On the western edge of the Biter Hills there are the so-called Mines of Oblivion, named after the fate that awaits to all who enter them.

The entrance to the mines is hidden behind a concrete wall and a huge steel door, and no one has ever found out what is going on inside.

But there are cyclic rumors about people being kidnapped through all the Wasteland to work in its tunnels as slaves.

This group of small hills and gentle slopes is home to packs and packs of biters, small animals, but with a ferocity and huge jaws that make them relentless predators in groups.

It’s not a place to venture into alone.

Everything about this place is a mystery. Placed among several gentle hills, these are the remnants of an old Lenape settlement, an Indian tribe that dwelled on this land before the arrival of the white men.

All the area is fertile with ghost stories, old spirits that haunt the surrounding landscape. But these hills are inhabited, as an odd group that follows the old Lenape teachings has settled here, and they even speak their original tongue, which is puzzling enough as this language has been dead for more than a thousand years.

The very name of the place means “union” or “be a single mind”. This tribe is extremely territorial and the young braves don’t hesitate to kill any stranger that crosses the line of totem poles that act as border and warning.

Shrine of the Watch is nested upon the ruins of an old abbey, where the flock of followers of the Eye of Fire gathers

Little is known about this folk, as their congregation is quite hermetic and, in the few occasions they leave their refuge, always in groups, don’t say a word but to affirm that they follow the word of Yarus.

It is a general belief that most of the dwellings in the Shrine are underground, built inside a labyrinth-like series of tunnels and chambers.

This level of secrecy is a breeding ground to lots of rumors. A lot of people affirm that all the members of this cult have been kidnapped as children; others talk about cruel rituals of blood; but the only true thing so far is that no one has witnessed any of these cultists doing anything suspicious.

Nowater sits in the middle of an old lake, now completely dry. It is a dirty, smelly and almost lawless slum, surrounded by a wall of timber and metal plates. It wouldn’t be worth a single word here if it wasn’t the hotspot for the best and more popular pit fights in the entire region. Bets go on without a pause and bullets change hands at an astonishing rate.

And, if you are desperate enough and can do decently in a fight, you can make a living in the pits and became a legend such as Eight Fingers, Rufus the Gutter o Lethal Rosie.

Nowater is run by the Lords of the Pit, a pompous name that includes the four main families that pull the strings of all the betting and gambling operations in town. They have quite a good number of mercenaries on their payroll, so no one tries to take this business from them.

If you want to cross the Great Rift without having to take a detour of a shitdred of miles, the Permaban Pass is your only way.

In this place you can find a custom bridge made of metal sheets of any size, shape and origin, which looks to be about to plummet down anytime soon. The central stretch is raised up to prevent anyone from crossing unannounced. The guys watching over the bridge are as simple as a rattle’s mechanics: you pay, you cross, you don’t pay, go fuck yourself. That’s it.

They don’t care about your appearance, whether you are a trader or a raider; you want to cross, you pay their fee. Of course there has been people who planned to take them down to avoid paying, but they have several dozens of explosive charges set under the bridge ready to be set off if anyone goes fucking around their place. So long, this dissuasive measure has worked like a charm.

Not so many places in the Wasteland get a name so clear about what’s going on. This is a huge rift ripped out of nowhere hundreds of miles long and deep enough to spit a green gob into it and not even hearing it hit the bottom.

The only place to cross it without taking a huge detour is the Permaban Pass. You have to be careful around this place, though, as along the cliffs of clayey rocks you can find plenty of colonies of puppeteering hornets.

If you see anyone or anything acting weird you better get away fast, as it is most probably an addlernet, a creature in which puppeteering hornets have put there eggs into and has become a sort of zombie controlled by the larvae inside. Some really sick and nasty shit, dudes.

This settlement got its name thanks to the nauseating stench which rises from the greenish waters on which it is located, that in turn are the source of the main activity and income for the locals: megatroutasses fishing.

Septic Tank is divided in two clearly divided areas: Upper and Lower Septic Tank. Down in the lower area, at the same level as the stinky water, there is a cluster of huts connected by floating platforms and catwalks. This is home to fishermen and outcasts, who survive in crowded conditions among the leftovers of the local fishing industry.

The good part of the village is on the ruins of an old bridge, where local rulers live away from the infestations of those nasty leechcrabs (mean mollusks which feed from blood) and spend their time tormenting the poor souls in the lower zone.

Everyone in this part of the Wasteland knows that beyond the Last Wastes there is only death. No one has ever gone there and returned to tell the tale, at least none who could prove it.

There are always rumors about this place jumping from mouth to ear, people who know someone who went there and made it back, telling stories about a green Paradise of fertile land, or an endless graveyard, or a thousand different tall tales.

There are quite a few individuals recently that swear to have heard violent explosions and seen huge smoke columns beyond the Last Wastes. But once again, who would believe any such story told about this place?

Upon the ruins of an old airport exists one of the weirdest settlements you can find in this area: Boner. The place has been turned into a racing track of… anything.

Here racing bets are everyday’s shit and everyone is always competing on seeing who’s got the bigger one. From Wasteland beast riders to addler chariots, everything is worth a bet. The only rule is to complete the agreed laps around the circuit and get back to the start/finish line alive, no matter what the fuck you do during the race as everything is allowed.

This settlement is ruled by the Hucksters, the most powerful group of merchants in the area, said by some to be descendants of Junkers who wanted to run their own businesses. They rule the place with sharp razors, which they will use to slice your scrotum open and use it as a spare change pouch if you try to outsmart them. They don’t give a fuck about your skin color, your size or your shape, only about the size of your money bag or the amount of merchandise you want to trade with; here you will find everything on sale, from a platepanty to a sexaddler for your darkest nights of desire. The marketplace is surrounded by shacks and containers known as the Stables, where the animals and wheels for the races are kept and prepared. Boner is called like that for the shape of the settlement watched from a distance. You know, an oval, a cucumber… Gosh, fuck it, ¡a stiff dick! That’s why almost everyone call this racing track “Dickus Maximus”.

The remains of Luckyland are undoubtedly one of the weirdest places in this corner of the World. This is an old fairground divided into four quadrants with different themes: Caribbean Corsairs, Samurai Showdown, Western World and Medieval Mayhem, all of them around a central zone consecrated to the coolest things of the late 20th century: Retro Revival.

In spite of the time since this place was running, many of its structures still stand tall. This is due to the fact that many of the cutting edge human-looking animatronics (and others with more unsettling appearances, such as the Virgin Gamer and Hot Cosplayer mascots), were not only in charge of the different shows offered, but also had to keep maintenance routines that are still active.

But their lines of code seem to be corrupted somehow, as any visitor is automatically seen as an intruder to be hunted down. This place is truly a state-of-the-art wonder worthy of visiting, although doing so will turn you into a shooting gallery target, quite literally.

On the western edge of the Biter Hills there are the so-called Mines of Oblivion, named after the fate that awaits to all who enter them.

The entrance to the mines is hidden behind a concrete wall and a huge steel door, and no one has ever found out what is going on inside.

But there are cyclic rumors about people being kidnapped through all the Wasteland to work in its tunnels as slaves.

This group of small hills and gentle slopes is home to packs and packs of biters, small animals, but with a ferocity and huge jaws that make them relentless predators in groups.

It’s not a place to venture into alone.

Everything about this place is a mystery. Placed among several gentle hills, these are the remnants of an old Lenape settlement, an Indian tribe that dwelled on this land before the arrival of the white men.

All the area is fertile with ghost stories, old spirits that haunt the surrounding landscape. But these hills are inhabited, as an odd group that follows the old Lenape teachings has settled here, and they even speak their original tongue, which is puzzling enough as this language has been dead for more than a thousand years.

The very name of the place means “union” or “be a single mind”. This tribe is extremely territorial and the young braves don’t hesitate to kill any stranger that crosses the line of totem poles that act as border and warning.

