URVILLE

Urville is the most modern city in the world.

It didn’t start out that way. In fact, Urville began as a small fishing village, off the Gold
Coast of Africa. As a joke, people used to call Urville the jewel of the coast. Urville had once
been a haven for drifters and convicts. A state prison was located nearby, about 20 miles down
the road. It was a poor city, back then.
But then the wars started. All large metropolitan centers were razed over the course of
three days. After that initial burst of destruction, the conflict that ensued would last for the
following decade. During that time, all the continents broke up and shifted; came back together
and broke up again - physically. There was very little food during this time. Many people died.
What remained was a testament to the biological need to survive. Somehow, groups of human
population managed to get by, and, after the wars, recover what was left from the previous era’s
sociological, technological, and religious tenets.
Perhaps the only geologically untouched (relatively) landscape was that of the Gold
Coast of Africa. It was now just a long, jagged strip of land that floated somewhere in the middle
of what had once been called the Atlantic Ocean. The width of the floating island ranged from
about 50 to 100 miles across, and stretched out for much longer than that - almost the entire
west coast of the continent remained, even after the destruction laid unto the land masses
across the rest of the globe.
Urville was situated a little above the halfway point of this strange stretch of land - the
Savage Land, as it was called. During the wars, the Savage Land became a sort of haven from
the tumult the rest of the world suffered from - it really was worthless, in terms of resources, and
was strategically insignificant. But, by the time the very much removed powers that were
realized the importance of Urville - most of the earth’s human population had migrated there at
this point - it was too late. The wars were nearly over, and the old guard had been all but
destroyed, leaving only the teeming, wild land of lawlessness that was the Savage Land.
What resulted was really an island of trash. People freighted over all their junk, their
entire lives, all of their belongings, when they migrated to Urville. There, a society of ad-hoc
engineers and construction workers - borne of the listless, idle masses of men and women who
had little else to do but sit and watch the earth outside of Urville go up into the flames of hell -
yes, a huge work force emerged and began to build in a frenzy, without ever pausing to plan or
think things through. It began slowly, with individual families and groups building their own huts
and houses, and began to spread as mass human adaptation took its course in organizing itself
into its usual cartesian lattice of hulking concrete with spindly steel wires interlaced all up in its
guts.
And what resulted there was a strange city - the most modern city in the world, once
the rest of it annihilated itself to pieces. A few very well-minded scientists gathered and, in the
span of a generation or two, developed a basic system of resource recycling, and managed to
heat, power, and irrigate the entire island based off the weather and geological patterns of the
torn earth. Both had become unpredictable after the savage atomic blasts and battles fought
over its surface, but necessity forced the last remaining men and women to develop ecologically
sustainable methods of survival.
They were successful, for the most part. As with just about all things, it depends on
how one looked at the situation. There were very little remaining resources on earth. The land
masses had all been broken up into tiny islands, with tribes of nautical outlaws warring amidst
themselves. As one came closer to the Gold Coast, and to its city center - Urville; as one
came closer, the islands grew larger and a little more organized. But it was still a man-eat-dog
world out there, and many were weeded out via the vicious recuperation process that followed
all the wars. Urville had grown from a simple fishing village to a modern mutant of organic
matter - teeming and heaving, emitting noxious vapors of unfettered humanity into the stifling
atmosphere that grew increasingly virulent with each passing day.
This new future world existed as it did now due to the inventions of one man - Dr.
Sorel. Sorel had survived the Upheaval; had been working, in fact, on various technologies
that seemed to harken the dark days of current times. He created deviously simple devices
that operated with few moving parts, devices that produced clean water, energy and heat from
brackish water. They were run by exposure to light in the UV spectrum in natural sunlight,
and were easily reparable with ad-hoc parts from the many piles of industrial junk scattered
across the islands. This, in fact, formed a whole class of worksmen in itself - there were actual
uncharted islands of junk floating about in the oceans that had taken over the earth’s surface,
and there were crews that sailed all over the dirty green ocean waters in junks, collecting
inventory to flip on the mainlands.
Sorel’s inventions took on more of a life than the man himself. Indeed, very few people
could accurately claim to have met and have known the man. It was not known if he was
still alive - only his inventions existed with any certainty, indeed with very rigorous and clear
certainty. They were used by nearly all the few hundred thousand human beings left alive on
the ravaged planet; many did not even know that the Sorel Machines were named after a man,
had never even questioned the origin of what had become necessities for every single human
creature, from childbirth to death. There was very little old age left.
Because of the depleted - changed, rather! - atmosphere content of the terrestrial skies,
the patterns of sunlight in the skies torn over radioactive earth and sludgy water - because of
these changed environmental conditions, the patterns of light in the sky fluctuated on a daily
basis, and there was a gradual but definite drifting out from what had historically been the idyllic
cerulean blue (of the picturesque type) toward the acrimonious violet of the Gold Coast Age.
The sun lit up the sky in the evenings a brilliant orange, mixed with a nasty red, and one could
not help but get the feeling, every night, that those would be the last graces of light the sun
would bless upon that particular horizon. During the evenings, activity would come to a dip and
lull - the diurnal busybodys would pause and gaze, eyes shaded, out toward the sour light falling
back over the distance, and the nocturnals would begin to stir, as if the fading light somehow
triggered some biological alarm clock that nudged them out of their sweating stupor.
The sunrise was little better. The bone-chilling cold that settled in during the night - the
atmosphere was much too thin to retain as much heat as it once could - would cast a fog over
the barren, blue mounds of industrial, humanistic decay. There was, in actuality, no sunrise in
the traditional sense. The sky would just grow brighter; the night zombies would begin scuttling
back to their respective holes and nests during the day; everything would turn a dirty gray, then
a dirtier blue before all the fog burned off by midday as the sun rode its heliocentric chariot
across the sky, leaving a shimmering mess of throbbing purple veins of condensation and blobs
of collected light behind it.
There were the usual divisions of labor in this new world. There are many ways to
bifurcate the gamut of human conditions; one such way is to view vocations as either based
upon the spiritual improvement of life, and those that form the backbone of logistical survival
necessity. You had your whores and drug dealers; your various musicians, artists, and general
sideshow or entertainment folk. Then you had a wild expanse of freelance dispute settlers (what
had once been known as lawyers in more civilized days), doctors, accountants, merchants...All
the same spaces in the peoples’ lives filled with a twist reflective of the current state of affairs.
People lived a hell on earth, many wishing for death but afraid to give up life. But what
is a human being if not a creature that can get used to things? There is little use in remaining
unhappy, and most people eked out some sort of existence that contained the very much
relative highs and lows of any life you or I may imagine now. People loved and hated, killed and
made up; they played and worked, and found relief either through inebriation or religion. New
religious cults sprang up everywhere - short-lived entities that would boast the Third Coming,
only to fizzle out as their members died off. The turnover rate of life, as I have said, was very
high in this new world.
Ironically, the most extreme cases - the shortest lives and the longest - could be found
in Urville. In Urville, like-minded folk banded together to form strength and unity. This right
borne of might was in constant flux and balance with the various random evolutions of individual
members of the groups. Personality, in other words. It invariably led to conflict, as the clash and
foment of people always seem to do.
So human life continued on earth. But nobody knew for how long. Environmental
prerequisites for biological survival shrank in number by the day; new diseases, new evolutions,
were taking place. There were false prophets. There was a heightened sense of urgency and
anxiety in the air. It was a feeling that knew no discrimination.

[ THE END ]