Welcome to Megacorpolis

Welcome to the Megacorpolis!

The year is 2108 and most of the worlds remaining 5 billion or so remaining registered citizens (and quite a few unregistered slummers) live here. Smack in the middle of old Europe and built over the cities of the past, the Megacorpolis is a vast city of gleaming skyscrapers and forgotten slums. When nations fell, flooded or burned, the corporations of the world stepped in. The extinction of humanity was an unacceptable risk to the shareholder's next financial quarter and action was needed. They built the Megacorpolis - the first and greatest of all mega-cities.
The Megacorpolis is a city of the future, free from notions of nationality or patriotism. It is a city ruled by corporations, by profit margins and marketing campaigns, run by middle-managers and algorithms. All under the watchful surveillance of everyone's friend, The Computer. Come on into the greatest city the world will ever see.

by Johny Mnemonic (with slight alterations)

Mapping The Metropolis

The Megacorpolis is divided into 13 sprawling sectors, each one the size of a city. Corporations claim bits and pieces of sectors, but no one owns a whole sector - the last who tried found themselves in the cross-hairs of a rare cooperative venture from the rest. Sectors are mix of old earth cultures and corporate influence, merged into something new. Some wear the skins of these old relics proudly, as an old Wisconsinite farmer might. Others embody the sort of bland, generic cityscape that offends (and appeals) no one at all.

by Johny Mnemonic (with slight alterations)

---

The corporations have worked very hard to erase any idea that this whole "nation" thing is worthwhile, but they're more than happy make money off it. The sprawling mega-city is built right over the riot-ravaged capitals of the old world and have borrowed anything from them that can make some money.
Even the places outside the sprawl haven't been safe, with entire landmarks dislodged and lifted off to a better (i.e more profitable) home inside the Megacorpolis.

Corporate enclaves stand like castles in the sectors, ringed by office spaces and mercenary armies. Space is always at a premium so the city continues to build upwards, layering streets and highways upon itself. Anyone who's anyone takes great care to not end up at the bottom and forgotten when the next round of gentrification rolls around.

A Day In The City

The Megacorpolis is the kind of city who took a look at the tagline of "the city that never sleeps" and thought it'd do one better. Vast enough to span time-zones, Megacorpolis is a buzzing hive of activity at any time. It isn't a proper week in the city without an explosion and the locals have adapted in kind. With busy deadlines and credit payments that are due, there is no rest for the wicked. Most middle-managers think that the employees can sleep when they are dead; others find such laziness regrettable and look with great hope to the corporate laboratories that work to solve it.

---

Technology is everywhere in the megacity. From the robots and drones to genetic science made manifest, to augmented reality advertisement plastered across every available surface. Only the most wretched hive of scum and villainy is without wi-fi.
Having learned at least one lesson from the past centuries, the city gleams with solar panels to fuel its appetites. Nuclear power plant supplies the rest, with the waste recycled endlessly. With almost endless power at their disposal, the city has made a good attempt to use it all.

by Johny Mnemonic (with slight alterations)

Profit, productivity, marketing and advertisement are more fundamental building blocks of the city than steel, concrete or glass. Corporations own almost everything in the mega-city, including lives. People are born, raised, employed and buried all within a single corporation. Brand-loyalties lead to generational feuds and a lapse in production can spark Java addicts to riot. Ad agencies go to ever greater length to reach their audience and R&D departments fight tooth and nail to bring the next Hot Thing to the market.
The Megacorporations rule it all while your friend, The Computer, keeps the city running in accordance with the Algorithm.

by Johny Mnemonic (with slight alterations)

The People and "People"

The population of Megacorpolis broadly fall in two categories: citizens and non-citizens. Past that, things get a little more complicated.

Citizens

To be a citizen is to be born into the System, with a capital S. Chipped, employed and probably overworked, citizens enjoy all the luxuries and rights that the mega-city's corporate overlords see fit to provide. Employment is a coveted thing and the corporate loyalty displayed makes cults second-guess themselves.
Still, it's not all bad. There are thousands of ways enjoy life in Megacorpolis, at least one which was specifically engineered to put its hooks into you like the first puff of a future drug-addict. To those who can afford it, life has its perks as a citizen of Megacorpolis. Those who don't, well...

Non-Citizen

It doesn't take much to fall from grace. Becoming unemployed can be a fast ticket to losing one's citizenship, while others rebel against the world and squat in the great slums between sectors. Others are born and raised there, outsiders looking in.
There's no real way of knowing how many non-citizens that live in the shadows of Megacorpolis, or at least no one has been willing to put in the effort. In a high-tech world where everything is at the disposal and whim of citizen chip and credit cards, those with neither are fighting an uphill battle with no arms and only one leg.

Others

Humanity is no longer alone in the world but to the disappointment of tinfoil enthusiasts everywhere, their companions in sapience came no from the stars. No, they were conceived in boardrooms and created in laboratories to fill demand or make a buck. Creatures made from genetic engineering and robotics, smart as a human (and, looking at the world, some would say smarter) but with all the rights of a vacuum.
Most people are happy to ignore the obvious implications and try not to think about it. Every year, that gets more difficult to keep pretending.

by Brad Wright

The Things Going On

While citizens go about their daily lives, Megacorps duel over market share and consumer reach. These duels sometimes include guns, explosions and all the high-tech devastation that corporate R&D can cook up with an unlimited budget and no ethnics committees breathing down their neck. Citizens sometimes get in the way or swept up in the action as offices are raided or marketing campaigns include heavy machine-gun fire.
There's no escaping the corporate machine. Those who fight the power do so with weapons produced by corporate factories and often corporate sponsorship, always lining one pocket or another. Like pawns on a chessboard made out of money, everyone and everything eventually comes back around to the Mega-corporations.
Well... Almost.

The City At A Glance

The Megacorpolis can be an overwhelming place, full of things that compete for a citizen's attention and disposal income. Where to even start?
Well, here's a few suggestions!

There was once a 14th sector; actually the 13th one - unlucky numbers, turns out, sometimes matter. It is a scar that runs jaggedly through the side of the city, full of crumbling buildings and other scenic bits of post-apocalypse.
Why it isn't rebuilt is a question asked just about every day across the Megacorpolis, before people shrug and get on with it. It must be for the best, surely, or the algorithm would have seen to that stuff along ago. Surely.

Although it often pretends it is, the Megacorpolis is not the only power left in the world. While most nation-states have long since crumbled away, some remain.
The Canadian Empire rule swathes of the northern hemisphere in unfailingly polite yet brutal ways, while the quickly sinking remnants of the United Kingdoms are still trying to complete their Brexit. To the south, the African Union is entering an golden age of technology and to the east, nations are still clawing their way back from nuclear devastation.

Much of the world outside the mega-city has been consumed by nature. Sprawling farms have been replaced with towers-farms that precisely regulate temperature, light and nutrients. Meat is grown in factory-laboratories rather than on a cow who'd rather keep hers.
There are no more suburbs, no more little towns and villages. Oh, sure. There are still hold outs, eking out a life in the sticks without wifi and so on. But as a whole, humanity has become a wholly urban breed.

"It could always be worse" is the motto of almost every denizen of the Megacorpolis, whether spoken aloud or merely considered while recovering in the gutter. Usually with the anticipation that it will.