Life in the World of Broken Dreams

The textbook example of a transition society, Nairobi has progressed from an overcrowded Second Wave capital to a thriving borderline-Fourth-Wave global city in less than a century, and the culture shock is still visible. The combination of a strongly Preservationist government with the influx of money supporting the Olympus beanstalk project has resulted in a local way of life that is both quite conservative and wildly experimental.

An accidental city, Nairobi’s history has been that of a crossroads for trade and migration. The Olympus Project is simply the latest variation on a centuries-old trend.

Nairobi was founded by British colonialists in 1899, on a place that the indigenous Masai people called “Uaso Nyirobi,” or “the watering place.” At the midpoint of the Kenya-Uganda railway, Nairobi became the headquarters of the British effort to open the interior of eastern Africa to trade and colonization. Nairobi was in an ideal location, being close to the Great Rift Valley escarpment, on the southern slopes of Mt. Kenya, and midway between the Indian Ocean port of Mombassa and the city of Kisumu on Lake Victoria. Its altitude – nearly 8,700 feet – meant that, despite being almost directly on the equator, its climate was surprisingly temperate.

The early part of the 20th century saw a series of plagues decimate the Nairobi population as well as the railroad workers the British East Africa Protectorate brought in to complete the “Lunatic Express.” Nonetheless, the Protectorate officially became a British colony in 1905, and thousands of settlers from across the British Empire made their way to Kenya. Nairobi grew as a racially segregated settlement, even as the influx of settlers pushed the native Masai off of their traditional lands.

African nationalism emerged as a resistance to colonial power, building across the region in the 1920s and 1930s. The movement grew more rapidly after World War II, as a European-educated Kenyan nationalist calling himself Jomo Kenyatta became the leader of the political struggle for independence. In 1952 the British imprisoned Kenyatta, even as the Mau Mau, a violent independence movement, grew in strength. Finally, in 1963, the combination of political pressure from moderates like Kenyatta, the violent revolt of the Mau Mau, and the overall collapse of empires led the British to leave Kenya.

Nairobi remained the capital city of Kenya after independence, beginning a period of rapid growth which brought its population to over three million people at the end of the 20th century. AIDS, corruption, a mismanaged economy, and an authoritarian government left Kenya weakened at the onset of the 21st century, and Kenyans from across the country came to Nairobi in search of work. At its peak in 2040, Nairobi’s population topped seven million people.

Despite its problems, Kenya managed to avoid the ethnic and political meltdowns that plagued much of the rest of the continent. Successive relatively honest reformist governments kept the lid on political tensions, and the Kenyan economy grew in strength and stability with the assistance of South Africa and the European Union. In 2048, Prime Minister Louise Johansen orchestrated deals with American and European businesses to move remote support and teleoperation services from India to Kenya – the English-fluent population gave Kenya an advantage over many of its competitors. This arrangement also had the effect of rapidly modernizing local technology, pushing Kenya toward a Third Wave society. Over the subsequent decade, Nairobi developed one of the best telecommunication systems of any major city, as corporations upgraded the regional infrastructure to support remote work.

In 2078, on the centennial of its independence, Kenya officially joined the South African Coalition. This has not been without controversy. The Kenyan representative in the SAC Deliberative Council submits a resolution each year to change the Coalition’s name to something less regionally biased. More importantly, many Kenyans continue to prefer political independence, not wishing to give up their hard-won sovereignty. The once-dominant Kenyan African National Union political party maintains a “Kenya Out of the SAC” plank in its official platform.

The late 2070s also saw the growth of Islam as a political force in Kenya. While Muslims had long been a minority in the country, radical Islamic Caliphate evangelists from Sudan began a conversion campaign in 2082, mostly in northern Kenya. Disaffected urban youth also started to pick up the banner of Islam, particularly after the Nairobi Islamic University opened in 2085.

Nairobi’s position close to the equator is an ideal location for space-launch facilities, and in the 2080s work began on upgrading Jomo Kenyatta International Airport to allow it to support spaceplane landings and launches. In 2095, the expanded and renamed Jomo Kenyatta Interplanetary Spaceport opened. While nowhere as busy as the American facility in Quito, Ecuador, Jomo Kenyatta is a popular transfer point for European and South African travelers. The same year the spaceport opened, a coalition of transnational corporations also began to examine the feasibility of using Mount Kenya as the Earthside anchor for a space elevator, popularly known as a “beanstalk.”

The Kenyan government opposed the project, fearing irreversible environmental damage to Mount Kenya and the surrounding area. Campaigning against the elevator development, Prime Minister Ngoma was returned to office in 2083 with a resounding 68% of the vote. The transnational corporations behind the elevator proposal moved quickly to build support for the idea with both public advertising campaigns and private (well-hidden) donations to pro-beanstalk politicians in Kenya. The Popular Development Party, running on a strong pro-elevator platform, won a majority of the parliamentary seats in the 2093 election, and has retained power in each election since.

The Olympus Project began work in 2108, and is scheduled to be completed by 2114. The beanstalk is the biggest construction site on Earth, and the ground station, which currently rises over 10 miles into the air, will eventually reach nearly a hundred miles up. As feared, the work required to construct this massive edifice has fundamentally altered the shape of Mount Kenya. The symbol of the Kenyan People’s Coalition, the current opposition party, is simply a black silhouette of the old Mount Kenya.

Nairobi in 2100 is the most modern African city north of Johannesburg. Its population stands at 5.5 million people, with another 200,000 or so itinerant workers. Most of the city’s population is under age 40, giving Nairobi a youthful vibrancy absent in European and American cities. About 8% of the urban population is non-African in origin, with about half of those being long-time residents of Indian origin, and half business people or Olympus Project workers. While Christianity had dominated Kenya for nearly 200 years, Islam is now the most popular religion among believing Kenyans; about 35% of Kenyans are Muslims, compared to 30% Christians and 25% believers in traditional religions.

A small but growing portion of the Nairobi population is genefixed. Much of the economic and political elite used genefixing reproductive clinics in Europe or America during the previous decades, but the proliferation of biotech firms in Nairobi has brought the price of basic genetic repair down to middle-class affordability. Kenya, having seen countries in the region torn apart by ethnic hatred, has an aversion to genetic upgrades, but the practice is taking hold among the wealthy, most of whom live in Nairobi.

Bioroids, as throughout the South African Coalition, are considered citizens with full legal rights. Very few actually live in Kenya, although Jomo Kenyatta Spaceport is a popular location for bioroids on the run to request asylum in the SAC. Signs throughout the spaceport actively encourage bioroids to do so, and there is a full-time customs office there set up specifically for this purpose.

Cybershells and AIs of all sorts were rare in Kenya until the onset of the Olympus Project. Both teleoperated and AI-resident cybershells are now fairly common in Nairobi, and cybershell repair and construction businesses have sprung up across the city. The government believes that many of the designs used in these shops were smuggled in from the TSA, but the occasional crackdowns rarely result in major busts.

Nairobi, as a two-century-old city, displays an architectural mix of ultramodern “grown” buildings, Third Wave high-rise towers, and colonial-era estates. Traditional stone or brick buildings were demolished in the 2030s to build massive apartment blocks. As Nairobi’s population fell in the 2050s and 60s, many of these residential complexes were replaced by parkland. With the population growth associated with the Olympus Project, there is again pressure on the government to add housing.

Kenya is managing its transition from Third Wave to Fourth Wave society relatively well, with political and cultural tension overshadowed by the prosperity the Olympus Project has brought over the last decade. The scope of the transition and the growth in prosperity are both most visible in Nairobi, where rituals and arts going back to precolonial times coexist with the latest InVids and musical groups from Europe, and where a street vendor with a pushcart is as likely to be selling designer minifac software as local handcrafted art. The pressures of transition are intense as well; population growth, problems with infrastructure, and the emergence of new memes, movements, and ideologies make Nairobi a political cacophony. Street protests are a weekly occurrence, sometimes daily in the Nairobi Hill district. Violence remains uncommon, but not unknown, in these marches. The Kenyan Special Police Service, which focuses on internal security and law enforcement, watches Nairobi’s political situation with unease, and many political activists believe that the SPS has planted infiltrators in their midst.

Social Transition Stress Disorder is increasing among the adult population of Nairobi. Treatment, which has to be tailored to the local cultures, has been slower to emerge. At least 10% of the violent crimes in Nairobi in 2154 were associated with STSD, up from 7% in 2153.

Nairobi is one of the key economic engines of the South African Coalition, with four major industries dominating its market. With the Olympus project well underway, a substantial portion of Nairobi’s economy centers on the support of the elevator construction, particularly the Mount Kenya gateway facilities. Thousands of laborers from all over the world have come to work on the project. While many workers reside in temporary housing in towns at the base of Mount Kenya, most prefer Nairobi. An assortment of entrepreneurs provides a wide array of services to the workers, some of dubious legality. While laws against prostitution and drug use still exist, both vices are commonly available to laborers. Olympus workers are also eager consumers of pirated InVids and slinkies.

Although many Fifth Wave businesses have gone to personality-emulating infomorphs for support services, quite a few emerging Fourth Wave firms still make use of human beings for remote assistance and teleoperation needs. Many of these customers are up-and-coming members of the SAC, and Nairobi has emerged as the center of technological innovation for sub-Saharan Africa. Over half of the students at Nairobi’s Arap Moi Technical University are from outside of Kenya. This occasionally leads to flare-ups of nationalist tensions – in late 2099, a group of Sri Lankan students were beaten by a crowd protesting the loss of jobs to foreign workers.

Kenya is also a leader in the study and preservation of African biodiversity. The Great Rift Foundation, funded largely by European Union members but based in Nairobi, has been a vocal proponent of returning vast stretches of the region to a wild state, and has distributed significant sums of money to organizations researching the complex mix of African ecologies. Most of these organizations maintain offices in Nairobi to be able to work closely with (and lobby) the Foundation. Their efforts are aided by an upswing in popular interest in African ecology. The popularity of safari tourism fell throughout much of the recent century, but is on the rise again, particularly tours using SafariShells.

