The arcology was awesome, in the old literal definition of the word. The footprint was huge – a rough circle five miles across. Twenty square miles, right down in the middle of nowhere, Minnesota. We built out there mostly because it was close to our main iron mines and refinery.
The best part about it? We got a deal with the state to be completely tax-free for ninety-nine years. We had to commit to sponsoring charter schools sufficient for the full population of the county where we built it, and we took over all their power generation too. The schools cost us a fair amount, but we could manage power essentially for free. Other than a bit of design time to make sure we could connect to the grid and to shut down the old plants without interruptions, getting the power sorted was almost as simple as hitting a big button.
For the arcology, we laid down the foundation first – Plasma Steel beams right down into the bedrock. We started out with infrastructure, building a major automated Plasma Steel production facility with its own glass printing facility. The factory was specifically designed to handle different sizes of projects. It produced everything from the massive beams and sheets in the mind-boggling volumes that we used for construction right down to one-off prototypes ordered by a researcher.
We overbuilt the warehousing and docking to handle a few thousand percent of the expected capacity. Next, we built in stacked greenhouses and hydroponics. Right off the bat, we could grow enough to feed almost two hundred people an acre in our grow spaces, and I kept getting reports on how we could improve that. With plenty of space, we stacked up the grow areas and left almost five square miles of space available for greenhouses, hydroponics, and other space-age agriculture.
All of that filled up the main circle and stood about five stories high above the ground. The wall encircling it was built as smooth as possible. We tried to avoid any protrusions or structures that broke up the flow of the wide gentle circle. Just gateways, doors, and windows to give it texture. There was a train station built inside the wall, and an airfield just to the west of the structure with plenty of space to expand. The trucking docks were between the trains and the airport, and entrances to underground garages all around. We’d also left open a few hundred doors higher up to handle growing air-drone traffic. A fair chunk of that interior space was still vacant, and we’d done our best to design the layout to be modular if and when needs changed.
The top of the circle was still mostly empty. It was here that we planned on putting people. We’d built a few dozen apartment buildings – skyscrapers really. Almost fifty stories tall, but the way they were connected to each other made them look funky. They were all clustered at the southern edge, with the bottom ten or so stories completely covered over. There was an eye-bending lattice of bridges connecting them to each other up higher. From the outside, the network of bridges looked insane, but on the inside it made sense, especially considering how we were laying out our grid system – it wasn’t built on squares, instead, we designed around arcs and floors. I did my best to make sure there was lots of open space inside, and that the buildings weren’t just unending doors into apartments.
We had plazas, concert halls, theaters, shopping areas, food areas. Each residential space was built like a donut, with individual apartments having balconies and windows to the outside, and their doors opening into large open spaces inside. No narrow hallways in public areas.
It was filling up slowly too. We allowed all our employees, including those who were basically paid to do nothing, to move in rent-free, along with their families. As we hired new employees, we discounted their salaries a lot but gave them space inside. By the time we had become the single largest manufacturer worldwide, we had a bit under ten thousand workers who could work from headquarters. A few thousand more were in research or other non-manufacturing divisions who moved in too. I got my idea when Ashley pointed out that most of the ‘extra’ staff we kept on salary gravitated to various tasks inside to make themselves helpful. A lot of the time those employees were just gophers or note-takers for someone else, but almost none of them just sat around and watched TV.
Not too long after most of the company's staff moved in, we all got together at Austin's place in the new Arcology. We meaning the owners. Austin had opted for the largest living space of any of us. The Beards and I both took one of the smallest apartments offered in the Arcology. Hansen had one a bit larger, but his extra space was filled with lab equipment, and he usually was sharing it during the day with an assistant or two. But Austin had a family. Sure, all three of his kids were grown and he only shared his rooms with his wife, but he still wanted space for a couple of guest rooms, a large family room, a dining room, and an entertainment room for the sake of kids and grandkids and family events. Two of his kids lived in the Arcology, the third managed a few thousand acres of our farmland an hour south of headquarters.
We had some comfortable chairs set up in his greenhouse balcony. It was covered over with thick panes and filled with thick vines and ornamental flowers. The warm fragrant air contrasted with the gray snow blowing outside. It was easy to forget what Minnesota winters were like when you lived full time inside. He had a twelve-foot telescope set up on rails so that you could easily push it all the way outside when you wanted. Alan was walking me through the fine points of the design when Hansen finally arrived.
I hadn't seen him much over the last few years. We were both busy with the company, but we spent our time on entirely different things. He was still plugging away at research, nailing down every variation and measurement he could. There had been only a few minor breakthroughs (like a method to recycle Plasma materials – by altering the fields a bit you could re-form a piece. Time-consuming but better than filling up landfills with junk that will literally never go away), but he remained up to his figurative elbows in data and tests. I was dealing with the daily minutiae of running the company – evolving compensation packages, design priorities, tax negotiation, and so on.