Shrine of the Watch is nested upon the ruins of an old abbey, where the flock of followers of the Eye of Fire gathers

Little is known about this folk, as their congregation is quite hermetic and, in the few occasions they leave their refuge, always in groups, don’t say a word but to affirm that they follow the word of Yarus.

It is a general belief that most of the dwellings in the Shrine are underground, built inside a labyrinth-like series of tunnels and chambers.

This level of secrecy is a breeding ground to lots of rumors. A lot of people affirm that all the members of this cult have been kidnapped as children; others talk about cruel rituals of blood; but the only true thing so far is that no one has witnessed any of these cultists doing anything suspicious.

Nowater sits in the middle of an old lake, now completely dry. It is a dirty, smelly and almost lawless slum, surrounded by a wall of timber and metal plates. It wouldn’t be worth a single word here if it wasn’t the hotspot for the best and more popular pit fights in the entire region. Bets go on without a pause and bullets change hands at an astonishing rate.

And, if you are desperate enough and can do decently in a fight, you can make a living in the pits and became a legend such as Eight Fingers, Rufus the Gutter o Lethal Rosie.

Nowater is run by the Lords of the Pit, a pompous name that includes the four main families that pull the strings of all the betting and gambling operations in town. They have quite a good number of mercenaries on their payroll, so no one tries to take this business from them.

If you want to cross the Great Rift without having to take a detour of a shitdred of miles, the Permaban Pass is your only way.

In this place you can find a custom bridge made of metal sheets of any size, shape and origin, which looks to be about to plummet down anytime soon. The central stretch is raised up to prevent anyone from crossing unannounced. The guys watching over the bridge are as simple as a rattle’s mechanics: you pay, you cross, you don’t pay, go fuck yourself. That’s it.

They don’t care about your appearance, whether you are a trader or a raider; you want to cross, you pay their fee. Of course there has been people who planned to take them down to avoid paying, but they have several dozens of explosive charges set under the bridge ready to be set off if anyone goes fucking around their place. So long, this dissuasive measure has worked like a charm.

Not so many places in the Wasteland get a name so clear about what’s going on. This is a huge rift ripped out of nowhere hundreds of miles long and deep enough to spit a green gob into it and not even hearing it hit the bottom.

The only place to cross it without taking a huge detour is the Permaban Pass. You have to be careful around this place, though, as along the cliffs of clayey rocks you can find plenty of colonies of puppeteering hornets.

If you see anyone or anything acting weird you better get away fast, as it is most probably an addlernet, a creature in which puppeteering hornets have put there eggs into and has become a sort of zombie controlled by the larvae inside. Some really sick and nasty shit, dudes.

This settlement got its name thanks to the nauseating stench which rises from the greenish waters on which it is located, that in turn are the source of the main activity and income for the locals: megatroutasses fishing.

Septic Tank is divided in two clearly divided areas: Upper and Lower Septic Tank. Down in the lower area, at the same level as the stinky water, there is a cluster of huts connected by floating platforms and catwalks. This is home to fishermen and outcasts, who survive in crowded conditions among the leftovers of the local fishing industry.

The good part of the village is on the ruins of an old bridge, where local rulers live away from the infestations of those nasty leechcrabs (mean mollusks which feed from blood) and spend their time tormenting the poor souls in the lower zone.

Everyone in this part of the Wasteland knows that beyond the Last Wastes there is only death. No one has ever gone there and returned to tell the tale, at least none who could prove it.

There are always rumors about this place jumping from mouth to ear, people who know someone who went there and made it back, telling stories about a green Paradise of fertile land, or an endless graveyard, or a thousand different tall tales.

There are quite a few individuals recently that swear to have heard violent explosions and seen huge smoke columns beyond the Last Wastes. But once again, who would believe any such story told about this place?

Upon the ruins of an old airport exists one of the weirdest settlements you can find in this area: Boner. The place has been turned into a racing track of… anything.

Here racing bets are everyday’s shit and everyone is always competing on seeing who’s got the bigger one. From Wasteland beast riders to addler chariots, everything is worth a bet. The only rule is to complete the agreed laps around the circuit and get back to the start/finish line alive, no matter what the fuck you do during the race as everything is allowed.

This settlement is ruled by the Hucksters, the most powerful group of merchants in the area, said by some to be descendants of Junkers who wanted to run their own businesses. They rule the place with sharp razors, which they will use to slice your scrotum open and use it as a spare change pouch if you try to outsmart them. They don’t give a fuck about your skin color, your size or your shape, only about the size of your money bag or the amount of merchandise you want to trade with; here you will find everything on sale, from a platepanty to a sexaddler for your darkest nights of desire. The marketplace is surrounded by shacks and containers known as the Stables, where the animals and wheels for the races are kept and prepared. Boner is called like that for the shape of the settlement watched from a distance. You know, an oval, a cucumber… Gosh, fuck it, ¡a stiff dick! That’s why almost everyone call this racing track “Dickus Maximus”.

The remains of Luckyland are undoubtedly one of the weirdest places in this corner of the World. This is an old fairground divided into four quadrants with different themes: Caribbean Corsairs, Samurai Showdown, Western World and Medieval Mayhem, all of them around a central zone consecrated to the coolest things of the late 20th century: Retro Revival.

In spite of the time since this place was running, many of its structures still stand tall. This is due to the fact that many of the cutting edge human-looking animatronics (and others with more unsettling appearances, such as the Virgin Gamer and Hot Cosplayer mascots), were not only in charge of the different shows offered, but also had to keep maintenance routines that are still active.

But their lines of code seem to be corrupted somehow, as any visitor is automatically seen as an intruder to be hunted down. This place is truly a state-of-the-art wonder worthy of visiting, although doing so will turn you into a shooting gallery target, quite literally.

Homeblock, better known as the Shifting Village, despite its small size, is one of the most curious settlements you can find. The whole thing was built on (in fact, with) the remains of an old theme park from a bygone era.

It seems that the first settlers realised the usefulness of the countless coloured plastic pieces (originally conceived as a children’s building game) as a raw material to build the structures necessary to ensure their survival in the Páramo. They had found a durable and resistant material, which they could fit together and dismantle just as easily and without the need for tools.

So, armed only with remarkable patience, they set about dismantling all the monumental representations, sculptures and other assorted nonsense of the monguers of yesteryear and using the pieces to erect tall, multicoloured walls.
Several generations later, its current inhabitants are busy, under the shelter of its imposing defences, constructing buildings of different shapes and sizes, dismantling others in order to do so. All this in a relentless urban planning race orchestrated by its erratic ruling council.

Homeblock, better known as the Shifting Village, despite its small size, is one of the most curious settlements you can find. The whole thing was built on (in fact, with) the remains of an old theme park from a bygone era.

It seems that the first settlers realised the usefulness of the countless coloured plastic pieces (originally conceived as a children’s building game) as a raw material to build the structures necessary to ensure their survival in the Páramo. They had found a durable and resistant material, which they could fit together and dismantle just as easily and without the need for tools.

So, armed only with remarkable patience, they set about dismantling all the monumental representations, sculptures and other assorted nonsense of the monguers of yesteryear and using the pieces to erect tall, multicoloured walls.
Several generations later, its current inhabitants are busy, under the shelter of its imposing defences, constructing buildings of different shapes and sizes, dismantling others in order to do so. All this in a relentless urban planning race orchestrated by its erratic ruling council.

Shielding themselves against extreme poverty and the ongoing street riots caused by the revolting population, the great fortunes and governing elites from South America’s Atlantic coast built an idyllic city fit for their expensive tastes. For their part the downtrodden, whose ranks numbered several millions, seeked refuge in the dense jungles and set up a number of insurgent networks to harass their traitorous former rulers

This area of the world is one of the very few that still has ample green zones ripe with lush rainforests and jungles, which not only have survived but also thrived in a hostile environment where Mother Nature should have been vanished long ago.