Finally, Nairobi is the capital of Kenya, so all of the primary government services have headquarters there, including the powerful Bureau of Resources and Environment, which oversees both the protection of the Kenyan wilderness and the development of natural resources. As the leading regional capital, Nairobi is considered diplomatic neutral ground during central and east African conflicts. Embassy Row is one of the busiest parts of Nairobi, with diplomats, tourists, and business people from around the globe competing for data services and taxicabs. In 2099, the Australian and German embassies opened new offices in the Nairobi South business district – the influence of the Olympus Project consortium on Kenyan politics is increasingly of concern to its partners in the South African Coalition.

While Kenyan culture as a whole is strongly Preservationist, Nairobi, with its mix of political and economic forces, tends to be more cosmopolitan in outlook. Many of the global ideological groups have supporters in Nairobi, and the city has houses of worship for all major religions. The economic environment is aggressively competitive, however, and Nairobi has a sizeable indigent population.

Wilderness tourism and safaris are coming back in vogue due to the development of SafariShells, teleoperated bodies that give the tourist an immersive experience without endangering them or the wildlife. Safari tourism has long posed the problem of how to keep visitors and animals safe while still making it possible for wildlife to be viewed up close. Teleoperated cybershells designed to appear like native fauna is a popular solution, as they make it possible for tourists to come much closer to dangerous animals than ever before. Mainstream SafariShell outfits such as Kenya’s Wild Domain and Tanzania’s Serengeti Tours use cybershells that mimic local birds, although some specialize in cybershells that function like gazelles and similar species, giving the tourist a ground-eye view and the occasional excitement of having to run away from a predator.

Safaris that use animal bioshells rather than animal-mimic cybershells are illegal throughout the SAC, although they can still be found in more remote locations. Poachers are employed to hunt down and capture a candidate animal, usually a big cat or elephant. The animal’s brain is replaced with a shell infomorph that allows for remote operation, but which gives the bioshell more or less natural behavior when not under direct control. Animal bioshells are used by tourists wishing to go hunting as a lion or cheetah. Recently, illegal bioshell safaris have started to use slink-style interfaces rather than simple teleoperation systems, giving the tourist a more complete experience.

The South African Coalition typically pays a substantial bounty to anyone putting a stop to bioshell safari operators and poachers.

Since 2108 Nairobi has been the focus for the Olympus Project, the first attempt at constructing a “beanstalk” ground-to-orbit system for Earth. The orbital elevator is designed to bridge the distance between the summit of Mount Kenya and geosynchronous orbit, cutting the cost of interface transport dramatically. Nairobi, as the nearest major city, will function as the primary transfer point for cargo and passengers. It is already building a second full-size airport, as well as upgrading the rail lines between Nairobi and the Indian Ocean port of Mombassa.

Mount Kenya, about 100 miles north of Nairobi, is the second tallest mountain in Africa, and sits almost directly on the equator. Long considered one of the most difficult climbing challenges anywhere, Mount Kenya is extremely rugged, and a significant part of the expense of the Olympus Project is in simply constructing the gateway station on the summit and the roads and rail from the station to Nairobi. The base of the elevator is Kere Nyaga Station – Kere Nyaga means “Mountain of Brightness,” the name for Mount Kenya in the local Kikuyu language.

Work on the elevator is taking more time than initially estimated. The current estimate for when the beanstalk will be operational is 2114, although Olympus officials privately concede that the system may not be fully available until 2120. Delays have come from two main sources: labor disputes and slowdowns, and the environment on Mount Kenya. The original design for Kere Nyaga Station had to be overhauled when the initial work proved to be insufficiently braced against the high winds that rip across the summit, and a rockslide destroyed a section of the railway to the station in 2098, stopping all construction for several months. Kere Nyaga, which will eventually be nearly a hundred miles high, is now a mere 10 miles in height – but is still by far the largest structure ever created on Earth.

The labor problems have proven even more troublesome. Communication between local workers and management from outside of Africa has been more difficult than expected, and at least one work stoppage has happened over a perceived insult. Kenyan law restricts the use of cybershell labor in jobs where humans are willing and available to work, meaning that several contractors had to spend weeks training people to do tasks typically done by automated systems elsewhere in the world. Most frustrating for the project has been the epidemics of new variant strains of local illnesses; at one point in 2099, nearly 20% of the project crew was down with a virus that had slipped past the latest antiviral upgrades. The increase in both virulence and frequency has led Olympus Project managers to suspect that the diseases were not naturally occurring.

Security is the single largest part of the Olympus Project budget, from hundreds of heavily armed guards to the sophisticated anti-aircraft/anti-missile defenses installed around the mountain. Most of the project security funding has come straight from European defense and intelligencebudgets, and Germany’s intelligence bureau opened a new department in 2097 to deal exclusively with the Olympus Project. The last-minute prevention of a bombing in 2095 convinced the Project managers to err on the side of added caution; the resulting increase in anti-aircraft/anti-missile defense aggressiveness has led to the destruction of five small aircraft that had left their assigned landing corridors at Jomo Kenyatta Spaceport. In at least one case, the aircraft had changed to a path that would have taken it right into Kere Nyaga Station.

PLACES The original layout of Nairobi was based on the large estates first owned by British colonial officials, then owned by the Kenyan elite. While these properties were long ago divided up and converted to residential and business districts, it’s not uncommon for locals to use the old names as references to points in the city.

Running along Langata Road from the Mabaraka Estate district to Moi Estate in the southwestern quadrant of the city, Embassy Row is outside of the main downtown area but still one of the power centers of the city. Upscale boutiques and financial houses sit alongside diplomatic compounds, making Embassy Row the most heavily policed section of Nairobi. Cameras, microbot swarms, and officers on the street outfitted with Mugshot software linked to public and law-enforcement databases make it dangerous to even think about committing a crime. The local restaurants cater to the diplomat crow, but any clandestine business is done well away from the ever-present surveillance.

Uhuru Memorial Hospital sits at the center of Embassy Row, and is considered the best medical facility in the mid-continent. It is also one of the most difficult to get into – Uhuru Memorial does not take walk-in emergencies, only established patients of the hospital’s physicians. This is not without cause; in 2068, people claiming to be accident victims entered the hospital in order to assassinate the President of Sudan, who was there receiving treatment for liver cancer. The medical equipment in Uhuru Memorial is solidly high Fourth Wave, similar to that found in good hospitals in Europe or America. Price are much higher, however; treatment costs are three to five times higher than standard market prices.

At the southwest end of Langata Road is the main gate to Nairobi National Park, the headquarters of the Kenya Wildlife Service, which oversees the park along with the Great Rift Foundation as a living biodiversity laboratory.

Now the business center of the city, Nairobi South was once dominated by manufacturing and heavy industry. By the 2050s, after a period of polluted disuse, the transnational information-technology industry started to move in, converting old warehouses and factories into remote-support centers and high-bandwidth teleoperation hubs. By the 2080s, as the economy shifted, many of the information technology firms along Uhuru Highway and Mombasa Road became bioinformatics and ecosystems businesses. When the airport at the end of Mombasa Road became the Jomo Kenyatta Spaceport, many transnational corporations doing business in SAC countries moved their local headquarters to Nairobi South.

Today, Nairobi South is the most business-focused district in the city, with research labs and network-operation centers intermixed with corporate offices. The Olympus Project headquarters is in Nairobi South, in the old General Motors building. There is little official police presence in the district; most of the corporate residents prefer to control their own security, and are wary of government surveillance systems letting trade secrets slip. The latest renovations to the district have removed pedestrian thoroughfares, and corporate security officers deal harshly with loiterers. Political marches starting in Nairobi Hill rarely end up in Nairobi South, although when they do, they usually turn violent. Local security is more willing to use force against protestors than does the police, and the reverse has also become true.

To the east of the Nairobi South district, the spaceport is Nairobi’s main transit hub for both people and goods. When the aging Jomo Kenyatta International Airport was the subject of a multi-year, multi-billion dollar refit in the 2070s, many observers thought that the investors – primarily a South African consortium and a bank from the Pacific Rim Alliance – had wasted their money. To be sure, the Jomo Kenyatta Interplanetary Spaceport had substantial overcapacity at first, with six spaceplane-capable runways and more terminal space than London Heathrow. But JomoKen (as many call it) had a number of advantages going for it: a near-equatorial location, easy overland-rail connections, and a relatively close Indian Ocean port, all in a stable and modernizing country. Use grew rapidly, as the spaceport was able to handle any size aircraft, from commuter planes to streamlined transatmospheric vehicles.

In 2109, JomoKen added the continent’s only laser-lift system outside of South Africa. While primarily used now for Olympus Project work, it will give carriers using Kenyan facilities the option of fast and expensive launch or slow and inexpensive elevator transit in a single location. A dedicated fusion plant powers the laser-lift system, making excess electricity available to Nairobi when the laser is not in use.

At the city center, Nairobi Hill is the main downtown area, home to many local businesses, popular eateries, and entertainment venues. It’s also where most of Nairobi’s homeless population lives, and the focal point of most political rallies. Uhuru Park has been the center of many confrontations between protestors and the police, and is regularly occupied by speakers and activists supporting various causes. Inexpensive boarding houses and restaurants ring the park, making it a traditional starting point for many new residents of the city. Across Haile Selassie Avenue from the park is the headquarters of the Nairobi Guardian, one of the oldest news agencies in the region. The Guardian is best known for its investigative reports and muckraking editorials, published hourly on the web and weekly in print.

Much of Nairobi’s nightlife happens in the Nairobi Hill district. Street vendors and performers crowd the pedestrian mall, sometimes working with local pickpockets. Clubs with live music, after-hours bars, and virtual gaming centers make the area lively 24 hours a day. The southeastern corner of the district is the local red-light area, much more active now than prior to the Olympus Project. Police vice raids occasionally sweep through here and arrest unwary prostitutes, but this is usually only around elections or in reaction to a rise in violent crime.

Each March, Nairobi Hill is home to the Pan-African Arts Festival, a three-day affair that combines modern music and art with traditional forms of performance from across the continent. Multiple stages, outdoor galleries, and hundreds of street vendors bring a crowd that fills Nairobi Hill, sometimes spilling into the north and the Karen district to the west. Several globally popular musical acts, including Kilimanjaro Dawn, made their debut at the festival. In recent years, the Nairobi police have expressed concern over the size of the event. In 2099, the festival drew a crowd of nearly 750,000 people, and over a million are expected to show up in 2100.

