You live in New York City, one of the largest of the Megacities. Your family has lived in New York for centuries, since before the city was known as New York. Your family has watched it change from a mere harbour to one of the shining gems of the twentieth century world, has seen it devastated twice – once at the turn of the third millennium, and once just before the Lunar Reckoning. And yet it survives.

You reside in one of the most prestigious superstructures of the megacity, right in the middle of Manhattan, close to historical skyscrapers. Part of you wonders how such things could have ever been called ‘skyscrapers’, but you remember that people in the past didn’t have the advanced materials available today. Today, it is 7 AM when you are awoken by a shrill alarm from the control panel in your room, and you yawn as you slowly sit up and try to face the day. Sunlight filters through light tubes at the corners of your room, providing natural light in a shadowed level of the city.

At your level, you can look out to the transparent aluminum window and see the top of the Chrysler Building, one of the skyscrapers the RKVs preserved. It’s a pretty-looking building, you think, somehow more vibrant than the neosteel that surrounds you. But you remember your history classes again, remembering that such buildings were fraught with faults compared to modern, self-sufficient superstructures. Beautiful yet fragile, you think. Shadowed by the tips of much smaller buildings, it requires its own lighting to remain visible here.

In the kitchen, you cook eggs and bacon – the real stuff, from Harvest Earth, not the synthetic stuff most people eat. As you do, you check your tablet and look through the latest podcasts. You skip over your shows and movies, groan at the weekly Marina Aquamar scandal, and glance at a story about work on the Ibiza Mass Driver before your eyes stick to a story – ’459th Tactical Eliminated by Rogue Magus’.

It’s hard to believe, you think, that just one person can eliminate an entire squadron of APUs on their own. Should one person be allowed to have that much power? It’s hard to judge Mages, you think, as they’re all so mysterious. They’re a wildcard in a world with enough instability, and you doubt that any of them are truly heroic, even the ones in the Grand Magus Tour fights.

But those thoughts are quickly dismissed, as you have a job to get to – 100 levels up. As you leave your apartment, you pass by other residential structures and commercial structures, each with their own elevators separate from the main transit line. Luckily, you have a Personal Rapid Transit pass from your job, so you get to use a small elevator in relative comfort, and it’s rarely a long wait. Still, even when you have to use regular transit, either from levels to levels or superstructure to superstructure, you find it’s never a problem waiting.

As you go up, you look at the agricultural strips, vertical greenhouses across every superstructure. Light, power, water, and food are all self-sufficient, enough to house 100 million people. You remember your father’s tales of the Unsung War, of shortages, destruction, and then the fall of the RKVs…and you are safe in the knowledge that such chaos will never happen again.

When you arrive, you quickly head to Western Microprocessor’s main structure. You’re a quantum researcher looking for that breakthrough that will allow practical quantum computing. It’s taken so long, you think, with so little to show for it, and part of you thinks it’s probably impossible.

Still, humanity has accomplished so much, even after it all seemed like it was going to end. Surely they can come up with just one more advance.

…right?