This fact is seen by many of the guerrilla leaders as a signal from Gaia, the Mother, and several religious cults on Her name have popped up here and there, forming a weird mix of paramilitary movement and religious sect unique all around the world. The commander-santeros of the Río Brasilia surrounding area have sworn to tear the megacity’s walls down and annihilate all its inhabitants; judging by their numbers, determination and zealousness, these freedom fighters are the ones with more chances to make it, in an unparalleled fight that has been passed down for generations.

At the southernmost reaches of South America exists the last city of the American continent, financed by the riches of Argentina, Uruguay and Chile. Paradise for philosophers, writers and orators, their governing elites are by far the most erudite, learned and cultivated out of the entire world’s megalopoli (its Spanish name means “City of Silver”).

That didn’t prevent them to enforce the old saying “Everything for the people, but without the people” with an iron hand and taken to its most radical conclusion: inside this enlightened utopia seeked refuge the last Literature and Peace Nobel Prizes, winners of the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society, honorary members of the Panamerican “La Otra Orilla” awards, runner-ups and winners of the Interamerican Journal of Psychology medals, and all kinds of internationally renowned scholars in their fields of humanities and social studies. The rest were judged unworthy and the city gates were closed in their faces without a second thought.

Ciudad de Plata might be one of the most unusual megalopoli, in the sense that within its boundaries it keeps huge libraries and knowledge vaults filled with countless terabytes of information about the World of Before, including lost works of art, incunabula, books written in hundreds of dead languages, full encyclopedias and all sorts of socio-political essays previous to the Great Devastation.

The dormant Afrikaner minority in South Africa played its hand brilliantly during the gruesome events that led to the world collapse at the end of the 21st century. Making their move with cunning, finesse and the right amount of brute force, they managed to achieve enough power to create a megalopolis on the southern reaches of the African continent for their white peers, with the founding of some European countries (mainly current United England).

This city is one of the smallest megalopolis in the world, but for the country’s white minority was more than enough. Outside its walls remained all the black inhabitants, who were the great forgotten of the end of the world together with the rest of the black Africa.

The main global players still had a colonial view about this continent, so they encouraged internal quarrels, civil wars and clashes to such extent that no viable project was ever made to create an African megacity apart from Boereland, with the idea of exploiting the huge natural resources of the continent for their own benefit after the native population had been decimated by the bombs or had killed each other. Inside this megalopolis exists a really violent terrorist cell, formed by white people who radically oppose to this new era of Apartheid and wish to open the city to all races, and which is creating serious public disorders and giving their rulers many headaches.

A city that shouldn’t have existed, but thanks to putting wads over wads of petrodollars and narcodollars on the table became a reality.

Texas oil tycoons wanted to build their own Paradise on the south coast of the country, but those damn bureaucrats from Washington kept inventing all types of legal obstacles to undermine the project (it was basically out of pure fear of losing their supremacy in the new world order, as the least competition they had at their own home, the better).

When Liberty City turned Cuba and Venezuela into radioactive wastes even before the megalopolis was finished, the great fortunes of the Gulf of Mexico started desperately to look for ways of seeing their project through without their northern neighbors’ green light. Help came from a morally despicable and not much appealing place, but the sheer amount of money contributed to the project helped a lot to ease any prejudice: billions of dollars from the drug cartels of Central and South America.

Between both groups of power raised Nuevo Álamo/New Álamo (both names are legally accepted out of mutual respect) from scratch, a divided city from the very moment of its creation: for now both groups accept each other and live together more or less correctly, flashing their money, class and education, but down in the bottom there exists a hive of rivalry, cultural barriers and prejudices that sooner or later will set it all on fire.

On the west coast of the former United States a megalopolis was created much in a natural way. For many years San Francisco, Los Ángeles and Santa Mónica had grown in size and population until they became a single urban area to almost all intent. Clearly Latin in population, this city always felt closer to the Latin American ones, especially to its close neighbor Nuevo Álamo, than for the far and demanding Liberty City.

The hideous ravages caused by street gangs in the old three cities were almost entirely eradicated in the new megalopolis, as its rulers made a huge sweep of all undesirable elements before sealing the city gates.

But due to that forced eviction, the Wasteland around this city and the south-west area of North America has became one of the most dangerous and lethal places in all the world, as the scum who survived the purge and its adaptation to the hard, barren lands of the Wasteland is the worst of the worst out of an already nasty selection of individuals.

This megalopolis was planned for the wealthiest people in the east coast of the former United States, raised over the ruins of old New York.

It hasn’t hesitated to use its military might against other megalopoli when it saw it fit, annihilating the neighboring countries of Cuba and Venezuela even during its own construction, as it saw them as potential threats to its future safety. Now both Caribbean zones are vast radioactive badlands due to the amount of nuclear bombs launched on them.

This megalopolis was the first one to reach the technological peak dreamed by its rulers, which in the long term led to severe problems of laziness, indolence and weariness among its population, which didn’t find any motivation or pleasure whatsoever in its mere existence inside that high-tech paradise.

Ambrosia, a synthetic drug which greatly increases the sensory and perceptive capacities of its users, is becoming a trend among the most decadent elites. The side effects caused by its continued use and abuse are giving the authorities some serious headaches, that have been forced to set up some kind of “asylum-jail-quarter” in the old isle of Manhattan to seclude those worse affected by the drug, in an attempt to put a stop to this modern plague.

The Canadian megalopolis was a “rara avis” among the world Megalopolis. Setting itself apart from the global planning for their creation, its rulers even let those poor middle-class bastards inside the city and offered them something similar to welfare inside its walls.

It was less populated than the standard among the megacities, and it even put in motion several sustainable development plans to be completely green and ecological.

Its only mistake was to be built far too near to Liberty City, which erased it from the face of the world with two devastating thermonuclear attacks before its communist hippious utopia spread to any other city.

The European Union was going to build a single Megalopolis for all its member countries, called Eurocity, but that project sank even before it could start to be discussed. Warring among several factions, the European Union nations started on their own to seek the way to build their national megacities. Down around the Mediterranean basin a coalition was formed between Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece to create a great vacation city full of theme parks, funfairs, restaurants, casinos and whoring.

It was projected on the shores of Spain’s Eastern coast, partially financed with money coming from German, Swiss and French investment funds, as these countries manifested their will to support this plan as funding partners.

But this groundbreaking idea died when news came to light that the foreign investment was mainly made up of high-risk hedge funds sold in turn to vulture funds, which left a huge black hole in its finances. Local developers disappeared in thin air with the rest of the money still available, giving the coup d’grace to Mediterránea and leaving behind them only the terrains where the city was going to be full of rusted machinery and flooded pits.

France wanted to build its own city of light taking its old capital city as the initial core. It will be a lighthouse of knowledge, art and innovation, set apart from the savage ways of the rest of the barbarian European countries and living up to the savoir faire and greatness of the French people.

This project was brought to a successful conclusion thanks to the good relationship with their allied and neighboring country, Belgium, where the EU seat of power was firmly established.

But what both countries did not take into account was the pan-Germanic factor. The city founded by the Germanic orbit, Freiheitfestung, didn’t tolerate for much long the arrogance and glee of their unbearable neighbours, and thus launched a relentless attack with neutron bombs that annihilated the entire population of Noveau Lumière without damaging its buildings and infrastructures. The German Kaiser hated those baguette-eating frenchies with all his guts, but he also acknowledged that their city was a technological marvel and a real pleasure for anyone’s senses, so he chose to use N-bombs (which have a mortality rate close to 100%, but which thermal pulse leaves structures almost undamaged) to use the deserted city as his personal place of retreat when taking some days off.

Religions still played a main role even at the end of the 21st century, in spite of all the scientific and technological advances made by humanity for the good of the entire planet.