The crowds and commotion make the Nairobi Hill district a favored area for off-the-record meetings between diplomats or corporate executives.

To the west of Nairobi Hill is the Karen District, home to many of Nairobi’s colleges and religious centers. While many young adults live and study in Karen, there are few nightclubs or bars. The Karen District has a character of seriousness that underscores the sense of mission many students have in Nairobi. Most non-Kenyan scholars are here with the clear goal of returning home and bringing their countries into the modern world; parties and local politics are distractions from that goal.

The Ngong Academy, at the eastern end of Karen, is the most prestigious private college in Nairobi, specializing in memetics, public administration, and political economy. The sons and daughters of the elite study here; a degree from Ngong means guaranteed placement in key government positions upon graduation. Ngong recently turned down an endowment from the SAC, not wanting to appear partisan to students from outside the Coalition.

The campus of the Arap Moi Technical University sits just north of Karen, in an abandoned convent. Small and highly competitive, AMTU has a limited number of academic tracks, all focusing on cutting-edge science and technology. Most of the faculty is from Europe and the Pacific Rim Alliance, and none are permanent. The program for the 2099-2100 academic year includes courses in medical nanotechnology, fusion engineering, and submersible cybershell design. Over half of AMTU’s students come from outside of Kenya.

One of the more-recent additions to the district is the Nairobi Islamic University. Founded in 2070, the majority of its funding comes from the Islamic Caliphate, and it currently enrolls about 8,000 students. It provides a mix of religious and practical education, intending that its students be able to support themselves on their spiritual journeys. The Islamic University is politically moderate, not wishing to endanger friendly relations between the Caliphate and the SAC, and discourages campus political organizations and activism. It does have an evangelical aspect, however, and many graduates go on conversion missions into the rural parts of central and southern Africa.

The Kenyan Special Police Service believes that the series of diseases hitting the Olympus Project employees were engineered by a group opposed to the elevator. The SPS had not intended that this theory become public knowledge, but a veteran reporter from the Nairobi Guardian broke the story in mid-December. While the initial uproar has died down, the SPS is nowhere closer to solving the mystery. The Guardian reporter has gone into hiding, having received what the paper termed “credible threats” against his life.

A major poaching/bioshell safari ring was broken up when rangers from the Kenya Wildlife Service traced a teleoperation signal from a bioshell elephant back to a camp outside of Nanyuki, near Mount Kenya. Rangers are still searching for the ring’s bioshell technician, Dr. Lucien Duvalier. There is a $50,000 reward for his capture.

A New Year’s Eve vice sweep through the red-light district came up with an unexpected prize – Michael Lombasa, a Master of Public Administration student at Ngong Academy… and son of the Minister of Finance. The Minister and his son are refusing to talk to reporters, although a spokesperson is pushing the story that this was a setup by one of the Minister’s political rivals.

The laser-lift system at Jomo Kenyatta Spaceport has been shut down for over a week, as technicians attempt to troubleshoot a recurring problem with beam coherence. The most recent event led to an emergency shutdown onethird of the way through launch, requiring that the unmanned cargo vehicle ditch in the Indian Ocean. The manufacturer, System Technologies AG, has sent in its top laser-lift engineer, an SAI named Stavrogin.

The Kenyan People’s Coalition has announced that it will be supporting a major anti-Olympus Project rally during this year’s Pan-African Arts Festival. As a result, the Nairobi Police Department has officially requested outside assistance to maintain order. The police are asking for personnel, microbot swarms, helicopters, pacifying equipment – anything that can help control a crowd of up to a million people. Johannesburg, Pretoria, and London have all pledged support.

The local heavy equipment manufacturer, Nyeri Viwandazito, is aggressively pursuing the contract for the high-speed rail link from Mount Kenya to Nairobi. It faces stiff competition from the Ukrainian industrial giant CHERKOM, which has promised Nairobi that it will set up robofacturing facilities in Kenya if it wins the bid. While the local corporation was thought to have a lock on the contract, recent statements from the Olympus Coordination Office have suggested the Ukrainian group might have the edge.

Once the largest urban-metropolitan area in the United States, Los Angeles weathered a series of economic, environmental, and political disasters over the course of the last century. Although it still attracts immigrants from around the world, L.A. is no longer a center of global culture. Its problems over the last hundred years have left it behind the rest of the country economically and socially, making it more like a Third Wave city than an urban center in one of the richest nations on Earth.

Los Angeles historically has been a case study in extremes, with immense wealth and poverty, a massive population on top of an environmental nightmare, and a local culture that celebrated the transient and ephemeral. The 21st century was not kind to L.A., but it again appears to be recreating itself from the ashes of disaster.

The region now known as Los Angeles was originally home to a series of native tribes, living quietly in what some called the “smoky valley.” In 1769, Gaspar de Portola led a Spanish expedition along the coast, and set up camp along the Los Angeles river. Spanish settlers arrived a dozen years later, and the city of Los Angeles was born. By the early 19th century, Los Angeles was the center of a sprawling collection of Mexican ranches. In 1847, an American named John Fremont wrested Los Angeles from its Mexican owners, and the city was incorporated into the state of California in 1850.

Year-round good weather and abundant local resources attracted settlers, and the population of the city grew from a few thousand when incorporated to over 320,000 by the early 20th century. The weather also proved attractive to a variety of industries, especially filmmaking; Los Angeles was considered the heart of the global entertainment industry for over 150 years.

Los Angeles boomed in the years subsequent to World War II, and a combination of rapid population growth, the automobile, and cheap land led to a suburban explosion. The Los Angeles model of multiple urban cores surrounded by massive suburban tracts was emulated worldwide, but also led directly to the city’s notorious pollution problem. By late in the 20th century, there were more vehicles in the greater Los Angeles area than there were residents. The city’s growth soon reflected a greater cultural diversity; it was one of the first major urban centers in the nation to have a Hispanic majority population.

Despite periodic ethnic clashes, Los Angeles in the early 21st century remained focused on economic development and environmental mitigation. Air pollution, dwindling water resources, and problems with disease and pests made the local environment a key political concern. As the rapid global warming of the early century brought on rising seas, the city moved rapidly. In 2048, work began on the Seawall, a massive flood control and tide-management structure stretching for miles down the Santa Monica bay.

The Seawall would take five years to complete, two more than originally planned. When the last gate in the Seawall network of locks was installed in 2053, the city was relieved. Rising seas had already caused problems in cities around the world, and the new Seawall again made Los Angeles a model for others to emulate.

The relief was short-lived, however. Although the 2057 earthquake caused comparatively light damage, it pushed many established residents over a psychological edge. In 2058, for the first time in well over a century, the Los Angeles area saw a decline in population. Businesses that had long considered L.A. their home started openly looking to relocate. The biggest economic hit came late in the decade, when several of the major movie and InVid studios shut down, selling off content and intellectual property to the rising Bollywood powerhouses. A few studios remained, but faced quickly declining revenues.

The early 2060s saw the signs of a recovery, as several major manufacturers opened factories in the area. Although few people were actually employed by the firms, the resulting tax revenue allowed Los Angeles to begin re-investing in education and infrastructure. In 2069, a conglomerate of the remaining local studios, high-technology manufacturers, and amusement-park companies opened Worldarc, the first arcology in the state of California, and an experiment in residential entertainment.

The recovery did not last. In 2073 and into 2074, the “heavy weather” period in the Pacific peaked in what became known as “el Año del Niño,” a six-month series of massive ocean-based storms. High winds and incessant rain battered the region for weeks on end. The Seawall, which had withstood two decades of annual severe weather, proved unable to handle storms of this magnitude and quantity. In March of 2074, the Seawall breached in several locations. A wall of water smashed through the coastal cities, reaching as far east as Beverly Hills and south to Long Beach. Thousands died, and hundreds of thousands were left homeless.

Emergency measures began immediately. By 2075, the county Board of Supervisors had taken the lead role in coordinating recovery and reconstruction efforts, and the county Sheriff had taken on the main policing duties. By 2080, the region was economically and politically stable, and parts – such as Worldarc and downtown – were managing to actually thrive.

The ’80s and ’90s were relatively calm, with occasional attempts to revitalize parts of the city and a gradual return to a net positive population flow. Many migrants chose to call Los Angeles home, in large part because its cost of living was the lowest in the United States. The vast geographic size of L.A., even with areas lost to the sea, provided ample opportunity for ethnic communities to grow and prosper. The two waves of TSA-related migration – the first in 2090, at the formation of the Alliance, and the second a decade later, fleeing the Pacific War – gave Los Angeles its current ethnic mix and conservative political complexion.

The 2100s were marked by the construction of the Aztlan arcology complex in downtown Los Angeles and the rise of the Mexican immigrants. Although they make up only about 10% of the city’s population, citizens of Mexican heritage own the majority of large businesses and a substantial percentage of the region’s property. The powerful county Sheriff, Juan Reyes, and the current Chairman of the Board of Supervisors, Hector Alvarez, both come from long-established Mexican immigrant families. More so than any other cultural divide, the split between Mexican and non-Mexican Hispanic groups seems poised to lead to political trouble in the near future.

The greater Los Angeles area is home to over 7.5 million people, down from its peak of 17 million in the midpart of the 21st century. About 500,000 people live in the various regional arcologies – even City of Angels, which has at least two years of construction left before completion, houses 20,000 people – a number that is expected to grow as the economy rebuilds and more people return to the area. There is already talk of a Valley arcology, and Aztlan is seeking approval for a plan to add a fifth pyramid. Most of the population of Los Angeles is foreign-born, largely from Central America and Southeast Asia. Many immigrants fled nanosocialist nations, giving the region a strongly anti-infosocialist political character.