He had aged shockingly. I shouldn't have been surprised: the man was in his sixties. When I had first met him, he was just middle-aged, and I was a kid who probably couldn't tell the difference between someone in their thirties or seventies at the time. But he had lost most of his hair, grayed out, cheeks and neck withered. He was an old man now, and he reveled in his ability to be cranky, eccentric, and detached. He had shown up in carpet slippers, flannel pants, and a tweed jacket over a t-shirt. I expected him to pull out a pipe to smoke.
He thumped into one of the padded wicker chairs, and asked me, “So why did you call this meeting? I hadn't heard about anything new, aren't you supposed to handle the day-to-day?”
“Not an emergency, more of a slowly-growing concern.” I sat down as well, while Alan sat on a lounge chair next to El. Austin was already in another wicker armchair. “There are a number of issues we're facing, and while we could maintain the status quo for some time yet, I'd like to get ahead of them. And anything we do decide will be... major. And problematic. I'd like to have a united front. At a minimum, I'd at least like some consensus before moving on.”
“To sum up... living here kinda sucks.”
Austin snorted at me, “What do you mean? Living here is the entire reason anyone wants to work for us. Not that we're hiring tons of people, but living in the Castle is our biggest draw. Especially after the Pittsburgh riots.”
Why do people insist on nicknames for stuff? We were living in an arcology, not a castle. We made Plasma Steel, not plasteel. But now wasn't time for that discussion. “Sure, sure. Living somewhere safe is a big deal, and not getting blown up or set on fire is a major plus. But it still sucks. We've got twelve thousand employees here, and another thirty thousand dependents, but that's just a small town. And an isolated small town, at that.”
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El got it, right away, “I know what you mean. There's no music, no parties except for work stuff, only one club.”
“And that club sucks,” said Alan. “You're right, but I don't see what we can do about it.”
“That's what I mean,” I said. “There are things we can do, but they'll be radical. And you can expect people to have issues. Basically, I think we should stop being a small town, and become a big town. A city, even. A big city.”
“We can do it. We have less than fifty thousand people living here, even counting the part-timers who only come in seasonally. We have current living capacity for another hundred and fifty thousand. The designs John's team came up with will let us expand capacity up to nearly a million people in a year and a half. And that includes public space, schools, and room for entertainment and commercial venues. We can grow past that, too, if we want to.”
“A million people?” Austin was clearly mulling things over... “That seems, um, well actually, we have a bigger footprint than Manhattan, and they've got two million people living there, right?
“One and a half, actually. Give or take a hundred thousand. Their population has been pretty steady for almost a hundred years, too. And not only do they have a few square miles less space than we do, we’ve got gobs more vertical space. The Arcology isn’t just more carefully planned, we build much higher, too. The logistics are entirely doable. And if we do get a million people to move here, I think we can improve a lot of social problems. More kids, more musicians, more creative types, more social options. You aren't limited to other PPI workers for everything.”
“But people aren't going to want to just move here. We can manage it, and we can do it with barely a hiccup, but incentives are a problem. Which is why I think we should basically just open the doors and let people move in for free. All the privileges employees already get. No rent, and we provide the same food, services, and so on as we do employees.”
Alan and Austin started talking at once, but Alan came through loudest, “Free? We'd just take over the room and board for a million people? That would bankrupt us!”
Austin's complaints were similar, “How would we feed that many? The farms only have so much output.”
“I've actually spent some time with Ms. Rice already, looking at costs and feasibility. We’ve been thinking about this ever since Canada expanded their UBI. Given our tax and capacity situations, we would pretty much break even. There’re a few assumptions in our estimates, for example, I'm assuming that we can find enough teachers willing to work for room and board that we don't have to pay extra for them, but I'm guessing that the benefits of living here, access to everything we produce, and our other services and tech support; all of that will mean that we can get all the professionals we're looking for. If we can’t, well, we’ll have to just go recruit people. It’s not like we’re short on penthouses.”
I tapped my tablet, sending some documents to the other four with varying buzzes and chimes. “Building and furnishing their spaces won't cost anything, really. Our fabricators are currently at just fourteen percent of capacity, and that's been falling for the past few years. Our extraction divisions maintain a stockpile capable of supporting maximum output for three years, and the AI wranglers say that they can increase production to maintain maximum output even if we double our capacity every year for the next decade.”
“Food is the only real cost – anything we provide for free here is stuff that we can't sell. But given the tax situations, any profits we make selling food are immediately lost to federal taxes anyways. So that works out fine. PPM is already producing food sufficient to feed fifty million people, so this is a drop in the bucket, anyways. Protein is the biggest issue; we just don't raise much livestock. But we can increase fish farming, soy, and nuts; I’ve got some reports that we can shift food waste from production and start pig farming, too.”