One of the main religions, Catholicism, amassed such an amount of wealth that its Pope and Cardinal ranks had no remorse at all in putting them out of danger when the known world went to hell with a nuclear mushroom cloud.

Locked inside a network of underground bunkers, built and secured under Saint Peter’s dome with the best technology gold-plated relics could pay for, the Pope, Cardinals and senior officials of the old Vatican Court still broadcast their self-righteous babble through every available communication channel.

Their cult has degenerated into pure idolatry, in which they prefer to worship the physical remnants and relics of their deceased Popes or the mummies of the most outstanding Cardinals who protected them from the Apocalypse, than rising their prayers to the God above who has obviously abandoned them.

The pan-Germanic countries and satellites always wanted Eurocity to be in their territory, under their rules and with their conditions. That was indeed one of the greatest obstacles faced by the original project, forcing the rest of European countries to close ranks against this imposition by Germany and its allies, until everything blew up for good.

All the central and Eastern regions of Europe, from Holland to Poland, the territories of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Hungary, part of the former Yugoslavia and Romania, pledged themselves to the Germanic project and joined it as cooperation partners to create Freiheitfestung, the Fortress of Freedom, where the self-proclaimed German Kaiser planned to rule with an iron hand. Warlike, expansionist and authoritarian to the bone, this megalopolis laid waste to the nearby Noveau Lumière simply because it could, preserving the French buildings intact so the Germanic ruling elites could use it as their summer resort.

Its closest neighbours usually treat this megacity at least with suspicion, if not open fear, due to its overwhelming heavy industry and its economy based almost entirely in military development, although for now Thule and United England prefer to keep their distance from the Germanic sphere of influence.

Putingorod is the only city that does not cower before the pan-Germanic war machine and is developing a similar arms race. The Slavic leaders are convinced that Freiheitfestung’s next move will be an expansion towards the east, and they are decided to face up to it whatever the cost.

United Kingdom not wanting to take part in the Eurocity project was a fact from the very first minute. The British Isles had never really felt part of the continent, and they always had had their eyes and hopes put on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, on the United States. Uncle Sam’s money flooded in and the House of Lords shielded the entire main island from the outside world.

A wall was raised hundreds of meters high all around the English coast, guarded by drones, automated weapons, sea mines and coastguard ships, leaving inside this fortress a funny megalopolis that combines great population centers crowded with skyscrapers and financial nexus, with wide parks formed by the old and bucolic English countryside, which still holds its picturesque manors, forests, streams and even medieval castles.

The old island of Ireland came to a refugee place of shorts, where most of those judged “undesirable” for mutual cohabitation were expelled on the last minute so those who survived here have developed a deep hate against United England. The internal “quarrels” among the North American cities have supposed a slight setback for the megacity’s economy, as its transatlantic investments have been severely reduced, but United England is still firm in its intention of remaining outside the European continent’s affairs.

The Scandinavian countries didn’t want to have anything to do with their rude southern neighbours neither, so they closed ranks and created their own idyllic Eden on the northern reaches of Europe.

This megalopolis was the refuge of the most outstanding scientists, the most groundbreaking researchers and the most renowned geniuses not only from the three original Scandinavian countries, but also from their closest neighbours and allies such as Denmark, the Baltic republics or even Iceland. In this knowledge and technology paradise have recently revived the old pagan cults to the Norse pantheon, creating a really bizarre mixture of scientific progress with ancestral costumes.

Generally speaking this is a really peaceful, stable and civilized megalopolis, with extensive educational programs for all its citizens and first class full health coverage, which remains isolated from the daily affairs of the southern megacities.

The Russian megalopolis rises on the remnants of the old city of Kiev, where Vladimir Putin’s mummy rests under a huge statue depicting the Russian leader riding a bear with no shirt on.

Wanting to expand its boundaries westwards to put pressure and fear into decadent Europe, Putin consecrated the last years of his rulership to invade again almost all the countries which had been part of the Soviet Union in the past and restore part of the former imperial glory. He moved his capital to Kiev, jewel of the crown of his conquests and one of the most enjoyable for him, leaving Moscow to become a dangerous ruined city infested by mutant monstrosities in which the few survivors seek shelter in the old underground stations.

The current political European status-quo, in which Freiheitfestung rules as the leading metropolis without any opposition, is making the Neo-Politburo members and the Party leaders really nervous. Putingorod is arming itself to the teeth, putting all his industrial might to full production thanks to its huge population almost unparalleled in the rest of the world’s megacities, and investing nearly all its economic, industrial and logistic resources in the shadowy Red One project.

What was intended to be one of the brightest jewels of Orient, heiress to the ancient and splendorous Alexandria, lighthouse of knowledge and science, soon was overwhelmed by reality. The almost simultaneous development of the nearby megalopolis of Jerusalem was really upsetting for the local, and when refugees coming from that place started to flood the plains outside its walls, it only got worse.

Of course the leaders of the Egyptian megacity didn’t allowed that rabble of desperate pariah to come inside the walls, which granted them an unusual level of inside criticism for their lack of Islamic charity towards fellow Muslims. The only way out the had to retain their power was to channel all that rage against their eternal enemies, the Jews from Jerusalem, setting them on an arms race that took them all to a bitter end. You can’t really say any of the megalopoli really won the conflict, but both ended up so damaged and ravaged that they were defenceless against the radioactive Wasteland and its inhabitants.

With their walls cracked, most of their automatic weapons destroyed or failing due to lack of maintenance, entire quarters exposed to toxic hazards by the collapse of their climatic shields, the population who managed to survive the short and brutal war was utterly helpless. The imams lost all their leverage and Luxor sunk into chaos. Now its ruins are inhabited by mutards, gangers and fierce mutant beasts, open to the desert except some small quarters where their residents have managed to put up a fight, restore the old shields and keep chaos at bay (for now, at least).

Promised land never seemed so close to the Jew people than when the Jerusalem megalopolis was funded. Contrary to what was done almost everywhere else, in this city nobody was cast off: anyone who could prove Hebrew ascendancy up to certain generation was received with open arms to be able to enjoy his earthly paradise.

But millennia-old grudges with their neighbours were not going to disappear overnight, so the nearby Arab city of Luxor became a melting pot of refugees, political rabble-rousers and those supporting the idea of wiping Jerusalem off the face of earth. It is not known who pressed the red button first, but not many years had passed (the megalopoli were not even fully finished or operative when the war begun) when nuclear warheads and tactical drone bombers began to fly forth and back between them.

The predictable outcome was that all the area is now a radioactive wasteland inhabited by all kind of gruesome mutations and degenerated humans, including the ruins of this very megacity, which have been laid open and exposed to the outside world since its citizens, who preferred to push their luck in the Wasteland rather than staying there, fled in panic. Toxic clouds and acid rain devastated all territories east of this city, erasing all traces of human life on the old basins of rivers Tigris and Euphrates, cradle and coffin of modern civilization, and even farther east to ancient Persia.

On the ruins of ancient Mecca, holy place of pilgrimage for one of the main religions prior to the Great Conflict, sheiks from Arab Emirates, Qatar, Arabia and other nations rich in oil reserves founded their own earthly Paradise (in fact, that is the meaning of its name in the old desert language).

A true oasis of white roofs, mosques and open-air markets, paid for with the petrodollars of millennia-old dynasties from Middle East and ruled by the sharia or Islamic law, where the most grotesque ostentation of wealth lives together with ancient traditions and technological achievements (specially on the fields of medicine and robotics) that would make many other megalopolis feel ashamed.

Curiously enough for a city raised on the money wads of oil tycoons, Imâra has clearly committed itself to renewable and green energies to fuel its day to day life, mainly solar and wind powers due to its privileged location in a desert. The old oil wells and refineries have fallen into the hands of errand bandits, gangers, mutards or worse things, who have converted them in their lairs and, in some isolated cases, man the wells to recreate a sad parody of the 20th century world they remember through legends and poems.