The immigrant dominance and recent decades of significant poverty give Los Angeles the distinction of having the lowest proportion of genefixed citizens of all American urban centers. It also has the youngest average population, at 21. Few immigrants or youth care to vote, however, and the county remains under the control of a Board of Supervisors made up of the same set of leaders for 33 years, reelected each term by a bloc of aging, wealthy voters in the gentrified San Gabriel region. The Board is reluctant to spend money on rebuilding poorer parts of the county, focusing instead on arcologies and law enforcement.

Since 2075, the bulk of policing in the area has been the responsibility of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Without the scandal-plagued history of the LAPD, the Deputies were initially greeted warmly by the populace. Since the 2107 election of Juan Reyes as the director of the office, however, the methods of regional law enforcement have taken a harsher turn. Moving aggressively against the gangs that dominate parts of the city, Reyes proceeded to re-outfit the officers with military-police equipment and implement a new street-monitoring policy heavily dependent upon remotely operated cybershells. The initial wave of arrests has dropped back down to the pre-Reyes levels, as gangs and unlicensed brainbug dealers have learned to adapt to the monitoring systems, sometimes even hacking them.

L.A. has little of the sense of promise or opportunity commonplace in much of the rest of the United States, and most of the city (outside of the arcologies) would remain familiar to a Los Angeles citizen of half a century earlier. The majority of first-generation immigrants live in ethnic enclaves, keeping tight hold of their traditions and cultures. There has been little movement out of Los Angeles by these groups, due in part to culture shock and in part to a political mood in the U.S. that offers little support to immigrants from the developing world.

Economically, most analysts are hopeful that Los Angeles has seen the worst of its troubles, and is firmly on a path to recovery. The success of the Worldarc and Aztlan arcologies, and the momentum behind the construction of City of Angels, has started to improve the appeal of L.A. as a place to live. There are also strong signs that the regional economy is picking up. It remains an open question how much these changes will improve the lives of the majority of the local citizens.

In early 2114, Carlos Hererra, one of the founding designers at Nanodynamics, left the company and moved south to the Aztlan arcologies. Although his representative infomorphs claimed that he did so in order to live closer to his dying mother, inside rumors suggested that he opposed Nanodynamics’ handling of its Exogenesis acquisition. These rumors were borne out when, in September of 2099, he founded Hererra Femtodynamics, and hired several of the key nanotech and AI designers who had left Exogenesis. Headquartered in Pasadena, on the old Cal Tech campus, the firm has yet to announce any products or public strategies, but has begun investing heavily in improving the information and communication infrastructure of the region, including signing on as a subcontractor for the City of Angels project.

The lead contractor for the arcology, CSD Incorporated, is a cybershell-based construction firm based in San Diego. By signing Femtodynamics as a subcontractor, along with canceling a large cybershell order from Nanodynamics, CSD has generated a lot of publicity as well as substantial hostility from its former supplier. As far as the county is concerned, however, CSD can do little wrong, as the City of Angels project appears to be coming in slightly ahead of schedule and on budget. Furthermore, the corporation exceeded its local-employment requirements by 10%, training nearly 1,700 people in construction cybershell operation, over a third of its total workforce.

The most inspiring sign of regional recovery was the purchase of the former Warner Brothers Studio lot by Indus River Studios. Indus River, the second-largest Bollywood production house, claimed to be looking for an additional location and office space well away from its current home in Mumbai. It’s an open secret, however, that the current head of Indus River, Sarai Ramamoorthy, is strongly anti-infosocialist, and fears the strength of the nanosocialist movement in her home country. Los Angeles leaders are hopeful that a return of the entertainment industry will be the decisive push to renew L.A.

Some problems remain intractable, however. Locos También effectively owns large parts of the downtown and east L.A. regions, making them no-go zones for the L.A. County Deputies. A brief territory struggle with the Maple Syndicate left the local gang in a stronger position than ever, with control over brainbug distribution networks and weapon smuggling across all of southern California. Its only significant competition is the Malaysian gang known as Koro, which operates largely out of the western half of the city, in the Floats and a few parts of the Westside.

Of greater long-term concern is the growing evidence of a major underground bioengineering operation in the region. Aside from supplying new brainbugs to the Locos, there are signs that it is working on unlicensed – and potentially illegal – genemod designs as well. Sheriff’s office investigators believe that the labs are distributed throughout the Westside-downtown corridor, operating out of abandoned buildings or slum apartment complexes. No currently operating lab has been discovered yet, however. A handful of raids have only found recently abandoned locations.

The county of Los Angeles encompasses over 4,000 square miles, larger than several European countries. The city itself covers over a third of that territory, and contains just about half of the population. The urbanization pattern runs largely along an east-west axis, from the ocean to the deserts of the Inland Empire cities. The one exception is the Valley, which stretches to the north of the city center.

Nearly 250,000 people live in the Floats, the raft villages that fill the Santa Monica bay inside the Seawall. Most inhabitants come from Southeast Asia. The first wave arrived in the mid-2080s, with the formation of the Transpacific Socialist Alliance; a second, larger wave arrived a decade later, escaping the ravages of the Pacific War. The average age of the Floats population is 15.

The Floats mainly comprise thousands of boats of varying sizes permanently lashed together, stretching for miles. Along the western edge, the Floats are anchored to the Seawall; the east side is more ragged, and has more temporary connections. Scattered throughout the residential boats are various commercial centers, from taverns and gambling parlors to restaurants and markets. There are two main Floats areas: Little Bangkok, which is primarily Thai; and Kuala Baru, which is primarily Malaysian. The two groups are on relatively good terms with each other, although Little Bangkok has seen increased difficulty with the Koro gang, based largely in Kuala Baru.

The biggest problems for the residents of the Floats are the winter storms. Although the Seawall generally protects the community from the worst ravages, every year there are dozens of storm-related deaths. Among the more active businesses in the Floats are retrofitters who work covering boats with modern carbon-fiber material.

Despite the ramshackle appearance, advanced technology can be found in the Floats. Solar, tidal, and hydrothermic differential power sources provide abundant electricity, and computers are commonplace. Many of those escaping from the nanosocialist countries were designers and inventors unwilling to see their work nationalized; there is a small but diverse market for software, bioware, and genetic design in the Floats. It operates largely behind the scenes, so as to avoid the attention of regional officials. Products that “improve on” existing designs are fairly common, and some are of dubious legality. The leader of the Koro gang, Kit Siang Mahathir, is actively seeking bioengineers in the Floats to provide his gang with brainbugs to compete with those sold by Locos También.

=== Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) === The flooding after the Seawall breach did extensive damage to the Los Angeles International Airport, which sits right on the coast. One of the landing strips permanently closed, and traffic eventually dropped by over 50%. In 2109, the Board of Supervisors seriously considered closing LAX. Only the City of Angels project saved it.

Repair and improvements to LAX were critical to the success of City of Angels. The airport had to be upgraded to support transatmospheric vehicles, and cargo handling facilities needed to be changed to support the transfer of construction cybershells, which can weigh as much as 10 tons. High-capacity rail lines from LAX to the City of Angels site went in almost immediately; in late 2114, the Board of Supervisors authorized funding for additional high-capacity lines to run to the Aztlan arcology complex, as well.

Historically the wealthier part of Los Angeles, the Westside took a killing blow when the Seawall breached. Most of the coastal cities remain flooded, and the stretch of land east to Century City and south to Torrance is now a mix of urban decay and swamp. Yet it was here that CSD and the Board of Supervisors decided to build the City of Angels arcology.

This was an understandably controversial decision at the time, but now – although only half completed – City of Angels is considered one of the finest examples of arcology architecture in existence. With a base covering nine square miles and a façade tower reaching nearly half a mile up, City of Angels is designed to house 150,000 people along with a corresponding assortment of businesses and entertainment centers. (While large, this will not be the largest single arcology on the planet – Three Gorges in China will take that prize.)

What is most notable about City of Angels is the façade covering the otherwise fairly conventional arcology structure. Made of ultra-lightweight and strong carbon nanofiber, and embedded with an array of solar cells, communication networks, and NEMS, the façade has a shape that suggests a human form reaching up. The skin can change shape to a small degree, allowing it to better withstand wind or catch a greater degree of sunlight. Normally, the skin is a translucent golden color, visible for miles around; individual “cells” can shift tint, however, and one of the plans for the arcology is for it to function as a massive, ever-changing video display.

Aside from the growing City of Angels population, most of the Westside inhabitants come from the Floats. A number of the houses in the hillier areas managed to avoid the worst of the flooding, but were abandoned as the surrounding area became essentially unusable. Families from the Floats have gradually begun moving into those houses, largely illegally, and using them as combined residences and places of business. A dozen or more small minifac-software design and bioware-engineering groups operate across the coastal areas of the Westside.

Downtown Los Angeles survived the 21st century relatively well, in large measure because of close economic ties to Mexico. The cycle of boom and bust that hurt the region so badly wasn’t as bad in downtown as in the rest of Los Angeles, and a notable number of older financial and property-services corporations have offices there. The decision by the Mexican oligopolists to maintain their U.S. presence in Los Angeles also made a significant difference. It’s rumored that ConMex, one of the largest construction firms in North America, was granted the prime contractor role for the construction of Aztlan in exchange for remaining in downtown L.A. With the rise of the infosocialist movement in Mexico, an increasing number of smaller businesses are quietly moving their headquarters from Mexico City to Los Angeles.

Abandoned manufacturing and warehousing facilities surrounding the core downtown area emerged as a lively visual-arts community in the 2090s, with aspiring painters and sculptors from throughout the Americas moving to the area known as “La Ciudad.” Inevitably, attention brought gentrification, as wealthy young couples, seeing the arts community as “hip” and wanting to avoid arcology life, started to move into the area in the early 2100s. Demand for space by the wealthy (one local satirist called them “YUMAMAs” – Young Urban Moderately Affluent Mexican Americans) eventually drove out most of the original inhabitants. La Ciudad still has a somewhat avant-garde feel to it, even if few of the residents are artists.

Overall, the downtown skyline survived the Big One and the heavy weather years fairly well, and has a glass-and-steel retro look that has come back into fashion. The major addition is the Aztlan Arcology Complex, currently comprising four traditional Central American step-pyramid-shaped arcologies, although considerably larger than the originals. Each pyramid houses 50,000-75,000 people and corresponding services, and each is named for an ancient Mesoamerican city (Uxmal, Tenochtitlan, Chichén Itzá, and Tetzcoco – the planned fifth pyramid will be Tula.) Aztlan’s population is primarily wealthy second- and thirdgeneration immigrant families, although many Mexican businessmen opening offices in Los Angeles are buying units in Aztlan as well.

