Cairo Anti-sprawl

Demographics

Ethnographic: 25% direct Egyptian lineage | 40% Mixed Arabic-Subsaharan | 15% Mixed Euro-Arabic | 5% Mixed Asian Arabic | 13% Other mixed race | 2% Other "pure" lineages. Wealth: 5% Non-dependent | 35% Post scarcity | 8% Precarious-employed | 28% Precarious-chronically employed | 24% Impoverished Allegiances: 15% Protocol-abiding/Egalitheistic | 58% Hopeless/Dependent/Unaffiliated | 4% Catholic/Imperial | 14% Space dreamers | 2% Govgang loyal | 7% (dis)Connected

Government

Theoretically governed by the Human Impact Containment Council-Cairo Division. However this entity does not exist in practice, except as a Liason between the Space Corps Consortium and The Parent Protocols. Of the latter, The Discord Arbiter quells any outbreaks of violence, and The Clockwork Caretaker (attempts) to provide for civil services. If that is a definition of 'government', then perhaps they would be all that Cairo has. There are however a myriad of actual vestigial "Government organizations" that lay claim to part or all of the city, and fight a constant criminal war with each other to expand their 'national' borders. None of them actually provide any services, or ensure any of the classical "rights" (human or political), cracking down instead on arbitrary laws free of moral grounding. By now almost all the populace has come to understand to these to be nothing but self-serving and consequently do their best to avoid the very rare 'patrols'. This becomes a much harder task during the biannual 'tax season', when the patrols multiply naturally.

History

With each generation, each catastrophe, each foreign government cancelled, and every war, a new wave of refugees flooded the banks of the Nile,

Architecture

Built procedurally by the unfathomable algorithms and whims of the Clockwork Caretaker, much of Cairo is an abstract collage of pre-fabricated containers of varying size and material stacked, welded and weaved into each other. Once the army of constructor bugs connect it into the tangled web of electrical cables and (if they are very luck) water pipes, the fab is donated 'as free shelter', at which point it immediately enters a complex cutthroat property black market. Whoever has enough credit cards (or food rations) to buy it will then turn into a store, clinic, drug den, brothel, or maybe even the new home, depending on standard factors like size, location.etc. A family that had scraped together enough cards may secure a prestigious but very temporarily rooftop home. The box they left a few floors below would be occupied by a family rising from a floor below that, and so on and so forth. The best of the worst trickled up like sea foam with each new layer placed (over time), vacating the lowest levels for the outsiders, refugees, outcasts and who knows what else lived in the depths. In most places the bottom few layers are technically off-limits or even uninhabited, it's walls long having buckled under the weight of the ocean above, but reinforced with the thick-as concrete filling of clogged waste, detritus and the occasional dumped body, that had sunk but not filtered through into the river. Where the banks, the flooded congealed sewage base for 'riverside' property ended and the Nile begin, no one could tell you. When hovercrafts clunk down onto rooftops, moving goods and occasionally people, it sends shudders rippling below the surface where throngs of denizens pump through its labyrinthine Human Arterial network. Pumped literally by the force of those behind you, a constant stampede where no one person walks, but they all move anyway; a human train that the insignificant individual couldn't stop any more than a water molecule could stop a river. If they stopped, the train would keep moving. They just had to perfectly time their leap into offshooting alleyway to their destination, and hope for the best. But the real labyrinth began in the veins and capillaries that somehow fed every fab, but not always in the most circuitous route. Here an ad hoc staircase climbs the side of a staggered column of fabs, once many layers ago all they way to the roof, but now ends abruptly in the floor of a fab dropped onto its mouth (Of course, the resourceful inhabitants made do by carving a hatch into their floor, gaining access to the stairs Over there a half-mile long pathway snaking through gaps in the pre-fabs (left intentionally, accidentally? no one knows) terminates in a balcony. Not a balcony to the outside world, no such luxury. Instead it opened onto a vent shaft with ragged walls made up of edges of containers and 'balconies'. A steady stream of air lifted heat, pollutants, and perspiration from the lower levels to meet the strings of sunlight filtering meekly down. The top of the shaft flickered like a distant star through who-knows-how-many floors worth of drying laundry, hung on (power)lines that crisscrossed the gap at every possible angle. Again, an accident or part of the 'algorithm'? Depends on the level of faith of who you ask. In this manner the Unsprawl stretched from the edge of the desert to the bank of the Nile, on either of its sides. What was once the fertile soil, that had fed some of humanities first ambitious cities, now lay trampled and compressed under their logical conclusion.

Alternative Name(s)

Cairo, The City, Al' Qahireh

Type

Megalopolis

Population

Anywhere between 80 to 140 million (as of 2095)

Inhabitant Demonym

Cairene

Characters in Location