The history of Poltohar Abad and New Kolata is quite similar to that of Jerusalem and Luxor. Two neighboring countries with such a deep mutual hate, rooted in religious and racial issues, cannot let go their differences overnight.

This city set in the high mountains of Pakistan, which wanted to recover the glory of the old empires when the Silk Road made the civilizations of Kurdistan and Hindukush blossom, was projected as a bunker with several levels under the tons of rocks of the local mountain ranges. On the surface were barely visible the roofs of temples, universities and trade centers to cover the decadent needs of the higher-castes quom elites, who had a luxurious living served by slaves bound to obey all their whims.

But not even all the magnificence of the Pamir rocky mass could withstand the devastating rain of radiation and death unleashed by their neighbor and nuclear power, India, although their leaders had time enough to order a retaliation counterattack to wipe their sworn hindi enemies off the face of earth. Crushing earthquakes changed forever the face of these mountains, burying whole sections of this megalopoli, leaving others exposed to the radioactive winter and vanishing everything on the surface. It is possible that some people could have survived inside the maze-like underground tunnels of Poltohar Abad, but isolated from the outside world, with their glorious city destroyed and prey to mutant beasts and their own escaped former slaves, their lives would have been forced to a brutal regression to an almost savage state.

Duiyas from India, who formed the three social upper castes (priests, warriors and traders), allied themselves from the very beginning to leave the rest of the population out of their megalomaniac plans to create a Megalopolis in the Indian subcontinent. At the end there were chosen ones even among them, as a big portion of traders (vaisias) were left out of the city walls in favor of a greater proportion of priests (brahmans) and soldiers (chatrias).

In a country with one of the greatest population densities in the entire world, that was the same as issuing a death sentence for more than 1.500 million of people from the lower social classes (workers, serfs and invisibles) outside the great walls of New Kolata, but none of the duiya leaders gave a damn when it came to seal the walls and activate the defenses. But the inhabitants of this peaceful haven, ruled by the strict teachings of Hinduism, were ill advised by the warlike chatrias who wanted to wipe out of the mountains the city of their eternal Pakistani enemies, whom they have always seen as a potential threat to their sovereignty.Their surprise attack with nuclear warheads could not completely destroy Poltohar Abad on the first strike, giving their enemies time enough to launch a revenge attack with all the missiles created in their extensive nuclear programs.

All the Indian subcontinent, the Himalaya and Tibet mountain ranges, all the rocky areas of the Hindukush, the plains of old Afghanistan… everyplace and everything was so saturated with radiation due to this relentless exchange of attacks that no living being was able to survive. Animals mutated in horrible ways and humans… well, for thousands of millions who were exposed to the agony of being trapped in such a lethal Wasteland, a quick death was a blessing.

At the end of the 21st century Beijin itself already had the size of a metropolis. But in the eyes of the Central Committee there were too many people.

Adept in repression and mass control techniques since times old, they didn’t think twice before using its full military power to purge of undesirable elements the germ of what would become the glorious megacity of Beijin. Those cast out fled to the vast Chinese rural areas, where they tried to survive the world holocaust the best they could.While the party leaders, their relatives, bootlickers, yes-men and other Committee bureaucrats enjoyed their new “communist” utopia safely behind their megacity’s fortified walls, the great masses of population scattered across mountains, rice fields and jungles, dying due to hunger, illness or attacks of the mutant beasts created by the war.

Although it is true that this region of Asia has not been much ravaged by radiation and it is one of the few in the world that still has great jungle and rainforest areas, without a central government or a mutual plan hundreds of millions of people abandoned to their own fate have been decimated and scattered in small isolated groups of survivors, who have reverted to a subsistence economy and a stone-age way of life.

In Nanking the political leaders decided to try a new approach when building their Megalopolis. They reached out to their southern neighbors in Hong Kong, offering them a place among the chosen ones to live in the reborn fourth historical Chinese capital city in exchange of funding and technological cooperation in the project.

The deal was made and they built one of the leading megacities in the fields of electronics, computers and communication, strengthened with the Chinese military expertise and defended by the most advanced war machines humanity could build. Then the Nanking Chinese leaders kicked out their Hong Kong peers, sending them back to their island and slaughtering them by the thousands. Once the betrayal was completed, the Chinese rulers sealed the gates with a loud laughter and began to enjoy the technological Paradise at their disposal.

The fact that this city is settled in a vast region almost completely free of radiation has encouraged the formation of wide agricultural and livestock farming areas, which have become very popular among the population as a meaning of “tuning back” with their ancestors. It would seem that this modernity-tradition dichotomy has always been present in the Chinese way of life, but nowhere is it as clear as it is in Nanking when you watch the lift-off sequence of a hi-tech communications geo-satellite from a platform rising above a huge rice field being ploughed by a yoke of oxen.

Nippon was the original name for the megalopolis in the Rising Sun Island, which in fact occupied the whole main isle of Honshu, right in the middle of the 7.000 islands archipelago that formed the 20th century Japan. A huge wall was raised all around the coast of Honshu and the inside land became a whole metropolitan area combining high-technology population centers with countryside regions full of snow-covered peaks, wooden castles and wild animals.

But the problems they had with mutations got out of their hands, maybe because of the gruesome nuclear war unleashed by both Koreas on the other side of the Japan Sea, which led them to mutual destruction and created an immense radioactive cloud all over the region. Being already a dangerous place due to its location over a main fault line, Nippon received its coup de grace when its own nuclear reactors began to fail. Local flora and fauna started to mute into colossal monstrosities (kaijus) which spread terror and chaos all across the island, or even emerged from the sea depths to storm the megacity’s armored walls.

The idle Japanese people, more concerned about their leisure time in the form of virtual reality videogames, diverse sexual perversions and holo-television epilepsy-causing animated series, could not face up to such an extensive threat.

The government had to resort to plan B and build a huge underground bunker under the old city of Tokyo to foster those survivors who managed to get there from any corner of the isle. The surface of Honshu Island is now completely devastated and is the hunting grounds of all kinds of mutant monstrosities weirder than you can probably imagine. A new caste of warriors, the Neo Ronin, have taken back the ancestral martial traditions of sacrifice, duty and honor, getting out of the subterranean bunker to run suicide hunts of this unholy beings across the surface. Although it is not quite clear that their sacrifice means anything, this handful of honorable men and women are beginning to awake the blunt consciousness of the decadent Japanese society, which is starting to see them as true heroes sent by the Gods.

In the sparsely populated Australia it wasn’t necessary to build more than a small sized megalopolis, as it happened with Boereland. The wealthy and powerful elites in the south Pacific region sought shelter behind its walls and just kept going with their flashy lives as usual, indulging themselves in such mundane pleasures as running organized hunting events across the Australian deserts from high-tech airships. Seeing the great austral island as their own private game preserve or personal zoo full of funny primitive life forms, these decadent yuppies were happy to stay away of the rest of the world and keep going with their routines.

The Australian Wasteland became a lawless zone subject to the whims of these great hunters arrived from the sky, who could track a single prey for days across the reddish sands or wipe out an entire settlement in one night out of pure boredom. But some time ago radio signals stopped being broadcasted from Austral City. All communications between it and its sister megalopoli felt silent overnight, and given the time lapse passed since then it doesn’t seem probable it was caused by a temporary failure or an accident.

If this complete isolation is a deliberate act planned by the megacity’s rulers, or something has gone wrong and the city no longer exists, is something yet to be revealed: its remoteness and the real lack of interest among the rest of megalopolis to know what has really happened to the citizens of Austral City, have sunk it in utter mystery and oblivion.