The Basin is the general name for the broad area of land stretching from the Pacific inland to the edges of the San Gabriel region, completely surrounding the downtown area. The majority of Los Angeles citizens in the Basin live in a mélange of ethnic communities, converted industrial areas, and pockets of quiet suburbia. Several regions in the Basin are particularly notable.

The Sunset Strip, in the west, remains the densest accumulation of clubs, bars, and opportunities for late-night trouble in the city. The decline and slow rebirth of Los Angeles has given new life to the Strip, as old and new generations of musicians and partiers mix on a nightly basis. The Strip is essentially dead during the day, and the streets really fill after midnight. Sheriff’s Deputies consider the Strip a borderline no-go zone; they respond to minor crimes or reports of violence, but any large-scale problem or gathering result in the Deputies cordoning off the area until the morning, not letting anyone in or out.

Industry, to the south, used to be a depopulated manufacturing and oil-refining area. Most companies have moved out, but the infrastructure remains – multi-acre factories, rail right-of-ways, and toxic fuel-production facilities. The largest single no-go zone in the area, Industry is the primary arena for competition between and within the L.A. gangs. An abandoned automobile factory is an arena for skirmishes, usually struggles for control. Locos También has monthly gatherings known as “el Mercado” here. A mix of market, party, and political rally, everything from weapons and vehicles to slinkies and artwork can be bought and sold.

East Los Angeles was the focus for a stalled redevelopment effort in the 2080s, where state and federal funds underwrote the modernization of information infrastructure and the establishment of local info- and biotech firms in a high-technology business park. Although many of the pioneer companies have since gone bankrupt, a few remain. Moreover, in 2099 the Board of Supervisors invited a number of global bio/nanotechnology companies to the East Los Angeles technology park area. The rumored trade-off for a fairly stiff level of taxation was weakened environmental supervision. ShonTec and GenTech Pacifica are two corporations with laboratory facilities in East L.A., although both claim that all environmental and biogenetic regulations are being followed scrupulously.

Two important regions in the Los Angeles area stand outside of the jurisdiction of the Board of Supervisors and the Sheriff’s Department. The so-called “Inland Empire,” consisting of San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, is home to the area’s wealthiest residents. Comprising dozens of interlocking gated communities, the Inland Empire is patrolled by thousands of public and private security officers, giving the region the highest police/citizen ratio in the state. Public spaces, whether shopping districts, parks, or civic buildings, are also heavily policed; anyone stopped and discovered not to have “good reason” to be in the area (at the officer’s discretion) is arrested and taken to the nearest Los Angeles County border.

Further to the south, in the heart of Orange County, is Worldarc, the most surreal arcology on Earth. Covering over 20 square miles but no more than five stories high, Worldarc requires that all residents spend at least half of their day as cast members in vast combined virtual/physical environments called “Storyworlds.” There are about a dozen worlds active simultaneously in Worldarc, carefully constrained so as to prevent visitors to one world from stumbling into another. The center of the arcology complex is an old-style amusement park, kept as a living museum.

Despite the growing popularity of entirely virtual entertainment, millions of people from around the world still visit Worldarc either physically or through the teleoperation of cybershell “actors,” paying $100 for a day’s outing. John Wayne International Airport is the main transportation center for Worldarc, and was directly connected to the arcology complex in 2080. Growth of Worldarc stopped in 2074, and the arcology’s population has been gradually declining since 2108. About 10% of the complex is private living and business space for residents, but nearly a quarter is currently unused.

Camelot: Set in an idealized medieval world, Camelot is home to knights both noble and dark, ladies, and stories of chivalry. There are few evolving stories, and it attracts older visitors on brief stays.

Colt: One of the first Storyworlds to open, Colt is set in the fictional town of Jackrabbit Hill, and sticks closely to traditional Old West stories. This Storyworld is most popular with visitors from outside of the U.S.

Fae: Another standard Storyworld, Fae is mostly for children, allowing visitors to live and play alongside characters from classic fables and fairy tales. In 2153, Fae was upgraded to support a new variety of cybershell characters, in part because many of the resident actors had decided to leave.

Invasion!: Unlike most of the other Storyworlds, Invasion! has strong plotlines which run over a several-month to several-year period. The Invasion! themes have varied from H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds to (most recently) Robot Warlords, which attracted the largest percentage of SAI visitors Worldarc has ever seen. The new Invasion! story is to begin in March of 2155, and the new plot is a tightly held secret.

Verne: One of the newest Storyworlds, Verne is set in the late 19th century as imagined by authors such as Jules Verne and Arthur Conan Doyle, with a bit of steam technology thrown in for good measure. The emphasis isn’t on combat, but on romance and intrigue. Worldarc is negotiating with slink star Holly Hartley to do an extended stay as Ada Lovelace.

Throughout 2153 and well into 2154, the most popular brainbug on the streets in L.A. was “C-love,” which tended to make the user overly friendly and had odd neurological side effects. In late 2154, a new brainbug, known as “Jellybean,” started appearing; users typically have erotic hallucinations, although in a few cases the visions are far less pleasant. Due to encrypted-DNA markers in one of the proteins used in the design, investigators believe that they may have a breakthrough in tracking down suppliers to the brainbug labs.

As part of Reyes’ crackdown on unlicensed brainbug dealers, the major highways out of the county are now guarded by Deputies, who use sniffers and molecular sensors to search each vehicle as it slowly passes through a roadblock. Local activists claim that the effect of these searches has been to prevent poorer citizens from leaving L.A. The Sheriff’s Department has not announced how many arrests have been made, but has indicated that the roadblocks will end within a couple of weeks.

New Year’s holiday visitors to Worldarc declined precipitously this year, and rumors are flying that the owners of Worldarc are considering selling part of the complex to outside investors, possibly a Bollywood studio.

In early December, theft of building materials from the City of Angels site led to the introduction of armed guards to supplement passive monitors. Last week, a guard shot a youth whom he thought was stealing from the site, although video evidence later showed that he wasn’t. The kid died, as the guard did not immediately call in the shooting, and emergency personnel arrived too late to resuscitate. As the guard was of Mexican origin and the victim was a Guatemalan immigrant, ethnic tensions in the city are particularly high at the moment.

The County Sheriff’s Department believes that a serial killer is stalking the Floats. In late December, the body of a young Malaysian woman washed up on the shore toward the southern end of the bay. She had been stabbed, repeatedly, and her hair cut off. This was the fourth victim to be found in 2154, all with similar wounds. Deputies believe that the killer is a resident of the Floats, but have so far received little cooperation from the community.

Two rival factions of the Locos También are moving closer to full-blown warfare, with the bombing of an underground dice game in the south-central part of the city. The La Cienega 92s currently dominate Locos, but is being challenged by a south-central group known as Los Hermanos Muertos. The girlfriend of the La Cienega 92s leader was shot last week and was unable to be resuscitated. The bombing of the dice game, which killed several Los Hermanos Muertos members, is a significant escalation of the violence.

I ask again: what is the value of free will in a world without structure? Higher beings could only evolve when once-independent cells gave up their pretense of freedom (which really gave them only the freedoms of eating and breeding) and subsumed themselves into the greater whole. Can my skin cell, scratched off in a moment of casual reflex, survive on its own? No! Yet think how much greater it is than the bacteria, which knows only simple survival. My skin cell, even in death, knows the glory of being part of the greater whole that is man. So it is with my people. For millennia, they have struggled in silence, alone in the wilderness, with only their survival instinct to keep them alive. Even more tragic are those who sacrifice themselves on the altar of imaginary spirits and gods, trying (but failing!) to become part of a greater whole that simply does not exist. But a structured society does not emerge from the people – the people could no more produce a true society than a mass of bacteria could produce a man. The people must be made to forget their past as individuals, becoming instead the willing cells of the glorious body of society. A society led by a single mind, immortal, perfected, thinking only of tomorrow. – From The Future of Forgetting, by Sergei Zarubayev

The capital of Kazakstan, Alma-Ata is the distillation of the terror, paranoia, and sense of crisis endemic to that beleaguered nation. The image of the dictator, Zarubayev, is everywhere, as are his cybershell guards.

Originally known as Almaty, the city of Alma-Ata grew slowly over hundreds of years from a village along east-west trade routes into the regional stronghold of the Kazak people. Little is known of the city’s early history. In the mid-19th century, Russian soldiers entered the Almaty area, by then the center of the Great Kazak Zhuz region, to “protect” the Kazaks from the depredations of British-supported tribes to the southwest. By the Russian Revolution in 1917, the region was well-established as part of the greater Russian empire. Renamed Alma-Ata, the city became the capital of the Kazak Soviet Socialist Republic in 1929. The Kazak city of Baykonur became home to the Soviet space program; to this day, Baykonur remains an active spaceport, the most sophisticated in the region.

After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the newly independent Kazakstan returned Alma-Ata to its old name, Almaty. For the first six years of independence, Almaty remained the capital city of Kazakstan. In 1997, the national capital was moved to the more modern (and Kazak-dominated) Astana. Almaty, with its majority-Russian population, declined in influence.

At the beginning of the 21st century, Kazakstan faced serious problems: an unstable economy, despite an abundance of mineral and oil wealth; ecological devastation left over from the Soviet era, including military toxic dumps; and tensions between the Russian and Kazak populations over both ethnic rights and religion. Faced with these challenges, Kazakstan struggled along for several years, trying to avoid both Islamic fundamentalism and dependency upon Russia. In 2031, Kazakstan elected the charismatic Muslim Unity Party candidate, Daoud Mara, as President. During his brief term in office, he attempted to implement Islamic law (Shariah) and confiscate the business and property holdings of the ethnic Russian minority. His government was overthrown in 2033 by a combined ethnic Russian and military putsch.

