Vos

Vos was massive.
One in eight people in the world lived within 70 miles of the city
center.  The city continued to grow on a
regular basis.

From an
aerial view, the city looked like a concrete cancer cell, a waterless white
blot on the west side of the continent, urban tendrils slithering out in all
directions.

The city
operated like a living organism, the beating heart of the world economy.

At the simplest level, the city sent energy
out and took resources in.  More than 90%
of the world’s annual energy output was generated in the gas mines in the mountains
north of Vos.  Vos’s explosive
growth over the last century and very existence were due to the cheap, nearly
unlimited sources of energy in the mountains to the north.

There were simply no cheap or
substantive sources of energy available anywhere else in the world – and when
the world government took hold, they ensured no infrastructure was built in areas
of the world with energy reserves of any kind to change this fact.  Only in certain areas very remote from the
capital was energy produced locally, where the cost of local production was
cheaper than the price of importing reserves from the capital.

The
infrastructure to support Vos’s operations was equally herculean.  There was the vast network of gas extraction
centers in the mountains, and the refinery centers closer into the city.  There were also massive industrial batteries to
hold the processed power and the labyrinthian network of railways and electric
systems supporting the movement of energy and goods in and out of the city.

The vast
metal and raw minerals supply in the mountains expedited Vos’s industrial development,
amounting to 70% of the world’s metal and mineral production on an annual basis.

Vos’s industrialization came to
encompass the production of most of the world’s processed goods as well.  Industrial production was vastly cheaper in
the capital due to the cheap energy, accessible mineral assets and massive labor
force.  Factories dotted the urban landscape,
producing everything from children’s toys to the complex, technologically
advanced weapons the government demanded for keeping the peace.

And so, Vos operated like a living cancer
cell, a process in flow.  Food, water and
natural resources in, energy, metal and technology out.

Over the
last 70 years, Vos’s booming economy coupled with widespread economic
collapse in the rest of the world drove massive migration into the city.  The government managed to keep pace with transportation
with the production of a massive system of railways to bring people into the
places of work in the city center and north.
They failed, however, to provide adequate housing, sanitation, hospitals
or even the most basic safety requirements beyond this.  The result was massive, autonomous slums
sprawling into the southern and eastern regions.

Crime in the slums was widespread,
and the army and city police generally stayed in the wealthier northern areas
and city center, which by comparison were some of the safest areas in the world.  It was ironic that, less than 50 miles from
the capital of the world government, were areas over which they truthfully had
very little control.

Parda had first settled down upon
his return to the city in one of these slums, a slum named Vidigal along the
eastern reaches of the city.