Shielding themselves against extreme poverty and the ongoing street riots caused by the revolting population, the great fortunes and governing elites from South America’s Atlantic coast built an idyllic city fit for their expensive tastes. For their part the downtrodden, whose ranks numbered several millions, seeked refuge in the dense jungles and set up a number of insurgent networks to harass their traitorous former rulers

This area of the world is one of the very few that still has ample green zones ripe with lush rainforests and jungles, which not only have survived but also thrived in a hostile environment where Mother Nature should have been vanished long ago.

This fact is seen by many of the guerrilla leaders as a signal from Gaia, the Mother, and several religious cults on Her name have popped up here and there, forming a weird mix of paramilitary movement and religious sect unique all around the world. The commander-santeros of the Río Brasilia surrounding area have sworn to tear the megacity’s walls down and annihilate all its inhabitants; judging by their numbers, determination and zealousness, these freedom fighters are the ones with more chances to make it, in an unparalleled fight that has been passed down for generations.

At the southernmost reaches of South America exists the last city of the American continent, financed by the riches of Argentina, Uruguay and Chile. Paradise for philosophers, writers and orators, their governing elites are by far the most erudite, learned and cultivated out of the entire world’s megalopoli (its Spanish name means “City of Silver”).

That didn’t prevent them to enforce the old saying “Everything for the people, but without the people” with an iron hand and taken to its most radical conclusion: inside this enlightened utopia seeked refuge the last Literature and Peace Nobel Prizes, winners of the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society, honorary members of the Panamerican “La Otra Orilla” awards, runner-ups and winners of the Interamerican Journal of Psychology medals, and all kinds of internationally renowned scholars in their fields of humanities and social studies. The rest were judged unworthy and the city gates were closed in their faces without a second thought.

Ciudad de Plata might be one of the most unusual megalopoli, in the sense that within its boundaries it keeps huge libraries and knowledge vaults filled with countless terabytes of information about the World of Before, including lost works of art, incunabula, books written in hundreds of dead languages, full encyclopedias and all sorts of socio-political essays previous to the Great Devastation.

The dormant Afrikaner minority in South Africa played its hand brilliantly during the gruesome events that led to the world collapse at the end of the 21st century. Making their move with cunning, finesse and the right amount of brute force, they managed to achieve enough power to create a megalopolis on the southern reaches of the African continent for their white peers, with the founding of some European countries (mainly current United England).

This city is one of the smallest megalopolis in the world, but for the country’s white minority was more than enough. Outside its walls remained all the black inhabitants, who were the great forgotten of the end of the world together with the rest of the black Africa.

The main global players still had a colonial view about this continent, so they encouraged internal quarrels, civil wars and clashes to such extent that no viable project was ever made to create an African megacity apart from Boereland, with the idea of exploiting the huge natural resources of the continent for their own benefit after the native population had been decimated by the bombs or had killed each other. Inside this megalopolis exists a really violent terrorist cell, formed by white people who radically oppose to this new era of Apartheid and wish to open the city to all races, and which is creating serious public disorders and giving their rulers many headaches.

A city that shouldn’t have existed, but thanks to putting wads over wads of petrodollars and narcodollars on the table became a reality.

Texas oil tycoons wanted to build their own Paradise on the south coast of the country, but those damn bureaucrats from Washington kept inventing all types of legal obstacles to undermine the project (it was basically out of pure fear of losing their supremacy in the new world order, as the least competition they had at their own home, the better).

When Liberty City turned Cuba and Venezuela into radioactive wastes even before the megalopolis was finished, the great fortunes of the Gulf of Mexico started desperately to look for ways of seeing their project through without their northern neighbors’ green light. Help came from a morally despicable and not much appealing place, but the sheer amount of money contributed to the project helped a lot to ease any prejudice: billions of dollars from the drug cartels of Central and South America.

Between both groups of power raised Nuevo Álamo/New Álamo (both names are legally accepted out of mutual respect) from scratch, a divided city from the very moment of its creation: for now both groups accept each other and live together more or less correctly, flashing their money, class and education, but down in the bottom there exists a hive of rivalry, cultural barriers and prejudices that sooner or later will set it all on fire.

On the west coast of the former United States a megalopolis was created much in a natural way. For many years San Francisco, Los Ángeles and Santa Mónica had grown in size and population until they became a single urban area to almost all intent. Clearly Latin in population, this city always felt closer to the Latin American ones, especially to its close neighbor Nuevo Álamo, than for the far and demanding Liberty City.

The hideous ravages caused by street gangs in the old three cities were almost entirely eradicated in the new megalopolis, as its rulers made a huge sweep of all undesirable elements before sealing the city gates.

But due to that forced eviction, the Wasteland around this city and the south-west area of North America has became one of the most dangerous and lethal places in all the world, as the scum who survived the purge and its adaptation to the hard, barren lands of the Wasteland is the worst of the worst out of an already nasty selection of individuals.

This megalopolis was planned for the wealthiest people in the east coast of the former United States, raised over the ruins of old New York.

It hasn’t hesitated to use its military might against other megalopoli when it saw it fit, annihilating the neighboring countries of Cuba and Venezuela even during its own construction, as it saw them as potential threats to its future safety. Now both Caribbean zones are vast radioactive badlands due to the amount of nuclear bombs launched on them.

This megalopolis was the first one to reach the technological peak dreamed by its rulers, which in the long term led to severe problems of laziness, indolence and weariness among its population, which didn’t find any motivation or pleasure whatsoever in its mere existence inside that high-tech paradise.

Ambrosia, a synthetic drug which greatly increases the sensory and perceptive capacities of its users, is becoming a trend among the most decadent elites. The side effects caused by its continued use and abuse are giving the authorities some serious headaches, that have been forced to set up some kind of “asylum-jail-quarter” in the old isle of Manhattan to seclude those worse affected by the drug, in an attempt to put a stop to this modern plague.

The Canadian megalopolis was a “rara avis” among the world Megalopolis. Setting itself apart from the global planning for their creation, its rulers even let those poor middle-class bastards inside the city and offered them something similar to welfare inside its walls.

It was less populated than the standard among the megacities, and it even put in motion several sustainable development plans to be completely green and ecological.

Its only mistake was to be built far too near to Liberty City, which erased it from the face of the world with two devastating thermonuclear attacks before its communist hippious utopia spread to any other city.

The European Union was going to build a single Megalopolis for all its member countries, called Eurocity, but that project sank even before it could start to be discussed. Warring among several factions, the European Union nations started on their own to seek the way to build their national megacities. Down around the Mediterranean basin a coalition was formed between Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece to create a great vacation city full of theme parks, funfairs, restaurants, casinos and whoring.

It was projected on the shores of Spain’s Eastern coast, partially financed with money coming from German, Swiss and French investment funds, as these countries manifested their will to support this plan as funding partners.

But this groundbreaking idea died when news came to light that the foreign investment was mainly made up of high-risk hedge funds sold in turn to vulture funds, which left a huge black hole in its finances. Local developers disappeared in thin air with the rest of the money still available, giving the coup d’grace to Mediterránea and leaving behind them only the terrains where the city was going to be full of rusted machinery and flooded pits.

France wanted to build its own city of light taking its old capital city as the initial core. It will be a lighthouse of knowledge, art and innovation, set apart from the savage ways of the rest of the barbarian European countries and living up to the savoir faire and greatness of the French people.

This project was brought to a successful conclusion thanks to the good relationship with their allied and neighboring country, Belgium, where the EU seat of power was firmly established.

But what both countries did not take into account was the pan-Germanic factor. The city founded by the Germanic orbit, Freiheitfestung, didn’t tolerate for much long the arrogance and glee of their unbearable neighbours, and thus launched a relentless attack with neutron bombs that annihilated the entire population of Noveau Lumière without damaging its buildings and infrastructures. The German Kaiser hated those baguette-eating frenchies with all his guts, but he also acknowledged that their city was a technological marvel and a real pleasure for anyone’s senses, so he chose to use N-bombs (which have a mortality rate close to 100%, but which thermal pulse leaves structures almost undamaged) to use the deserted city as his personal place of retreat when taking some days off.

