuff is bullcrap. If you think it’s hard to start small and be famous and successful now, it’s ten-fold that in the future. And it was especially bullcrap for me, for I knew there was no way I was getting wealthy, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was I was too optimistic! I actually thought that myself, Acer Widget, could live a normal life with little friends and no family.
I forgot to tell you my family died in an accident, didn’t I? It was just in the past two years, as I recall. Instead of making me sadder, (don’t get me wrong, I was sad. Cried in the corner for a few days actually) it made me grow stronger as a person! Even though I loved my family, after they died I felt like i was chosen to live out and survive on my floor of the North American Atlantic!
Which was yet another load of bullcrap, but it somewhat helped when I thought to myself if I should abandon my job and move to a lower floor and live life as a freelancer. Which I absolutely should have, because of what was about to happen to me -
HOLD ON! You don’t know what floors are, do you? Out of the two big things that pertain to the context of this story, the concept of cities having floors is crucial. It looks like I have to fill you in, so I’m just going to pull up my thesaurus in order to explain what the hell happened to your normal cities, the best way I can.
Where did this start again? Oh right! The 50’s (the 2050’s). It was almost a hundred years since the first successful human launch into space, so we decided to do it again, because we had alot more technology and hadn’t made any other significant spacial explorations with it since then. So over the course of 10 or 20 years, a few select people explored the solar system and made temporary camps on habitable enough planets. Luckily, none of them died.
Another outer space accomplishment were the satellites that were sent out into space such as New Horizons, which explored newer and newer depths of space each day. But the United States wasn’t the only country that was participating in outer space exploration. Major world powers such as the UN and Russia were also exploring different parts of space at different rates. But there was one thing all of the nations and organizations had in common after 20 years or space exploration.
Nothing.
None of the astronauts discovered anything new about any of the planets they had visited and none of the satellites had received any bizzare signals from the great beyond. This didn’t improve how people felt about extraterrestrial lifeforms and living in space, so less people became interested in the sort. I remember learning that before then, humans were really adamant about going into space to terraform Mars and set up colonies on other moons. It’s too bad that it didn't quite come to be.
While this wasn’t a major reason for the cities we have today, it certainly helped people prefer to build them rather than the great beyond. This reason also helped with another big movement that happens in the future, but that will be brought up later.
The second and more important movement that practically made these rising cities is the creation of carbon nanotubes. In the same time of the new space exploration, so the 2050's, chemists were slowly discovering ways to better structure atoms and molecules in order to make stronger building materials. While I don’t know the fine details behind how it happened, I do know that the chemists accidentally found a better, cheaper, and easier way to make these carbon nanotubes. Why do some of the most everyday inventions have to come about by accident? I swear, you really have to be cooking corn flakes on your teflon frying pan while playing with your silly-putty covered slinky in order to actually put a post-it note down for these questions. But anyway, while this new way of making carbon nanotubes was highly profitable and helped nations made incredibly stable buildings really fast, it could also support alot of weight from the positive y axis.
So the curious architects of New York decided to purchase a city block sized piece of land in what was White Plains, or the land above Manhattan Island. They designed the building to be a scientific museum for the carbon nanotubes and other structural and scientific breakthroughs of the like, as well as a sightseeing point. After doing some calculations about how much weight the carbon could hold and what the conditions of the terrain and climate were for that area, they started production. After under a year of building they completed the entire building, and it ended up being really tall.
Tallest in the world, actually.
After hearing the news, the public became ecstatic, and started viewing the building more and more to learn, look out at new york and take pictures next to it. Architects came to the building too, and tried to calculate if the building was actually stable, and could really survive most types of weather despite its height. After they tested and ran the numbers...they found out it could. Of course it could! What did you think? It was going to fall over the next year? This is your future we're talking about. All the stupidly unexpectedly good stuff actually works.
So now that it was proven the carbon nanotubes could build really tall towers really well, other people in other countries also joined the race to make the tallest building they could, and maybe even beat the one in New York.
Which they did.
But not for long. Other big cities such as London, Berlin, Venice, Tokyo, Singapore, Los Angeles, and some more also had their bet at building with the carbon nanotubes, and one by one, surpassed each other in height. The top spot for tallest building was constantly updated. With all the building going on, you’d think at least one building was knocked down because of its structural instability, which did in fact happen. One was built in Australia as a lighthouse for ships. But due to its rushed structure, bad planning, and because it was below the earth, it was actually rooted from it’s base, fell off the earth, and ended up in space. You think I’m kidding? I wish I wasn’t. It did fall into the ocean though. Somehow, no one died, but the accident threw away millions of dollars that went into building it.
There was one particular city though, that didn’t try to build it’s buildings as quick and as fast as possible. Instead they planned and structured their tower so it could be the tallest, most stable, and most interesting tower. It was only after all of the other regions of the world had finished their projects that this city started theirs. And as you might have guessed, this city was New York.
Unfinished