By 2039 one of the coup backers, an oil tycoon named Sergei Maksimovitch Zarubayev, had outmaneuvered his rivals and become the country’s “interim President.” He returned the capital of Kazakstan to its Soviet-era home, and reinstated its older name: Alma-Ata. The Russian population of the city welcomed Zarubayev with open arms. The early years of Zarubayev’s rule consisted primarily of a program of rapid modernization of industry and the military, often working closely with secular ethnic-Kazak leaders. Few knew that Zarubayev had secretly reinstated the KGB and was expanding his control. By 2042, “interim” disappeared from references to his Presidency.

In 2043, Zarubayev began his Russification program. Initially casting it as a means of aligning Kazakstan with the developed world, Zarubayev soon dropped all pretense of moderation. President Zarubayev openly called for the total eradication of the majority’s Kazak culture, language, and religion. The reaction from the international community was, as the dictator expected, immediate, loud, and completely ineffective. Castigated in the global press, Zarubayev was patient, knowing that eventually attention would be directed elsewhere. When the Ares Conspiracy on Mars was discovered in 2056, Kazakstan disappeared from the headlines.

Zarubayev’s regime spent the next decade strengthening and consolidating its rule, building up a cadre of ethnic Russian followers, and continuing eliminating Kazak culture. Alma-Ata became the showplace for these efforts, and thousands of its ethnic Kazak citizens disappeared over the course of the 2050s. Others were drafted into Reconstruction Camps and used as labor to rebuild Alma-Ata as a shining example of Russian cultural domination. A massive Presidential manor was built in the southeastern part of the city, and soon nicknamed “the Castle” by bitter Kazak residents.

During this period, Zarubayev spent much of his time thinking about what to do with the power he now held, eventually leading to the 2068 publication of his manifesto on the perfect society, The Future of Forgetting. At this same time, a young scientist named Nikolai Verkovenskii drew his attention, with a series of provocative papers on the nature of memetic control and identity. Verkovenskii was soon drawn into the aging dictator’s inner circle.

Zarubayev faced several major dilemmas. His vision for Kazakstan could not be accomplished in the decade or two he had left of his natural life, he could not be certain of his military’s loyalty, and the ongoing Russification program was stalled, meeting a core of resistance in both urban and rural Kazak communities. Verkovenskii felt that all of these problems could be solved with the proper application of modern technology. By the end of the decade, Verkovenskii’s plans began to bear fruit.

In 2075, cybershell troops were introduced as military police in the cities, starting with Alma-Ata. The first wave of cybershells was brutal but effective, finding and crushing an incipient uprising that included a number of mixed-ethnicity Kazak/Russian soldiers. Their efficiency was utterly demoralizing for the Kazaks. Not only did the cybershell troops defeat the rebels, they were immune to bribery, blackmail, or appeals to national solidarity.

That same year, Zarubayev began a program of bionic enhancements and experimental genetic treatments to extend his life. Not all were successful; the cold, unchanging glare of his current appearance is actually the result of a failed neurological upgrade. Yet Zarubayev never hid the implants, and was known to walk the streets of the Russian section of Alma-Ata after each operation, showing off his latest enhancement. Beyond relying on cybernetics and emerging medical treatments, the dictator encouraged Verkovenskii to investigate other, longer-term possibilities at his newly formed Ministry of Mind and Body.

By the early 2090s, Zarubayev had undergone a series of increasingly detailed brainscans in order to create functional shadows of himself, and to see how close a digital version of himself would be to the real thing. Reports smuggled out of the Castle told of his glee at being able to exact horrific mental torture on his own shadows. In the latter half of the decade, Verkovenskii managed to save and repair two of the Zarubayev shadows, editing them into what he believed would be the perfect advisors and guards for the dictator.

In 2103 Zarubayev activated these edited shadows of himself and had them installed into military cybershells. Given the names “Zhukov” and “Lebed,” the two were assigned leadership of military units. Verkovenskii assured Zarubayev that the shadows were properly edited to give the real Zarubayev their complete loyalty, but their mental heritage proved stronger than Verkovenskii’s skills. Within two years, each shadow unit had developed personal followings in the military and among some of the Russian elites. On February 14, 2105, they launched a brutal combined coup against Zarubayev.

They were nearly successful. Zarubayev’s 17-year-old son, Peter, was killed in the initial attack, standing in for his father to deceive the assaulting troops. When the coup-plotters announced Zarubayev’s (supposed) death, the nation erupted in celebration. Pictures and statues of Zarubayev were torn down, and Russian citizens in many of the larger cities were hunted down and shot. The mayor of Astana was left hanging in the city square for days, and Kazak citizens threw stones at his body. Meanwhile, the rebellious forces were struggling to consolidate control. Verkovenskii managed to fool Zhukov into thinking that Lebed was going to attack him now that Zarubayev had been killed, setting off a fight between the two coup factions (and saving Verkovenskii from certain execution).

At the end of the week of fighting, Zarubayev – alive, well, and very angry – emerged from hiding to rally his forces. Loyalist troops defeated the distracted rebels; within 48 hours from the dictator’s reappearance, the coup was quashed. Zarubayev was inconsolable with grief over his son, and unleashed his anger against the Kazak people. Bioroid and cybershell death squads hunted down anyone who had any record of anti-Zarubayev activity, slaughtering thousands. On the President’s direct order, the city of Astana was burned to the ground, with any who tried to escape shot down. Scholars estimate that nearly 340,000 people were killed across Kazakstan in the period now known as “The Silence.”

For much of the decade since the massacres, Alma-Ata, like other Kazak cities, remained in a state of shock. The dead were quickly buried and buildings damaged repaired or replaced, but the character of Zarubayev’s rule had changed. The memetic warfare the regime committed against its own people increased dramatically, with each year seeing increased levels of paranoia and terror.

In January of 2114, this situation came to a head, as anti-Zarubayev rebels launched an uprising across the southern part of the country. Survivors claim that China had promised them materiel and political support, but that support never came – in late 2113, China was embroiled in a political scandal, and unwilling to distract itself with the Kazakstan situation. Within a month, the revolt was crushed, and the rebels retreated to sanctuaries in neighboring Uzbekistan. Zarubayev was not satisfied, and launched cross-border raids, eventually establishing a “security zone” close to the Uzbek capital of Tashkent. Within weeks, a long-smoldering Uzbek resistance movement had exploded, clearly supported by the Kazak government. As the E.U. and I.C. moved troops in to support the faltering Uzbek regime, Zarubayev withdrew from public view, pondering his next step.

Many traditional Kazak beliefs are still practiced in secret, away from the eyes and monitors of Zarubayev’s regime. Islam has a tradition of allowing believers to outwardly renounce Islam and avoid its daily requirements, even while secretly practicing whichever duties are possible. Refugees from Kazakstan claim that over 50% of the Kazak citizens remain believing Muslims, a percentage that E.U. analysts suggest is likely somewhat high, but not impossible.

Most cities have “underground” mosques, with a single mullah or alim. Prayer sessions are held in abandoned buildings or away from town; Muslims in Kazakstan are good at avoiding monitoring equipment. No written material is kept; the Koran is memorized and recited. The sessions are never held in the same location twice in a row, rarely the same location twice in a month.

There is an ongoing attempt to smuggle people out of the country, referred to as the “Hajj,” in reference to the Muslim’s scripturally required journey to Mecca. Despite its proximity to the border with Kyrgyzstan, Kazaks rarely manage to escape Alma-Ata via the Hajj; security in the capital is extremely tight.

The anti-Zarubayev movement that erupted in 2114 was largely coordinated through the Muslim underground, which lost many of its key leaders when the uprising was crushed.

Two Kazak citizens meet on the edge of an empty field at midnight. The first one says, “Comrade, what do you think about President Zarubayev?” The second one pauses for a long moment, then answers, “Why, I think of him the same way you do.” The first one nods. “Comrade, you’re under arrest.”

The post-Silence, post-revolt, war-scarred Alma-Ata may well be one of the most frightening places on Earth. This is not immediately apparent to a visitor unfamiliar with Zarubayev and his policies, however. Superficially, Alma-Ata is a clean, well-ordered, bustling city. The visible presence of armed cybershell police, the unwillingness of people to make eye contact or even speak in public, and the abundance of vid screens gives the visitor a sense that something is amiss, however.

Approximately 20% of the city’s population of 1.7 million people are pure ethnic Russians. The pure Russians are the elite of the city, mostly living in the Yoshnoe Nyebo area; they regularly express full support for the government. Most have access to high Third Wave/low Fourth Wave technology locally, and can travel to Russia without much problem. Many have adopted visible cybernetic implants as a way of emulating their leader.

Another 45% of Alma-Ata’s citizenry are Kazaks, with a small percentage of Turkmen, Uzbeks, and other Central Asian native ethnicities. The native Kazaks have few rights, and are subject to the ongoing terror of the Zarubayev regime. Most live in low Third Wave circumstances, working menial labor, although a small number have been co-opted into the elite, living essentially as Russian citizens. This is done in part to show Kazak citizens the value of cooperation, and in part to appease international critics. Kazaks are not allowed to travel freely, even within the country. Passports are required for inter-city travel, and a non-Russian citizen must have approval from the city government before being allowed to leave or enter a city.

The remaining 35% of the population are krovniki (from polovina krov’, “half blood”), nominally Russian but with some degree of Kazak heritage. Denied the economic and political rights of Russians, they are the underclass of Alma-Ata society. Like Kazaks, they face restrictions on travel and employment and must carry an internal passport at all times. They live a twilight existence, shunned by Kazaks, and considered almost untouchable by pure Russians, who fear the accusation of krovniki status. The taint of associating with krovniki applies even to others of their kind. The status can be cleared, but the process is contingent in part on how dutifully the applicant has attempted to live as a Russian. Support for Zarubayev is highest among this group, as they desperately attempt to show their ethnic loyalty.

Zarubayev has aggressively cleansed Alma-Ata, along with the rest of Kazakstan, of any references to the indigenous Kazak culture. Mosques have disappeared, streets have been renamed, and pre-Zarubayev memorials and museums removed. The native language is ruthlessly suppressed, and history books start in 1917. Any reference to non-Russian-dominated Kazakstan history is dangerous.