Religions still played a main role even at the end of the 21st century, in spite of all the scientific and technological advances made by humanity for the good of the entire planet.

One of the main religions, Catholicism, amassed such an amount of wealth that its Pope and Cardinal ranks had no remorse at all in putting them out of danger when the known world went to hell with a nuclear mushroom cloud.

Locked inside a network of underground bunkers, built and secured under Saint Peter’s dome with the best technology gold-plated relics could pay for, the Pope, Cardinals and senior officials of the old Vatican Court still broadcast their self-righteous babble through every available communication channel.

Their cult has degenerated into pure idolatry, in which they prefer to worship the physical remnants and relics of their deceased Popes or the mummies of the most outstanding Cardinals who protected them from the Apocalypse, than rising their prayers to the God above who has obviously abandoned them.

The pan-Germanic countries and satellites always wanted Eurocity to be in their territory, under their rules and with their conditions. That was indeed one of the greatest obstacles faced by the original project, forcing the rest of European countries to close ranks against this imposition by Germany and its allies, until everything blew up for good.

All the central and Eastern regions of Europe, from Holland to Poland, the territories of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Hungary, part of the former Yugoslavia and Romania, pledged themselves to the Germanic project and joined it as cooperation partners to create Freiheitfestung, the Fortress of Freedom, where the self-proclaimed German Kaiser planned to rule with an iron hand. Warlike, expansionist and authoritarian to the bone, this megalopolis laid waste to the nearby Noveau Lumière simply because it could, preserving the French buildings intact so the Germanic ruling elites could use it as their summer resort.

Its closest neighbours usually treat this megacity at least with suspicion, if not open fear, due to its overwhelming heavy industry and its economy based almost entirely in military development, although for now Thule and United England prefer to keep their distance from the Germanic sphere of influence.

Putingorod is the only city that does not cower before the pan-Germanic war machine and is developing a similar arms race. The Slavic leaders are convinced that Freiheitfestung’s next move will be an expansion towards the east, and they are decided to face up to it whatever the cost.

United Kingdom not wanting to take part in the Eurocity project was a fact from the very first minute. The British Isles had never really felt part of the continent, and they always had had their eyes and hopes put on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, on the United States. Uncle Sam’s money flooded in and the House of Lords shielded the entire main island from the outside world.

A wall was raised hundreds of meters high all around the English coast, guarded by drones, automated weapons, sea mines and coastguard ships, leaving inside this fortress a funny megalopolis that combines great population centers crowded with skyscrapers and financial nexus, with wide parks formed by the old and bucolic English countryside, which still holds its picturesque manors, forests, streams and even medieval castles.

The old island of Ireland came to a refugee place of shorts, where most of those judged “undesirable” for mutual cohabitation were expelled on the last minute so those who survived here have developed a deep hate against United England. The internal “quarrels” among the North American cities have supposed a slight setback for the megacity’s economy, as its transatlantic investments have been severely reduced, but United England is still firm in its intention of remaining outside the European continent’s affairs.

The Scandinavian countries didn’t want to have anything to do with their rude southern neighbours neither, so they closed ranks and created their own idyllic Eden on the northern reaches of Europe.

This megalopolis was the refuge of the most outstanding scientists, the most groundbreaking researchers and the most renowned geniuses not only from the three original Scandinavian countries, but also from their closest neighbours and allies such as Denmark, the Baltic republics or even Iceland. In this knowledge and technology paradise have recently revived the old pagan cults to the Norse pantheon, creating a really bizarre mixture of scientific progress with ancestral costumes.

Generally speaking this is a really peaceful, stable and civilized megalopolis, with extensive educational programs for all its citizens and first class full health coverage, which remains isolated from the daily affairs of the southern megacities.

The Russian megalopolis rises on the remnants of the old city of Kiev, where Vladimir Putin’s mummy rests under a huge statue depicting the Russian leader riding a bear with no shirt on.

Wanting to expand its boundaries westwards to put pressure and fear into decadent Europe, Putin consecrated the last years of his rulership to invade again almost all the countries which had been part of the Soviet Union in the past and restore part of the former imperial glory. He moved his capital to Kiev, jewel of the crown of his conquests and one of the most enjoyable for him, leaving Moscow to become a dangerous ruined city infested by mutant monstrosities in which the few survivors seek shelter in the old underground stations.

The current political European status-quo, in which Freiheitfestung rules as the leading metropolis without any opposition, is making the Neo-Politburo members and the Party leaders really nervous. Putingorod is arming itself to the teeth, putting all his industrial might to full production thanks to its huge population almost unparalleled in the rest of the world’s megacities, and investing nearly all its economic, industrial and logistic resources in the shadowy Red One project.

What was intended to be one of the brightest jewels of Orient, heiress to the ancient and splendorous Alexandria, lighthouse of knowledge and science, soon was overwhelmed by reality. The almost simultaneous development of the nearby megalopolis of Jerusalem was really upsetting for the local, and when refugees coming from that place started to flood the plains outside its walls, it only got worse.

Of course the leaders of the Egyptian megacity didn’t allowed that rabble of desperate pariah to come inside the walls, which granted them an unusual level of inside criticism for their lack of Islamic charity towards fellow Muslims. The only way out the had to retain their power was to channel all that rage against their eternal enemies, the Jews from Jerusalem, setting them on an arms race that took them all to a bitter end. You can’t really say any of the megalopoli really won the conflict, but both ended up so damaged and ravaged that they were defenceless against the radioactive Wasteland and its inhabitants.

With their walls cracked, most of their automatic weapons destroyed or failing due to lack of maintenance, entire quarters exposed to toxic hazards by the collapse of their climatic shields, the population who managed to survive the short and brutal war was utterly helpless. The imams lost all their leverage and Luxor sunk into chaos. Now its ruins are inhabited by mutards, gangers and fierce mutant beasts, open to the desert except some small quarters where their residents have managed to put up a fight, restore the old shields and keep chaos at bay (for now, at least).

Promised land never seemed so close to the Jew people than when the Jerusalem megalopolis was funded. Contrary to what was done almost everywhere else, in this city nobody was cast off: anyone who could prove Hebrew ascendancy up to certain generation was received with open arms to be able to enjoy his earthly paradise.

But millennia-old grudges with their neighbours were not going to disappear overnight, so the nearby Arab city of Luxor became a melting pot of refugees, political rabble-rousers and those supporting the idea of wiping Jerusalem off the face of earth. It is not known who pressed the red button first, but not many years had passed (the megalopoli were not even fully finished or operative when the war begun) when nuclear warheads and tactical drone bombers began to fly forth and back between them.

The predictable outcome was that all the area is now a radioactive wasteland inhabited by all kind of gruesome mutations and degenerated humans, including the ruins of this very megacity, which have been laid open and exposed to the outside world since its citizens, who preferred to push their luck in the Wasteland rather than staying there, fled in panic. Toxic clouds and acid rain devastated all territories east of this city, erasing all traces of human life on the old basins of rivers Tigris and Euphrates, cradle and coffin of modern civilization, and even farther east to ancient Persia.

On the ruins of ancient Mecca, holy place of pilgrimage for one of the main religions prior to the Great Conflict, sheiks from Arab Emirates, Qatar, Arabia and other nations rich in oil reserves founded their own earthly Paradise (in fact, that is the meaning of its name in the old desert language).

A true oasis of white roofs, mosques and open-air markets, paid for with the petrodollars of millennia-old dynasties from Middle East and ruled by the sharia or Islamic law, where the most grotesque ostentation of wealth lives together with ancient traditions and technological achievements (specially on the fields of medicine and robotics) that would make many other megalopolis feel ashamed.

