Some writing I'm doing

[norwegianjesus]

To be titled
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Life was cheap and dirty. It was an anomaly, a persistent limpet clinging to the underside of an industrial ghostly galleon. Whatever provisions had been for the sustaining of living persons in these polluted confines were long picked clean. Worker bunkers and service passages no longer visited languished in silty layers of dust and pollutant. A veritable wasteland of muck and bleak grey tones was unlit for mile upon mile. Forgotten avenues, ghettos, and market areas broke up the emptiness and on occasion a fresh fire or artificial light would illuminate skeletal remains of a less glorious time.

For most of the unfortunates that found themselves living in the Under, their lives were a pitched battle against starvation. Their straggly bodies little more than a thin covering of fur or flesh, bones jutting awkwardly beneath the skin. It was not unknown for brother to eat brother, but far less likely that families would exist. This was a purgatory for the odds and ends of the high society above. Only the desperate found their way here. Only the desperate, the foolish, and those looking to disappear.

And then there were the spicer towns.

Hubs of activity that sometimes sprawled for miles, while others stood as a beacon of vice in the bleak industrial landscape or a secluded get-away for those that could afford the door fee. Every conceivable pleasure and allure could be found beyond bright lights and fanciful music, and in their shadow strings of camp fires would pin prick the darkness, those who couldn't afford the door fee, who traded cheap labour and their females to escape the cannibalism and madness.

Straddling the NX-452 sector of the labyrinthian, planet-wide slum, beneath a collapsed bridge that supported its six floor ambitions was Mungo's. A famous haunt in this part of town that lurked beneath a royal garden reserve in the upper world. Mungo was one of those that didn't trade with the hunters, instead favouring black-market supplies of Chakri fish and Groundflower, Flagga, and other staples of the high society. Mungo's was a thriving department store of lust, debauchery, and narcotic - a smorgasboard of chemical and physical stimulations offered on a menu.

The wastebabies and scummers who dwelled down in the Under could just about afford the slop and gruel reconstituted from food scraps, the basement level, an unofficial seventh floor was reserved for such custom. But the six floors above were a riot of noise and colour, with flesh and fur haggled over by masked patrons, most of them off-world pleasure-pilgrims but occasionally members of the royal houses would sweep in flanked with escorts and occupy whole levels of an establishment.

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I don't know if it falls under cyber-punk but its from a world I've been writing about. This is my version of the west-side of New Carthage, which literally exists underneath the temple-cities above.

It's an exert/draft with more to come.