The Seventh City

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"A shrill recording of birdsong jolts you awake. Check your watch immediately: 06:37, 28º, AQI Moderate, BP 160/90, stress endocrine response detected, 777 unread emails—"[1]

The Seventh City is the last of the Fallen Cities; it does not exist yet. Visions of a possible iteration of this city may be seen in the Neon Future Destiny.

The Digital City[edit | edit source]

"Friday night comes with its long-awaited energy. Clerks throw their neckties over their shoulders and nurse cans of beer in the W-Bahn; ill-advised photos abound on the feed; the faint pounding of electronic music creeps over the city."[2]

Welcome to what was formerly known as Berlin.[3] Perhaps the world looks a little more familiar to you, the reader, the person in front of the screen. The Seventh is full of beer cans and bureaucracy and electronic music.[4] The era of smart watches[5] and social media is in full swing;[4][6] even computers cannot handle the Correspondence, however,[7] so the digital age itself did not contribute to any further breakthroughs in this field. Beneath the surface of the city lies an electric network[8][9] that neighbors Parabola:[10] a convenient way for criminals to keep their activity hidden and disrupt targets with RF attacks[11] and Parabolan viruses.[12]

The neighborhood once called Watchmaker's Hill is now called Brunnenberg.[13] This is where the stalactite full of Starved Men fell, back in 1899;[14] these days, it's covered in Neathbow-neon signs[15] written in Correspondence.[16] There are still Starved folk here, living in their own commune,[17] where they make and sell things like textiles, mushrooms, and liquor that doesn't comply with Herrn Weine's regulations.[18] Lately, they have begun offering grey-market electronics and software discs among their wares as well.[18] The Starved now share the stalactite with young, wealthy posers, who have indulged at the shaping spas that sprang up around the city,[19] but some of the original inhabitants remain to this day. They have adapted.[20]

In this future, the lands across the zee are less dangerous; Gaider's Mourn[21] and Varchas have become tourist attractions, as the weather in the Seventh City worsens.[22] Even the Surface is a destination, though few fall for the Travertine Transit Consortium's advertised bargain prices and risk the perils of sunlight.[23]

The Duchess and her cats are still here, living in Kraterberg between massive sky - er, roof-scrapers.[24][25] So is July; she's doing better now,[26] but still as flighty as ever.[27] And there will always be cults in the Neath, won't there?[28]

References[edit | edit source]