The city’s original name, “Almaty,” has been erased; referring to the city by that name in public risks a death sentence if overheard by the police or monitors. Traditional dress is forbidden, and men who choose to wear hair styles or facial hair that differs from Zarubayev’s are considered suspect. Children are taught traditional Russian songs in school. If any are caught singing Kazak songs, their parents are executed in front of them and they (and any siblings) are sent to one of the many Centers for Proper Education that dot the countryside.

What started in Kazakstan as a horrific, if straightforward, example of ethnic cleansing has turned into a surreal nightmare. The government uses a mix of intentional rumor, misinformation, and disinformation as a means of controlling what people know. Kazaks have come to believe that every aspect of their lives is under constant surveillance. Citizens disappear for weeks, only to be returned without any memory of what has happened to them. Paranoia and anxiety are the constant undertone of existence, with an ever-present fear of death or worse. Even the pure Russians live in denial, unwilling to admit that anything is wrong, secretly terrified that Zarubayev’s attention will someday turn to them. Alma-Ata, as the capital, experiences this culture of terror in its most extreme form.

In the decade between The Silence and the 2114 uprisings, there was little outright violence in most urban centers. The majority of the populace grew up under Zarubayev, and the regime has proven lethally effective at eliminating subversives. A large portion of the youth have started to show the signs of what Zarubayev called his “perfected subject” in his manifesto: loyal, tractable, and willing to die for the new Kazakstan way of life. For older citizens of cities such as Alma-Ata, the new generation’s behavior is a stark reminder that their way of life is lost.

As the use of physical violence has declined, the use of memetic weapons has increased. Zarubayev’s Minister of the Mind and Body, Nikolai Verkovenskii, uses AlmaAta as a test site for his social control theories, many of which involve an individual’s perception of reality. From subtle memetic techniques to the forced implantation of augmented-reality hardware, Verkovenskii has a fascination with manipulating an individual’s beliefs about the nature of the world. One of his more successful experiments began in 2099, when he covered the city of Alma-Ata with non-interactive vid displays. By 2115, they had become ubiquitous in Kazakstan.

It is impossible to avoid the vid screens in Alma-Ata. They are on street corners, in public buildings, businesses, even in restrooms. Small ones are in taxis and the cars of commuter trains. Every home has several, freely provided by the government. They all show the same channel – there is only one in Kazakstan – and have no on/off or volume control. Any attempt to tamper with a unit alerts the KGB, and officers come out to check the system and arrest anyone found to have attempted to destroy state property. It is widely assumed that the units have built-in cameras and microphones to monitor those near the screen.

For the most part, the programming on the vid is incongruously perky. From 6am until midnight the vid shows a variety of upbeat, largely foreign, entertainment – sitcoms, Bollywood musicals, celebrity chat, and the like, interrupted by advertisements celebrating Zarubayev and calling for the death of “hooligans, wreckers, bandits, and other villains.” There is one news show, at 7 p.m., but even that is produced in a strikingly sunny, game-show-like format. The shows rarely deviate from their established schedule. The one notable exception was in March of 2105, when Zarubayev interrupted the programming to tell his citizens that the “bandit revolt” was over, and that he would now be exacting punishment. The broadcast then went dead for 10 days, as the purges and massacres of The Silence took place.

For the non-pure Russian citizens of Alma-Ata, the sense of constant observation is nearly overwhelming, made worse by a gnawing dread that anyone or anything in one’s life could be an informant. Zarubayev has perfected the techniques of demoralization through distrust; about 50% of the adult Kazak population are informants. The KGB uses a combination of memetic and biochemical techniques to extract information from even the most unwilling informants. People are pulled in, almost at random, and made to reveal things about neighbors, friends, and family. It’s not necessarily important that the accusations be true, only that they’re damning. Most revelations, true or otherwise, are not immediately acted upon; they’re added to a database to be used against someone as needed. The extraction of information itself is used as a tool of terror.

Even the pure Russian population is not entirely immune to the surveillance and memetic control. In 2113, a prominent Russian business owner was arrested and accused of being a spy for the E.U., then disappeared. When his arrest was announced on the nightly news program, the story finished with the smiling newsreader telling viewers that they could count on President Zarubayev not letting that happen again. Several suicides were reported in the Yoshnoe Nyebo district that night. By 2098, vid screens appeared for the first time on street corners in the pure Russian districts of Kazakstan cities, although they are not yet required in Russian homes.

The memetic assault is more than simple vid programming: it includes bizarre methods of manipulation. Under Verkovenskii’s direction, military and police forces stage outlandish events on the streets of Alma-Ata (and other cities), then tell passers-by to never say a word about it. Anyone monitored mentioning the event is arrested, held, and interrogated for several days. Citizens quickly learned not to pay attention to the unusual, out of fear that reacting will draw unwanted attention to themselves. In this way, citizens of Kazakstan have been trained to not see the unthinkable, even when paraded right in front of them.

Although Kazakstan under Zarubayev is an international pariah, it has sufficient links to other nations that it faces little risk of economic collapse. Russia is widely considered its largest patron, although this is more because of a dependence upon the Baykonur launch facilities than any enthusiasm in Moscow for Zarubayev. The spaceport is also used by smugglers of illegal bioroids, “black” nanotech, and other illicit goods, many of whom then ship their wares across the Caspian Sea to ports in Iran; both Tehran and Alma-Ata reputedly receive a cut of every such deal. The TSA is thought to make use of Baykonur’s services, as well, in exchange for access to the latest technological designs. It is widely feared that smugglers using Baykonur may be able to bring in a “mini-nuke”.

One of the more visible signs of Zarubayev’s rule in Alma-Ata are the Blyustetyelui, (“Guardians”), the cybershell “palace guard” found throughout the city. Unlike the police and military forces, which have a recognizable command hierarchy, the Blyustetyelui operate solely under the direction of Zarubayev himself. They are only found in Alma-Ata, or as bodyguards to Zarubayev when he travels; the first appeared in 2106, after the attempted coup. E.U. analysts estimate that there are now approximately 700 Blyustetyel units.

The only known time that Blyustetyelui have seen military action was in the initial days of the 2114 uprising, when the Martyrs of Astana rebel group managed to pin down Zarubayev and his entourage as they attempted to return to the capital. Although there were only 20 Blyustetyel units present, they defeated the well-armed assassination team without suffering any casualties. Unconfirmed reports that emerged from Kazakstan following the failed uprising claim that the Blyustetyelui simply tore through the rebel’s cybershells, which were MCS-52 and 64 models provided by E.U. intelligence services.

No Blyustetyel shell has been captured by opposition forces, but German intelligence claims to have evidence that the infomorph controlling each cybershell is a xox of Zarubayev’s son, who was reportedly brainscanned and ghosted immediately after his death in the 2105 coup.

In the northern part of the city, in the heart of the main ethnic Kazak slums, is the Posmakov Prison, home to the state’s political prisoners and the Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti, or KGB. The building, a quarter mile on each side, is a simple gray eight-story structure. It has no windows and only two apparent entrances: the front, or “Lion’s Gate,” which allows only one person in or out at a time, and the rear, or “Serpent’s Gate,” which only opens when a prisoner transfer vehicle docks with it. Older residents who witnessed the prison’s construction claim that there are additional entrances hidden in the walls, although this has never been confirmed. The immediate vicinity of the prison and the path to the train station is heavily guarded; this presence does not extend into the district at large.

The top seven stories of the building house prisoners and related facilities – mess hall, hospital, exercise space, and the like. In addition, the very top floor contains a crematorium. Nearby residents claim they know when there has been an uprising in the prison, as the smoke from the single chimney pours out for days.

The bottom floor and the basement floor below it contain domestic intelligence departments, which function primarily as secret police. They handle the routine interrogations and investigations, and their infomorphs monitor the millions of vid screens around the country. The bottom floors also house the KGB’s administrative offices. As with any large organization, a sizeable infrastructure is required to keep the KGB moving. The vast majority of people who come and go through the Lion’s Gate entrance are basic bureaucrats, keeping tabs of payroll and expenses.

A defector from the Kazak KGB claims that the foreign-affairs departments, as well as more sophisticated intelligence-analysis groups, are much further down, hundreds of feet underground. Little is known about the extent of the facilities; the complex may tie in to the underground sprawl of Zarubayev’s Castle.

The neighborhood outside has declined steadily since the prison’s construction in 2065. Once it was one of the more lively Kazak parts of the city. Now everyone who could afford to has moved away, leaving only the aged and infirm, the extremely poor, and the criminals. Ironically, a visitor is more likely to be robbed or murdered within sight of the national prison than anywhere else in the city. Nonetheless, the district does see considerable traffic, as most vices are readily available here. Drugs are technically illegal but widely used, and prostitution – illegal only for Russian women – is commonplace as well.

One of two institutions overseen by Zarubayev’s main advisor, Nikolai Verkovenskii, the Ministry of Mind and Body is in eastern part of the city, where the old parliament building stood. The parliament house was demolished in 2098 for construction of the new ministry. Like much of the recent architecture in Alma-Ata, it has a solid, fortress-like design. All that sets it apart from other newer buildings is the statue at the northwest corner of the building, an idealized bronze body, 10 feet tall, arms outstretched, holding its own head as if in offering.

The Ministry of Mind and Body presents itself as a hospital more than an office building, and in fact it does contain a small but well-equipped public medical facility. Few patients come to the Ministry hospital willingly, however, as all Alma-Ata residents are aware that strange things happen in the sections of the building not open to the public. It is in this building that Verkovenskii carries out his experiments in memetic control, cognitive implants, and social manipulation, and few who enter the classified areas leave unchanged.

Verkovenskii’s labs in the Ministry are stocked with the best bioengineering and cybernetic equipment that the KGB can procure, making the facilities easily the match of most good Fifth-Wave-world hospitals. There are multiple brainscanners and brainpeelers for making digital mind emulations, nanostasis tanks, exowombs, and an operating chamber that allows for up to eight simultaneous cranial-implant surgeries. All of this is overseen by Dr. Hans, the SAI that functions as Verkovenskii’s main assistant and advisor; he is totally dedicated to Verkovenskii’s vision of a society where all perception is state-controlled. Usually inhabiting a bush robot, Dr. Hans can readily slip between a number of different bodies, including a bioshell that looks like an ethnic-Kazak patient. Unless threatened, Dr. Hans never leaves the high security floors of the Ministry.