Curiously enough for a city raised on the money wads of oil tycoons, Imâra has clearly committed itself to renewable and green energies to fuel its day to day life, mainly solar and wind powers due to its privileged location in a desert. The old oil wells and refineries have fallen into the hands of errand bandits, gangers, mutards or worse things, who have converted them in their lairs and, in some isolated cases, man the wells to recreate a sad parody of the 20th century world they remember through legends and poems.

The history of Poltohar Abad and New Kolata is quite similar to that of Jerusalem and Luxor. Two neighboring countries with such a deep mutual hate, rooted in religious and racial issues, cannot let go their differences overnight.

This city set in the high mountains of Pakistan, which wanted to recover the glory of the old empires when the Silk Road made the civilizations of Kurdistan and Hindukush blossom, was projected as a bunker with several levels under the tons of rocks of the local mountain ranges. On the surface were barely visible the roofs of temples, universities and trade centers to cover the decadent needs of the higher-castes quom elites, who had a luxurious living served by slaves bound to obey all their whims.

But not even all the magnificence of the Pamir rocky mass could withstand the devastating rain of radiation and death unleashed by their neighbor and nuclear power, India, although their leaders had time enough to order a retaliation counterattack to wipe their sworn hindi enemies off the face of earth. Crushing earthquakes changed forever the face of these mountains, burying whole sections of this megalopoli, leaving others exposed to the radioactive winter and vanishing everything on the surface. It is possible that some people could have survived inside the maze-like underground tunnels of Poltohar Abad, but isolated from the outside world, with their glorious city destroyed and prey to mutant beasts and their own escaped former slaves, their lives would have been forced to a brutal regression to an almost savage state.

Duiyas from India, who formed the three social upper castes (priests, warriors and traders), allied themselves from the very beginning to leave the rest of the population out of their megalomaniac plans to create a Megalopolis in the Indian subcontinent. At the end there were chosen ones even among them, as a big portion of traders (vaisias) were left out of the city walls in favor of a greater proportion of priests (brahmans) and soldiers (chatrias).

In a country with one of the greatest population densities in the entire world, that was the same as issuing a death sentence for more than 1.500 million of people from the lower social classes (workers, serfs and invisibles) outside the great walls of New Kolata, but none of the duiya leaders gave a damn when it came to seal the walls and activate the defenses. But the inhabitants of this peaceful haven, ruled by the strict teachings of Hinduism, were ill advised by the warlike chatrias who wanted to wipe out of the mountains the city of their eternal Pakistani enemies, whom they have always seen as a potential threat to their sovereignty.Their surprise attack with nuclear warheads could not completely destroy Poltohar Abad on the first strike, giving their enemies time enough to launch a revenge attack with all the missiles created in their extensive nuclear programs.

All the Indian subcontinent, the Himalaya and Tibet mountain ranges, all the rocky areas of the Hindukush, the plains of old Afghanistan… everyplace and everything was so saturated with radiation due to this relentless exchange of attacks that no living being was able to survive. Animals mutated in horrible ways and humans… well, for thousands of millions who were exposed to the agony of being trapped in such a lethal Wasteland, a quick death was a blessing.

At the end of the 21st century Beijin itself already had the size of a metropolis. But in the eyes of the Central Committee there were too many people.

Adept in repression and mass control techniques since times old, they didn’t think twice before using its full military power to purge of undesirable elements the germ of what would become the glorious megacity of Beijin. Those cast out fled to the vast Chinese rural areas, where they tried to survive the world holocaust the best they could.While the party leaders, their relatives, bootlickers, yes-men and other Committee bureaucrats enjoyed their new “communist” utopia safely behind their megacity’s fortified walls, the great masses of population scattered across mountains, rice fields and jungles, dying due to hunger, illness or attacks of the mutant beasts created by the war.

Although it is true that this region of Asia has not been much ravaged by radiation and it is one of the few in the world that still has great jungle and rainforest areas, without a central government or a mutual plan hundreds of millions of people abandoned to their own fate have been decimated and scattered in small isolated groups of survivors, who have reverted to a subsistence economy and a stone-age way of life.

In Nanking the political leaders decided to try a new approach when building their Megalopolis. They reached out to their southern neighbors in Hong Kong, offering them a place among the chosen ones to live in the reborn fourth historical Chinese capital city in exchange of funding and technological cooperation in the project.

The deal was made and they built one of the leading megacities in the fields of electronics, computers and communication, strengthened with the Chinese military expertise and defended by the most advanced war machines humanity could build. Then the Nanking Chinese leaders kicked out their Hong Kong peers, sending them back to their island and slaughtering them by the thousands. Once the betrayal was completed, the Chinese rulers sealed the gates with a loud laughter and began to enjoy the technological Paradise at their disposal.

The fact that this city is settled in a vast region almost completely free of radiation has encouraged the formation of wide agricultural and livestock farming areas, which have become very popular among the population as a meaning of “tuning back” with their ancestors. It would seem that this modernity-tradition dichotomy has always been present in the Chinese way of life, but nowhere is it as clear as it is in Nanking when you watch the lift-off sequence of a hi-tech communications geo-satellite from a platform rising above a huge rice field being ploughed by a yoke of oxen.

Nippon was the original name for the megalopolis in the Rising Sun Island, which in fact occupied the whole main isle of Honshu, right in the middle of the 7.000 islands archipelago that formed the 20th century Japan. A huge wall was raised all around the coast of Honshu and the inside land became a whole metropolitan area combining high-technology population centers with countryside regions full of snow-covered peaks, wooden castles and wild animals.

But the problems they had with mutations got out of their hands, maybe because of the gruesome nuclear war unleashed by both Koreas on the other side of the Japan Sea, which led them to mutual destruction and created an immense radioactive cloud all over the region. Being already a dangerous place due to its location over a main fault line, Nippon received its coup de grace when its own nuclear reactors began to fail. Local flora and fauna started to mute into colossal monstrosities (kaijus) which spread terror and chaos all across the island, or even emerged from the sea depths to storm the megacity’s armored walls.

The idle Japanese people, more concerned about their leisure time in the form of virtual reality videogames, diverse sexual perversions and holo-television epilepsy-causing animated series, could not face up to such an extensive threat.

The government had to resort to plan B and build a huge underground bunker under the old city of Tokyo to foster those survivors who managed to get there from any corner of the isle. The surface of Honshu Island is now completely devastated and is the hunting grounds of all kinds of mutant monstrosities weirder than you can probably imagine. A new caste of warriors, the Neo Ronin, have taken back the ancestral martial traditions of sacrifice, duty and honor, getting out of the subterranean bunker to run suicide hunts of this unholy beings across the surface. Although it is not quite clear that their sacrifice means anything, this handful of honorable men and women are beginning to awake the blunt consciousness of the decadent Japanese society, which is starting to see them as true heroes sent by the Gods.

In the sparsely populated Australia it wasn’t necessary to build more than a small sized megalopolis, as it happened with Boereland. The wealthy and powerful elites in the south Pacific region sought shelter behind its walls and just kept going with their flashy lives as usual, indulging themselves in such mundane pleasures as running organized hunting events across the Australian deserts from high-tech airships. Seeing the great austral island as their own private game preserve or personal zoo full of funny primitive life forms, these decadent yuppies were happy to stay away of the rest of the world and keep going with their routines.

The Australian Wasteland became a lawless zone subject to the whims of these great hunters arrived from the sky, who could track a single prey for days across the reddish sands or wipe out an entire settlement in one night out of pure boredom. But some time ago radio signals stopped being broadcasted from Austral City. All communications between it and its sister megalopoli felt silent overnight, and given the time lapse passed since then it doesn’t seem probable it was caused by a temporary failure or an accident.

If this complete isolation is a deliberate act planned by the megacity’s rulers, or something has gone wrong and the city no longer exists, is something yet to be revealed: its remoteness and the real lack of interest among the rest of megalopolis to know what has really happened to the citizens of Austral City, have sunk it in utter mystery and oblivion.