There’s chaos in the highstreets tonight. Sirens wail, and choppers fly overhead with white signal lights shining like pure circles as they search the low city. Riots in the summer heat keep the police busy. Guns, firebombs, protest signs, violence is in the air... I can smell the blood.

Somewhere a bomb goes off, shaking building windows, kicking up dust and a great orange fireball rises over rooftops and disappears in an instant. Someone rushes through an alleyway, a man of forty-four years, with a woman in hand half his age. They knock over a trash can in their hurry and step on a bum’s ankle by accident. He curses, but is too strung out to really believe it happened.

The pair come out on a nearby street that's been emptied. The power’s off here, so the streetlights don’t work. It’s hard to tell if this was planned or natural. In the next moment, a spotlight flashes down on them, exposing them to the night but the light is not from the police. These guys drive cars that are too nice for a cop.

They pull out from the dark and surround the pair, but the two are already on the move. Sprinting, they race for an alleyway that leads to the next street over. Bad move.

The ground beneath the man’s feet turns to clouds of dust, and he cringes as bullets tear into his trench coat. In the next moment, he is on the ground. The woman holds his bloody hand but he pushes her away. She rushes into the alley alone.

Assailants in black riot gear edge closer with cautious steps before wasting the dying man in a hail of gunfire. His body is hidden behind a cloud of smoke before a hot breeze blows it all away. A moment later, the man’s killers hoist the young woman out of the alley, dragging her into a nearby car, which drives away into the chaos of the low streets where all things are lost, never to be seen again.

In their greed, the corpo pigs did the impossible. The world was heating up. The skies were choked by smog. Animals and plants died in mass extinctions. People struggled in the streets while resources dwindled. Yet, profits steadily rose.

All the signs pointed to collapse. The world should’ve ended, the profit margins dropping from sky high to plateau before nose diving all the way down to zero… Then. Dead, all of us. Yet here we are.

Somehow we survive, as if the wheels of industry simply will out our continued existence.

And so, it’s pitch black under the smog strangled sky. The city lights mark the ground in radiant colors, and buildings sing in hissing steam columns and buzzing neon signs. The city stretches out like lines of sparkling water on a black slate off beyond what the eye can see.

And right in the middle of it is Low town “low down”, or Harmony as the suits call it. A place where the normals live. On the north, it's edged by a mountain of smokestacks, an industrial zone. Two weeks out of the month the smokestacks spew putrid black smoke. The other two weeks, giant fire pillars twist and bend out of their tops, heating the city, and lighting it in a nasty dull orange glow. Most people have industrial shades on their windows for that exact reason.

The city is a mess of bridges, tall buildings, and shambled dwellings stacked on top of one another, all trying to reach higher into the sky than their counterparts like trees of jungles found in old magazines. They’re all set to edge each other out, to swallow the rare sunlight even at the cost of all the others.

The city is as vertical as it is wide. What came before is simply built over now, instead of toppled. Sometimes, old buildings are filled with cement as support for new ones, burying any poor sap unlucky enough to squat inside. Other times, the derelicts are built around, encased in hardened steel and concrete like death cells for those forgotten and left inside.

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The streets are no better. Cracked and broken, hobbled together by insane engineers, they stretch for rows and rows into the distance in whatever direction you look. And when a new level of city is planned, the old roads are entombed and turned into tunnels, their roofs the new streets.

It’s the same beneath the city too; some streets sit empty and unused, while others still bustle as underpasses for the people living below the surface. It’s like this all the way down for who knows how deep: one giant car park, a living breathing city where the old are trampled and built over with asphalt, and the young reach for the skies.

No one knows how far down the city goes. Maybe those distant sand hills used to be mountains…

Vegetation doesn’t grow in the surrounding soil anymore, so the hills to the west are blank and gray, the color of static. Almost featureless, only contour lines shape them, burnt through by acid water from filthy rain showers. The hills in the west outline the city, where beyond is no man’s land, a vast stretch of wastes no one’s gone into and come back out alive.

To the east, beyond Lowdown, is Midcity, or Ambition if you're a midtowner, where the normals work, and some execs and low-rung suits live. It’s all boring financials, full of white-collar crime, corporate greed, and tall, tall office buildings. Research centers, high government, military police… anything with real value lives here, but it’s only a boring middle ground, a gate between Lowdown and the real city.

Buildings taller than any you’ve ever seen poke against the clouds, there. Entire districts, entire sections of the city live in their shadows. At night, it glimmers gold. The aura can be seen from Lowdown, only past the tallest buildings in Ambition.

That place is beyond me. I've heard it's all backroom deals, hush money, corporate orgies, and gold-collar crimes. Bad things happen in the shadows if you know who to ask. Mass slave trading. Corporate murder. All manner of reviled perversions.

Doesn’t matter to me though. People like us don’t concern ourselves with that side of the world.

What’s beyond Gold City? I don’t know. Probably more of the same. Another midcity. Another Lowdown. Repeating and stretching forever, for all I know.

To the south, midcity breaks into smaller residential areas, and poorer neighborhoods, before turning into a stretch of super highways that reach down the coast. I was born down that way, though I don’t remember where. I’ve lived here my whole life.

Not exactly in Lowdown though… No, past Lowdown to the southwest is a stretch of dilapidated city more akin to a bombsite than a city zone. Spires of stone poke up through the disease, remnants of old superbuildings that were much like the ones in current-day Gold City. The streets are ash, or rubble, and most buildings left standing have been abandoned or burned out.

There is no government, no rule or law. Gangs run rampant in the streets, harassing the weak and the destitute, and the violent take what they want from those struggling in the middle of it all. Only the strongest survive.

It used to be called Cherry Hill, but now… Warzone, Wasteland, the Pits. Whatever shit name you want to give it I’m sure would fit. If anyone’s ever been to hell it would look like this.

Murder, slavery, perversion, drug trafficking… that’s just scraping the surface. I saw a man last week drug around the streets tied to the back of a motorcycle. And when his ride was over, they poured gasoline on him, burnt away what little life he had left. Why, you ask? No reason. No goddamn reason at all. It’s worse than the wild west here. It’s post-apocalyptic.

Something happened here a long time ago, but nobody knows what. It used to be the city center, much like Gold City is today. At least that’s what they say. I don’t know if I believe any of that.

To me, it’s always been nothing but a concrete jungle never kept up with, breaking down over time, and dying all on its own. Here, it doesn’t look like something bad happened. It looks like it’s still happening. I see the same rot in the rest of the city too. Just, “Cherry HIll” is ahead of the curve.

I suspect that one day the whole city will be like this. Maybe that’s what it deserves. Shit. That’d be something to see, those corpo suit freaks scrounging in the dirt like the rest of us. But none of that matters to me. I won’t be here to see it.

Even though it's where I was raised, where I live on the days I can’t help it, I’m getting out. Just wait and see.