The Concrete Forest

Unknown

Several places in the southern parts of Forestville still recieve power and spotty matrix-access from Raleigh's grid, but that's about it for utilities.

So when I first learned about barrens and Z-zones, I always kind of figured there'd be some big dramatic reason behind how they became lawless hellzones, like a dirty-bomb or a big war or some giant spirits wrecking things. It turns out that the origin of the Concrete Forest, like every barrens area out there, is kind of tragic in how mundane it is.   So back in the late '30s, all of the CAS was riding the high of being its own territory. They wanted to show the world and especially the UCAS that they could not only survive, but prosper on their own.  

Well, a very liberal definition of 'on their own' what with all the mega-rich corps and such...

— Ouzo

  Jonathan Brightday, billionare and CEO of the ZEZZ analytics-software corporation, got together with some of the other rich and influential fatcats in North Carolina and came up with the mother of all projects to prove exactly that to the UCAS, by proposing the mother of all renovations on the quiet area of Forestville NC and turning into one giant sprawl of the future, capped off with a 'self-sufficient research and habitation complex' - like a small prototypical arcology - right in the center for Brightday and all his friends to relax and rule over their kingdom.   In '38, the 'Forester Group' got approval and investment from their contacts, ranging from local civil-organisations to upper-management in AAA megas and their subsidiaries, and construction began on the monolithic project with the bleeding edge of construction techniques. Businesses had already opened shop in the lower floors of the high-rise buildings while the rest of it was still being built, and the foundations of an independant power-grid were already approaching fruition with the impending completion of a fusion-reactor in their central building, finally dubbed the 'Forestville Arcology' despite not technically meeting the prerequisites of being fully self-sufficient. The buildings rose like trees of steel and concrete, connected by a cobweb of metal bridges and slowly lighting up as businesses staked their claim in what was potentially going to outgrow Raleigh itself!   Then the money ran out.   To this day, everybody in Raleigh has a couple of ideas of what they believed happened and a few dozen ideas of what they wanted to happen, but anybody in the know isn't letting a single word about it leak to the public. All we know for sure is that around 2056 Jonathan Brightday and most of the Forester Group vanished into thin air, while funding and construction in Forestville just sort of stopped overnight, with half-finished construction sites and even industrial equipment and vehicles being left behind to gather

If social media metrics are anything to by, the most believed theory is that Brightday and pals either died or fled with a bunch of the invested money, and whoever was left couldn't hold the project together. My personal theory is that the investing megas saw what was going on in Renraku's arcology in Seattle and got cold feet, which kicked off a runaway effect of withdrawing investors.

— Null Kit

Of the people sampled, how many of them plugged the theory that Brightday was actually a proxy for a great dragon?

— Hi-Jinx

Five, six if we include you.

— Null Kit

  Some people and businesses tried to stick through it, especially those that lived there before the Forester Group began building, but with so few of the residential buildings being in a habitable condition, civilization slowly moved out and all the usual residents of Barrens and Z-zones moved in as Lone Star began declaring Forestville a Z-zone, one street at a time.   Raleigh and the CAS as a whole did their best to pretend the whole thing happened, until a portion of the half-finished not-quite-an-arcology in the middle collapsed, and in the preceding 'everything is fine' public statement by the Raleigh city-council, someone asked the astute question: Didn't they build a nuclear reactor down there?   Now let's get one thing clear before we continue: nuclear safety has gone a hell of a long way since Chernobyl, and even if for whatever reason the fusion reactor was fueled and running, we wouldn't start seeing the whole of Raleigh start glowing green from a building falling on the reactor-core. With that said...   Councilwoman O'Leary made a commendable effort of keeping control of the situation after the question was asked, but the fleet of emergency-vehicles hauling backside towards Forestville didn't exactly help keep the peace. As you probably guessed, there was no actual nuclear incident but the truckloads of construction materials and equipment combined with the sheer weight of the portion of the arcology that collapsed led to something igniting and setting the entire center of the building ablaze.   Now despite the clouds of nasty stuff being belched into the sky from a barely-contained blaze, the situation could have been resolved right there but there was a problem: Small-arms fire.   Gangers, criminals, transients and what few angry, angry locals still remained took potshots at the emergency responders with guns they either owned, stole or cobbled together, until they were forced to retreat from what was being called "The Pit". Every now and then the council sends progressively larger and better-equipped forces to try and put it out, but the now-completely uncivilized denizens of what Raleighites began calling the 'Concrete Forest' would drop everything and put almost all grudges aside to sprint back there and attack the government forcces, even going so far as to throw more stuff into the still ferociously burning chemical-fire in the arcology's twisted depths to try and prelong it for as long as possible: As a symbol of the Raleigh's failure, and of Forestville's burning rage at their homes being ripped up and then abandoned for nothing.

You're telling me that cloud of smoke I can see from across Raleigh has been keeping on all these years because some dredkheads throw furniture into it once in a while?

— Vulcan Gravy

Not really, naw. Even after a few drone surveys, the actual source of all the fire still isn't known. Drone-surveys of the smoke show no radioactive particles, ruling out the worst-case scenario of a nuclear incident, but they have discovered chemical traces that would suggest substantial concentrations of chemical fuels in the fire.

— Redhat

Since then, Raleigh's government made the executive decision to move on from the monolithic failure and pretend it never happened, with the whole area being something of a forbidden topic in city-council meetings. For everyone else, the Concrete Forest and the consequences of its failure hang over everyone's head, its towers and burning heart a symbol of decay and broken promises of a better life.

The Concrete Forest's namesake come from the planned 'Forestville Economic/Industrial Hyperstructure System': Exactly 67 (now 63) identical skyscrapers, 490 meters and 102 floors high (110 floors if you count the basements) placed in a perfect grid and connected by a high-elevation monorail-network. Each one was supposed to be able to handle everything a corporation could want, from manufacturing to research to offices to entertainment.

Only four or five of them got the neo-futurist deco that was gonna be standard across all of them, but since the whole thing got abandoned before anyone could occupy (and thus maintain) them, the interiors and the rest of the skyscrapers remain functionalist eyesores.

— Redhat

Speaking of no maintenence, just how come they're still standing to this day if there's nobody looking after them?

— Blyat-Country

Same reason they were built so quickly: The Forester Group were using the then-cutting-edge tech for megastructure construction, utilising the fanciest structural alloys and high-strength scaffolding designs to build something that could potentially hold a small factory in its upper-floors. Hell, they're so strong they had to try out an experimental compount just attempt to safely demolish a single tower under economic timescales.

— Redhat

The rest of the Concrete Forrest consists of ultra-dense residential and commercial-buildings, intentionally built low (making use of lots of underground foors) to emphasize the height of the surrounding skyscrapers and in far worse shape, owing to the more frequent occupation (and by extension more frequent shootouts and arson) than the towers, whose higher floors lay mostly untouched what with the lack of elevators.

Also makes said upper floors a good place to lay low, if you don't mind walking up all those stairs.

— Ripshot

Real shit though, if you want to chill in the upper floors dress in layers. No climate-control or windows means those upper-floors get COLD.

— Saint Ain't