Atlantis-3
I've worked with ██████ for two years. He saved me from a Martian Heat Ray over on Wells-1, he's had my back and I've had his through a dozen different worlds now, but if he doesn't stop humming 'Under The Sea', I'm gonna kill him.
Ya we in luck here, Down in the muck here...
In the late 1970s, following multiple disasters (such as Skylab de-orbiting a few days after receiving its first crew, the destruction of the shuttle Enterprise during preliminary tests, and an unknown explosion destroying the Baikonur Cosmodrome), mankind turned away from the skies, and looked inwards, where, as one pundit noted, 'three worlds have been waiting to be truly dicovered' -- the oceans, covering three times as much of Earth's surface as the land, and, not entirely coincidentally, full of untapped resources. The best and most visionary scientists and engineers applied themselves to solving the problems of deep-sea exploration and exploitation on a previously unimagined scale, and over the next decades, the continental shelves began to sprout temporary habitats, growing larger and less temporary with each passing year. By the early 2020s, permanent settlements started to spring up, outside national boundaries, founded by various factions of ideaologues, some benign, some less so. These were in addition to the increasing number of private or nationally owned mining sites, hybrid surface/subsurface aquaculture platforms, and semi-clandestine military bases and listening posts.All of this was made possible by advances in bio-engineering, that took off on this world even as computer technology progressed much more slowly than it did on Baseline. Most important of these advances were symbiotic gills, actually a form of sponge that could be attached to the chest or back and which would grow into the skin, feeding oxygen and excreting waste gasses so long as it was submerged, and capable of surviving long periods out of water. Further developments included complex biological 'pumps' that helped rapidly equalize air pressure. This greatly reduced the risks of undersea living, as it had proven impossible to design a sub-sea shelter for every conceivable contingency, and once flooding started, the results were invariably catastrophic. Now, humans lived and worked in air-filled spaces, as they were far more convenient for many types of acivity, but could venture freely into the oceans beyond, and a breach between the internal and external enviroments was destructive, but not in itself fatal. (Well, other than exposure to whatever forces caused the breach, but accidental death at a certain level is just part of life, on any world.)
The years passed, and humans did what humans do, namely, each other. Soon a generation had come of age that had rarely or never set foot on land, their symbiotes attached a few weeks after birth. And they begat a second generation, and then a third, each new wave (pun intended) expanding the aquatic civilization further and deeper, forming bonds (and sometimes, battles) with other cities, growing more and more detached from whatever might be happening on the surface. There was constant communication, trade, and travel, the aquatics were not isolated or ignorant, but it was all something happening far away to someone else. Landbound nations seeking to control their wayward children relearned the same old lesson: A society which chose to leave the rule of a distant government and become independant could be destroyed by overwhelming force, but could not be conquered and ruled.
No Longer Part Of Their World
In the early 2100s, there came what has become known as "The Week of Screams And Fire". Communications from the land, or from surface ships and platforms, became garbled and incomprehensible, then sporadic, and from the shallower settlements, people could see the ocean's surface lit with painfully intense brilliance, hard to look at it even a hundred feet below. Whales and dolphins literally fell to the bottom, dead (a rare treat for many life forms used to such bounty occurring infrequently), while others could be seen swimming with hideous scars. When the light faded, after only few days, no communications came from the surface. Explorers who swam up to take a look around reported abandoned and destroyed cities, dessicated corpses, and painful lesions appearing on their skin within a few hours.
Precisely what happened is a subject of speculation. It didn't seem to be a nuclear war, and places with close military ties to the surface said they received no mobilization orders or alerts. The most likely explanation was a lengthy and new type of solar flare, or possibly the result of a distant, extremely powerful, supernova's light reaching Earth, but it remained theory. The impact on the oceanic world was severe, but not genocidal. Near-surface crops and aquaculture suffered heavy losses, which could be replaced by careful use of stockpiles, trade with less-impacted cities, or, of course, war and plunder, always a popular fallback position. Most of the sub-nations had long since moved beyond being mere suppliers of raw materials and had developed their own industrial chains; those which hadn't shifted to supplying those which had, an economic and political relationship that has never had any unfortunate consequences on any Earth, and life continued.
Poor, Unfortunate Souls
The breach point opened in an isolated corner of a city park, about 10 miles east of Natal, and 200 feet below. At first glance, it seemed like a typical location, with families strolling, young people making out, vendors selling food, the signs in readable Spanish, the evident technology looking about on-par with Baseline, familiar-seeming trees and an annoyed squirrel chittering. Then they saw the geodesic dome and the shadowy shapes swimming above it.Careful exploration (and a facility to pick up minor linguistic changes) let them explore without too much undue attention. The nature of the city was pieced together; contrary to common images, it consisted of hundreds of small domes linked by subsurface tunnels which could be easily sealed, with most industrial infrastructure underground. The city, in turn, linked to others by high-speed tube trains, and this pattern was repeated.
The "week of screams and fire" happened several years ago, and the consequences are mostly dealt with. As far as most people were concerned, this was the world, and if anyone was alive on the surface, there had been no contact attempts so far.
Technology was, to Baseline, odd. Genetic engineering was quite advanced, which seemed to be a fairly common trend in alternates, but other areas were much closer to, or even behind, Baseline. Computers are mostly central mainframes on par with late-1990s models, hooked up to omnipresent terminals with primarily text screens. Medical technology relies on biotech for most treatments, and it was easier to replace failing organs with quick-grown clones than to develop drugs to counter symptoms. Engineering has focused on strength and redundancy, for obvious reasons. Weapons have been modified for maximum efficiency in air-filled and aquatic environments.
The main impact of the apparent death of the surface world has been slowly-expanding gractures between regional alliances. Diplomacy and negotiation had been the primary means of settling disputes due to the implicit understanding that much larger surface nations would take sides in any open war, based on historical or still-active national ties, and it was preferable to avoid this. Now, it is sinking in (pun also intended) that any conflict will rely solely on the forces at hand, which changes the balance of power in many ways -- a smaller subsea nation backed by a larger surface one might have been the equal of a larger aquatic alliance with few or fragmentary land ties, but not any more.
In other words, Atlantis-3 is destined to be an active site for the Dimensional Cold War, especially since it's rich in sub-surface wealth (and might have a depopulated surface world ripe for plunder).
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