  1. ↑ A new wind, Fallen London
  2. ↑ A Visit (A Neon Future), Fallen London
  3. ↑ Bruno (FBG), Failbetter Games Discord Server "But it ended up being Berlin largely because of timeframe alignment... The Neon Future was always meant to be set in the 2020s, and to be contextually similar to Fallen London (ie, a city that's been fallen for about 30-40 years), so you work backwards from that."
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 A Visit (A Neon Future), Fallen London "Clerks throw their neckties over their shoulders and nurse cans of beer in the W-Bahn; ill-advised photos abound on the feed; the faint pounding of electronic music creeps over the city."
  5. ↑ A new wind, Fallen London "A shrill recording of birdsong jolts you awake. Check your watch immediately: 06:37, 28º, AQI Moderate, BP 160/90, stress endocrine response detected, 777 unread emails—"
  6. ↑ The Loom: A Neon Future, Fallen London "Open the feed and hunt for dopamine (find none). Here and there, an ad catches your eye."
  7. ↑ Decipher the signage, Fallen London "For a brief moment in the nineties, Scholars of the Correspondence thought that digital computing would make their work exponentially easier. This idea was quickly proven optimistic. Computers don't like to encode the Correspondence any more than paper does; and though silicon is less flammable, it is also much more expensive."
  8. ↑ The City and the Network, Fallen London "There's the city and then there's the electric soul of the city – the one that permeates everything, silently moving the world. You were not born to this sub-surface web, but you have learned to manipulate it all the same."
  9. ↑ Prepare a mirror attack, Fallen London " Beneath the surface of the world, the network. Beneath the surface of the network, Parabola."
  10. ↑ Prepare a mirror attack, Fallen London "The network borders Parabola – feeding on wild-eyed possibility and misinformation."
  11. ↑ Perform a small favour, Fallen London "A class of criminals has emerged that operates almost entirely in the wires. [...] A bike courier drops off a device in your mailbox. It's an oblong beige box with no apparent external ports; clearly it works wirelessly. You are meant to hide it somewhere [...] and simply walk, at a specified time, through a specified path. [...] Whatever RF attack you were asked to perform, it must have been silent – and probably targeted at someone walking past you, rather than at the infrastructure."
  12. ↑ Prepare a mirror attack, Fallen London "The worm you nurture is half-dream, half-code; it devours information and excretes entropy."
  13. ↑ 'For you, of course.', Fallen London "These days, you share a small apartment in Brunnenberg. It's just about big enough to dance in."
  14. ↑ Spiralhügel, Fallen London "It is a stalactite gingerly dropped onto a plaza in the middle of Brunnenberg; a city-within-a-city; a commune; a chthonic Power that imposes its own rules upon the landscape."
  15. ↑ Spiralhügel, Fallen London "Wrapped in an anarchy of illuminated signage, much of it blazing violant or peligin."
  16. ↑ Decipher the signage, Fallen London "[...] stare at the sigils, write a tentative translation [....] Apply some extra-strength eye drops, chew on currywurst, go back to transcribing. Eventually, you have a notebook full of new transcriptions and the skin on your scalp is crawling around like mad."
  17. ↑ Visit the street market, Fallen London "The Starved Men who inhabit the tower are largely self-sufficient. But they still enjoy luxuries that only the city can provide."
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 Visit the street market, Fallen London "The street market is known for handmade textiles, exotic cultivars of mushrooms, liquor that doesn't comply with Herrn Weine's regulations. But new stalls have popped up in the last few years. Increasingly, the spiral market is the place to buy electronics at cut-rate prices or discs laden with bootleg software."
  19. ↑ Barter for information with Starved Merchants, Fallen London "After the fall of Spiralhügel onto the city, it became fashionable for young transhumanists to adopt the elongated, many-jointed limbs of the Starved Men. Shaping spas nestled against tattoo parlours, employing Roof-denizens to massage wealthy bodies into new, exciting shapes. A number of those you approach are therefore not true Starved Men at all – just faddish aesthetes and pampered trust-fund kids [...]"
  20. ↑ Barter for information with Starved Merchants, Fallen London ""I remember little of the Roof." She flicks away message notifications with a tertiary hand. "Only the milk of the Moon-Mother. Only looking down at the rocks below us, and reading in their shapes our detachment from the sky. We fell not long after." Her phone rings. A tinny, bass-deficient rendition of a popular Bazaarine electrobeat. "Excuse me. I have an appointment.""
  21. ↑ 'That was simply how long it took to put my plan into motion.', Fallen London "You stop at Gaider's Mourn to resupply; nobody in your crew remembers when the pirate's nest at the heart of the Zee was real and not a tourist attraction."
  22. ↑ Great deals on holidays to Gaider's Mourn and Varchas, Fallen London "Maybe a little time up north would do you good. Weather in the city gets worse every year; you long to feel the brisk air."
  23. ↑ Annual pass on the Travertine Funicular, Fallen London "Who needs these? Who goes up to the Surface that often? Or at all? [...] It is a mystery how the Travertine Transit Consortium stays in business. [...] They certainly advertise all those convenient and inexpensive ways to visit the Surface, but who would buy them?"
  24. ↑ Go see the Duchess, Fallen London "The Duchess had barely moved into an old townhouse in Kraterberg when sixty-story roofscrapers started springing up. Her home is now narrowly squeezed between concrete behemoths [...]"
  25. ↑ Go see the Duchess, Fallen London "But the interior is insulated from the bustle of the street outside, and preserves little bits and pieces of London – the porcelain tea set she still uses, for one thing. A rotating cast of cats and visitors maintains a tense truce over the use of the cushions."
  26. ↑ Meet the Elusive Violinist for Dinner, Fallen London "You post a few pictures in a daring new outfit. Log on to a few burners and fill the network with targeted misinfo. Getting a rise out of her is always a shot in the dark. But a message arrives in the middle of the night."
  27. ↑ Meet the Elusive Violinist for Dinner, Fallen London "You have a long conversation – catching up to do. About December. About the state of the city. Her eyes rarely meet yours; she stares over the railing, watching the cars racing down lilastraße. She doesn't stay long – these days it's as if she can hear a countdown in her head."
  28. ↑ Six dozen or so offers to join a cult, Fallen London "There's too many to count and they're all so same-y. Back in your day there was an artistry to it. [...] They all have little themes, copied from other cults; an unbroken chain of repackaging the same ideas over and over. Candles. Blood. Sorrow-spiders."
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