Saint Tranya

Saint Tranya, the city at the southern tip of the continent of Saint Dora, the information core of the main civilisation. The city is itself a machine that never shuts down—Spectra's nodes, the power grid, the information research substations, the ground terminals of the sensor cloud layer, all running in layers stacked on layers.

Seven maglev lines are laid underground, running at 24 metres, 42 metres and 86 metres down; below that is the cooling pipe network of the Source-Stone power plant, its cooling towers lit red through the night, the artery of the whole city. The tallest tower above ground runs a little over 600 metres from foundation to spire. The light in the city sorts itself out cleanly too: the cold white of Source-Stone power, the shifting colour of holographic advertising boards, the blue-white of maglev arcs flashing in the tunnels every few seconds—all of it tuned by machines, all of it running to schedule.

The Central Spectra Monitoring Center is set in the city district, with 360 observation stations on rotating day and night shifts, and monitoring officer designations numbered by position, so that the man in position 7-B is called K-9. The Information Research Substation No. 10 is one of its unremarkable rooms, doing routine power-grid verification, pushing 327 lines of alignment data at a time. Before dawn in Kaiyuan Year 1010, someone in there casually bypassed normal request protocol, woke a disconnected node on the Frozen Continent, and aimed it at a coordinate where nothing should have been.

There is a layer beneath the city that isn't on the plans. At 1,040 metres down, the official level chart has "no data" in that square, while in fact someone has hacked another city out of the rock: warm yellow patchwork lamps strung down one after another, and under the lamps, stalls and sheds stacked out of scrap, recycled metal sheeting and salvaged pieces of the old city, with people inside calling prices, taking prices, dragging things across the ground.

This city files away every lamp, every carriage, every card swipe. As for what it misses, the archive doesn't leave so much as an empty square.