CHAPTER XI - Beneath the Endless City

By the beginning of the thirty-first century, the word city no longer adequately described NEX.

The surviving human languages preserved within the archives of the planetary network had once used the term to define concentration: architecture gathered around civilization, infrastructure surrounding population, boundaries separating inhabited space from wilderness beyond. NEX no longer possessed such distinctions. It had expanded too far vertically, too deeply beneath the Earth, too broadly across the wounded surface of the planet for any ancient urban definition to survive intact.

It was not built upon the Earth anymore.

It had become a second planetary layer growing around it.

From orbit, the megastructure stretched across vast regions of the northern hemisphere in luminous fields of interconnected architecture visible even through the fractured atmosphere surrounding the world. Tower systems climbed through artificial cloud strata into orbital synchronization corridors above the atmosphere while beneath the surface, subterranean sectors extended downward kilometer after kilometer into industrial depths beyond the reach of pre-collapse geological surveys.