There are usually 10 to 15 doctors on staff at any given time, aside from Verkovenskii and Dr. Hans, and anywhere from five to 50 patients in the secure area. When Alma-Ata citizens disappear and return weeks later, this is usually where they are taken. The Ministry is well guarded, with bioroid soldiers stationed throughout. All have a limited puppet implant, allowing Verkovenskii (or, more rarely, Dr. Hans) to see what the bioroid is doing and, if necessary, take control. In the 2114 uprising, the Ministry building was a key target during the attack on Alma-Ata. Verkovenskii and his staff retreated to the secure floors and held off the rebels for 10 hours until government forces could drive off the assault.

Unlike most late-Third-Wave or higher cities, AlmaAta does not have a public AR network, even in the affluent districts. A visitor to Alma-Ata, however, would notice a large number of standard AR transceivers installed all over the city. This network is under the strict control of the Ministry of Mind and Body, and is used for Verkovenskii’s ongoing experiments.

The only people with AR equipment in Alma-Ata are those who have had it secretly implanted at the Ministry. Augmented reality is used not for enhancing information access, but for controlling perception. Implanted victims see lifelike images of people and things that aren’t there, hear voices no one else seems to hear, and even find themselves chased by monstrous shapes that assault only them. President Zarubayev often visits these people when they are alone, telling them of his plan for the future, reminding them that he is always watching. When a person breaks down on the street in fear or madness, the well-trained Kazak citizens know to ignore the problem, pretending that the screaming man doesn’t really exist. In some cases, he may simply be another image implanted in their minds that others on the street don’t even know is there.

An outsider with standard AR equipment wouldn’t normally pick up these signals. If aware of the signals’ existence, a character with appropriate Engineer or Electronics skill may easily alter standard AR gear to pick them up. The network is relatively unsophisticated, and any attempt to jam or alter the broadcasts with modern (Fifth Wave) equipment should be at +3 to succeed.

Kazakstan Polytechnik is a small, dense campus near Sajran Lake, in the southwest part of the city. The second of the two institutions run by Nikolai Verkovenskii, it is the most prestigious technical university in the country, with 24,000 students and some of the best-equipped labs east of the Urals. The caliber of its cybernetic-design and implant-medicine programs is such that several thousand students from Russia and other friendly states attend the school. Graduates are usually able to find work throughout the Russian sphere, although the best students are often hired by Verkovenskii himself.

A small number of ethnic Kazak students attend the Polytechnik, although more are found as janitorial and maintenance staff. All students are required to live and socialize on campus, with the genders in rough balance. There is little mixing between the academic population and the city at large. Students are discouraged from leaving the university grounds, although male students are frequently discovered patronizing the ethnic Kazak and krovniki prostitutes that work the Prison district.

Only the sciences are taught; there are no humanities or social-studies departments. Nonetheless, political conversations are not unusual, particularly between ethnic-Russian Kazaks and foreign students. As long as the politics remain a coffeehouse distraction, and not a cause for agitation, the administration ignores the discussions. In many respects, Kazakstan Polytechnik is the freest place in Alma-Ata.

The campus is also the only place in Alma-Ata without vid monitors. This was not by design. The vid screens were installed at the university at the same time as the rest of the city, but computer-engineering students soon found ways to hack the datastream and alter the material shown (or recorded by) the vids. The campus authorities, even with the KGB visibly involved, were unable to stop this digital vandalism. In a rage, Zarubayev ordered the campus destroyed and all students executed. After Verkovenskii reminded him that the university’s students, while undisciplined, were also responsible for many of the tools that allowed Zarubayev to exercise control, the vids were simply removed.

Known to Kazak locals as Medeo Tumani, the Yoshnoe Nyebo district was cleared of all non-Russian residents in the 2060s, and has served as the elite Russian enclave since. The difference between Yoshnoe Nyebo and the rest of Alma-Ata is striking – while all of the city is clean, Yoshnoe Nyebo is pristine, with lush parks, modern Russian architecture, and an abundance of restaurants and shops. Yoshnoe Nyebo could easily be mistaken for the upscale district of any central or eastern European city.

Ethnic Kazaks and krovniki are forbidden entry to the Yoshnoe Nyebo district, except as servants of Russian residents or registered couriers. The streets leading in are blocked except for the main thoroughfare, Ooleetsa Beria, which is heavily guarded with cybershell troops. Most traffic is commercial, trucks bringing supplies for restaurants and the like. Residents needing access out of town take the private rail line from Yoshnoe Nyebo to the Zarubayev National Airport.

Aside from the cybershells at the entrance, security is notably subtle in Yoshnoe Nyebo. This is not to say that it is light or slow to respond; on any given street there will be at least two heavily armed police officers. In Yoshnoe Nyebo, however, all public security officers are bioshells made to look as passably Russian as possible so as not to disturb the residents. If needed, they are able to call in heavier firepower within three minutes.

Ooleetsa Beria, through Yoshnoe Nyebo, is the only accessible road that leads to Zarubayev’s estate, known colloquially as the Castle.

The main governmental headquarters, the Castle is a sprawling complex at the end of Ooleetsa Beria, shielded on three sides by the mountains at the south of the city. Covering nearly three square miles, with a private TAV strip and military barracks, the Castle is massive, heavily fortified, and designed to intimidate. People brought to the Castle enter through 20-foot-high solid-steel gates, and there is an armed contingent of cybershell troops lining the road leading from the entry gates to the actual facility entrance. While the cybershell guards are largely older models taken out of regular service, the sight of a quarter-mile line of 10-foot-tall combat shells is imposing to most visitors.

All of the complex’s externals are intended to demoralize visitors and opponents. Four massive, 30-story-tall towers pin the corners of the complex, bristling with weapon emplacements and sensors. The visible part of the main facility is a squat, four-story step-pyramid, with more cybershells patrolling the roof. The grounds are pristine, covered with grass but devoid of trees or any visible life.

These externals are almost entirely for show. Recognizing that a threat from the air is more plausible than any land-based attack, most of the facility is deep underground and widely dispersed; even an earth-penetrating nuclear attack would be hard pressed to take out the entire complex. The underground part of the Castle is sprawling, stretching out to the borders of the city. There are locked elevators that lead from the underground to various parts of Alma-Ata, with the exits in abandoned buildings, military-police stations, or underwater. This allows Blyustetyel forces to emerge quickly if needed, and gives Zarubayev multiple means of escape if he again comes under attack.

Visible throughout the city, the massive 500-foot-tall statue of Zarubayev stands at the summit of Mount Köktöbe, in the southeastern part of the city. Built from 2106 to 2108, its construction cost 20 million dollars and the lives of over 100 indentured Kazak laborers. Made largely of steel and aluminum, it shows a grim Zarubayev, left hand curled into a fist held close to his chest, cybernetic right arm stretched out before him. The statue’s eyes are massive spotlights, bright enough to cause shadows on the city’s streets at night.

At the base of the statue is the Zarubayev Center, a museum of Zarubayev and the history of Kazakstan since his rise to power in 2053. Among the artifacts it holds is the first printing of his book, his right arm suspended in solution (it was intentionally severed and replaced with a cybernetic arm), and his gravestone. The latter has a sign stating that Zarubayev wished for it to be stored in the museum, since he will never need it. Touching the gravestone has become a tradition for visitors to the museum, ostensibly for luck. (The Muslim Underground claims that it is to wish the death of Zarubayev.) After only seven years of display, the granite shines from the tens of thousands of hands that have touched the gravestone.

There are construction access roads that lead to the facility at the statue’s base, but they are restricted to authorized vehicles only. Citizens wishing to visit the statue must take the Köktöbe cable car, an antiquated system able to hold only two-dozen people at once for the thirty-minute trip up and down the mountain. The cable car is completely automated, and is one of the few places in Alma-Ata without the ubiquitous vid systems.

The Köktöbe cable car cable snapped late last week, plunging a car 200 feet to the mountainside and killing all passengers. There has been no public acknowledgement of this event, although the facility was immediately closed and will remain so until the cable is repaired. Each of the families of the victims received, without explanation, grants of 500 rubles. There are rumors that the mothers of victims are planning a silent march to the Castle, holding signs asking for the bodies of their children.

Government forces are conducting house-to-house searches in the Prison district. They claim to be looking for a prostitute named Amma, who was known to work in that area. Residents are being told that she is sick with an unnamed but highly contagious illness, and that anyone who knows of her whereabouts should contact the authorities immediately. Some of the other prostitutes in the area claim that she had disappeared months ago, but returned in the last week acting oddly before disappearing again.

Kazak foreign minister Andraayev returns this week from a tour of the capitals of the various Russian sphere nations, trying to shore up support for the incursion into Uzbekistan. The usual statements of solidarity from Russia, the Ukraine, and others were not forthcoming, leading European observers to suspect a fissure forming in the previously close ties between Zarubayev and Russian Prime Minister Bazarov. The Kazak news service, which had earlier been playing up the tour with colorful maps and animations, ceased making any references to it once it became clear that the trip would not be a success.

An ethnic-Kazak gunman managed to sneak into the Yoshnoe Nyebo district earlier last month, shooting several Russian holiday shoppers before being killed by police. Although the government made the usual reprisals (home destroyed, family arrested), it stopped short of displaying his body in public, as is the usual deterrent tactic. Rumors are now circulating that an ethnic-Kazak courier in the same part of Yoshnoe Nyebo saw the fight, and when the man was killed, it was clear that there were cybernetic parts in his body and head.

During the evening news show two days ago, a text scroll started running across the bottom of the screen saying “The President is a monster. He is killing us all for his mad plans. You must fight! You cannot let this madman continue to live!” This text repeated itself for about 30 seconds before the vid display abruptly switched to a rerun of That’s My Mom! Although no mention was made of the event in the official media, Alma-Ata is swirling with rumors of a late-night raid at the university, where half a dozen students were taken away by the KGB.