"I suspect the bigger issue will be food diversity, but we're on that. Right now, our farms outside have about six hundred people managing them, on top of the drones. But they don’t grow much beyond corn, wheat, and beans. But we’ve got those grow rooms downstairs. They’re not done yet, but they are slated to employ another thousand people once we finish. And then we'll be able to supply most of the fruit and veg and processed food that you can get in supermarkets. At least, what you used to be able to get."
Alan spoke again, “So people are just going to come here, and have everything handed to them. Are we going to make them work, or pay anything?”
I shrugged, “Again, we'll need a handful of professionals – teachers, doctors, and police, mostly. But other than that, yeah. People can come for free.”
Alan frowned at me, “I'm not sure I like that. I mean, having more people here would be great, it can be boring when you don't have a project on hand. But just letting people do nothing... I mean, that doesn't feel right. And isn't that why there's all the riots, suicides, murders, and so on? Unemployment and purposelessness?” Unemployment in the States was approaching eighty percent, between the bottom following out of manufacturing and automation, there just wasn't that much work left that needed to get done. Welfare had expanded, somewhat, food stamps and medical aid were helping, and no one was starving or freezing to death. But most people were just spinning their wheels and angry about it.
I explained, “This is why we needed a meeting. Memos that no one reads doesn't cut it for stuff like this. And yeah, it doesn't quite feel right, does it? But we can provide for people without cost, I'm not sure if I like the idea of forcing them to work any better. And we do need more people here.”
“As to the violence and stuff. I'm not sure. We can keep guns out, and screen people for domestic violence or addiction issues. But I'm not sure if I can buy that it's just boredom. It's hopelessness. If we can put them somewhere safe, where education and other services are provided, where poverty isn't really an issue, won't it be better?”
“I guess.” Alan didn't appear to be willing to argue much, so El chimed in.
“There still needs to be something to work towards. I mean, we've got our twelve thousand, but let’s be honest, that's four times what we actually need. So, we need ways to reward people willing to actually get out of their houses and do stuff. Otherwise, I don't think people will be happy, whether or not their needs are met.” She paused for a moment, clearly trying to put thoughts into words.
“I mean, Alan and I don't make molds anymore, but we still sculpt and play, we have our glassworks to work in even if the molds get printed out now. Could that be enough? You said we needed to fill all the promenades, and I know most of the space in the central blocks are still empty. Everyone gets their apartments, sure, but we can allocate shop space and workspace to people who intend to actually use it? Some people like to cook, and host, right? The auto-chefs are nice, but what if we encourage people to start restaurants by giving them the resources to do so?”
Alan said, “So we solve the problem of letting people live for free by giving them more free stuff?”
“No,” I said. “I get what you mean, El. We're estimating about a thousand square feet per person. Oddly enough, the ratio mostly goes down for families and couples. And this might be a good thing, too. We want a more active community, so let’s go ahead and tailor what incentives we do have towards that. If you want to do something beyond sitting in your rooms, watching TV, and eating, then you can. And all you have to prove is that you'll actually put the time in.”
Hansen finally chimed in, “I like it. I think. It won't hurt us, and it's at least an attempt to fix the problems we've been causing. Worst case, people whose lives are falling apart will still have lives falling apart, with more reliable heat and water.”
“And you know what? All the rest of you have to vote against me to get your way. And since it looks like Ward’s voting for it too, I think the discussion is over.” He stood up and stretched.
“Besides, it’ll be nice to get new assistants more easily,” he said as he shuffled out. As though he didn’t already have a waiting list of applicants.
And that was it. The rest of us kept talking it over after Dr. Hansen headed back to his own spaces. There were plenty of bugs to work out – we had to decide what would or wouldn't be contraband. Guns were out, although they could be kept in a locker and checked out for hunting or whatever when leaving the city. The types of activity that merited a public space had to be defined, though we were pretty generous about it; my favorite 'shop' was a large room occupied by a constantly evolving model train track and scenery. Almost everyone spent their time on some hobby or another. Sure, a lot of them settled into a steady life of online gaming and lotus-eating, but a lot of them invested thousands of hours into music, art, writing, crafts, and more.
We were able to get enough teachers, and doctors, although we struggled to get enough nurses. Some AI help alleviated the healthcare problem, but sick people almost universally responded better to flesh & blood caretakers. A few cosmetic perks and health care workers' social status rose enough to get more people into training programs. After a few years of growth, the population steadied down at about one point two million citizens. It mostly stopped growing because other arcologies were coming online to compete with us for residents.
I still consider the Arcology to be my greatest idea. The rest of my life was pretty much accidental, but this was my idea and my contribution to evolving modern civilization.
The only problem was that I started getting called King of the Great Lakes. So I had that going for me. Which is nice.