Skyscapes

Virelda looked down from her balcony on the eighty second floor at the black cloud looming below her. Above her, the building scraped the skies for another hundred floors then extended outwards reaching to another tower a hundred metres or so to the side of it. All across the horizon, protruding out of the black cloud were towers, brilliant white or shimmering silver, growing towards the sun. Most of them were connected with bridges and almost all of them had a ceiling that extended outwards to their nearest tower. This was the city she was born and raised in. This was Skyscapes, the city in the skies. 

Two hundred years ago, man had reached a pivotal role in his technological and social development. Technology had permitted the building of even larger skyscrapers then ever before. Able to withstand natural disasters and their own weight, they now defied the clouds and the winds of the skies. An architect had also invented a way to connect skyscrapers with open spaces that seemingly hovered in thin air from one tower to another. The original design was used for a garden and extended a couple of metres. Nowadays, these so called skybridges were built to connect skyscrapers such that no citizen of Skyscapes had to go down to ground zero in order to cross into another tower. So was the beginning of the great rift between the people of Skyscapes and the derelict Moles. 

The Moles were poor mistreated people. Beaten yet resistant, they were slaves to the Skyscape highborne. Over the years, a black cloud had covered the city that was once known as Skaipei. This cloud, a product of pollution and egoism by the hands of the rich of Skaipei infested the lands and the city like a plague. The remaining fields that stretched for kilometres on the outskirts of the city were scorched and poisoned until people started to starve. Water was polluted and undrinkable. The High-mayor of Skaipei had ordered his elite cast to live on the topmost floors of the towers of the city. People were hired to dig underground for resources and to harvest fungi for food. Such was the time when the poorest of the city, the harvesters, became known as the Moles.

In Skaipei technology had permitted the construction of what are called Biotowers, large skyscrapers that are wholly dedicated to planting food. Plants are grown on each floor in inert media without the need for soil. They are grown in artificial light and fertilized with minerals harvested by the Moles. Water is gathered in great Mist-Net towers and channeled to the Biotwers. Over time, the elite of Skaipei became independent and did not require the Moles for their survival. The High-mayor had then ordered the lower floors of the towers to be shut and isolated from the top ones. The black cloud was the boundary which was chosen, and the Moles were forever left to forage in the rotting lands underneath the black cloud. At this time, Skyscape and Virelda were born. 

There was one problem associated with the prosperity of Skyscapes, however. The Highborne could still not build indefinitely upwards, and the spaces between different towers was quickly diminishing. They had to build new towers, and in so doing, they had to make contact with the Moles. Starving, the Moles were hired on cheap labour by the investors of Skyscapes and around two to three towers started showing up through the black cloud each year. 'The city that shines and dances in the wind', was the motto the High-mayor used as propaganda to attract loyalty in his investors and lower ranking supporters. 

The children of the elite were born never to see the land. They were truly the children of the skies. Virelda was one of them. Daughter of a Biotower farmer, she was not one of the highest ranking individuals in this society, yet she was lucky enough to be part of it. On her nineteenth birthday, her father had promised her to show her the mountain view from the topmost floor of the highest building in Skyskapes, the magnificent Cosmotron.

Cosmo, as it was called, was constructed by a family of Highborne known as the 'Space Dwellers'. This family invested and researched ways to prospect precious metals from space rocks, and was famous for building the space elevator between Earth and the Moon around fifty years earlier. Virelda knew, that to get her to Cosmo, her father had tp compromise quite a lot of his budget. Yet, she hoped he would keep his promise, and so he did.