Michael and Michelle drove with urgency, exiting the derelict stadium and heading down the long highway towards Velo City. Michael took the opportunity to put his right foot to the floor, running his Mustang up through the gears, letting its engine sound growl across the plains leading towards the city, while Michelle followed in his slipstream.

The Mustang's acceleration slowed dramatically as Michael put it in 5th gear, its faded speedometer barely cresting 150 miles per hour, the engine growling at a steady 4 thousand RPM. Michael supposed this was the car's top speed, as he hadn't managed to get it to go any faster than that.

Michael let off the throttle, letting Michelle catch up to him as the city grew closer, its massive buildings stretching almost into the clouds.

Flanking the highway were short off-ramps and exits which led into towns and gas stations that were long since abandoned as opportunity had fled to the large cities.

Slowly, the road began to curve downward as they reached the entrance to the city, and the scope of the place could truly be seen.

The entire city sat nestled in a massive man made crater, hundreds of square miles wide and thousands of feet deep. Hundreds of thousands of buildings sat anchored to the ground, with large Superscrapers — buildings so wide and tall that they stretched up into the lower layers of clouds — marking the the skyline like great castles of industry. Large bridges weaved between and through the tallest buildings, snaking their way down into the depths below. The umbrella of roads and buildings was so dense that it was often said that someone could go their entire lives without ever being in direct sunlight if they were born on the ground level.

The city was divided into 4 districts. In the south, there was the Kempton slums, an area densely packed with factories that had once employed hundreds of thousands of workers, who had long since been replaced by robots and artificial intelligence software. As a result, the once thriving middle class area had become a smoggy, crime ridden maze of slums and poverty... and it was where Michael and Michelle went to school, since it was the only area that still provided free education in the entire city.

Just above northeast of Kempton was the Cultura, a large district that had once been the city center. It held the old government buildings, and had become the cultural center of Velo, filled with all sorts of restaurants, boutique shops, theaters, museums, and parks. It was mostly occupied by younger, well off citizens, many of whom lived in the expensive apartments that flanked the area.

To the east of Cultura was Fortuna, the ritzy uptown suburbia made for the rich, with large, gated communities, and lots of police and emergency services, flanked by shopping malls and casinos.

Finally, in the north of the city, Argenti: the home of the corporations, where the city hall and new government buildings sat in the shadow of corporate Superscrapers. If you lived here, you probably had a few billion credits in the bank, employed several lobbyists in congress, owned a second yacht in Monaco and a summer home on the moon.

******

Enormous holographic billboards sat conveniently by the road like massive capitalistic guardians. Michael's eyes fell upon an enormous anime school girl, tinged with the trademark blue shimmer of an industrial hologram. The apparition danced, twirling like a ballerina and holding her hands out as a foreign looking planet appeared floating above the palm of her hand.

New Horizons. Never worry about food, housing, health care, or job security ever again! Sign up for the New Horizons Indentured Labor Program Today!

The girl twirled again, fading away and being replaced by an elegant fighter drone with forward swept wings, soaring above a war zone, expertly bombing a small middle eastern village.

Shax Security: KEEPING AMERICA SAFE!

Michael shrugged and turned his attention back on the road. He passed by hundreds of these things on the way to school every morning, he hardly considered it impressive anymore.

The main road led Michael and Michelle onto a massive 12 lane overpass, paved with asphalt, but supported by a lightweight and strong plastic polymer. The overpass was filled to the brim with thousands of autonomous vehicles, which Michael and Michelle were forced to weave their way through at speed in order to make it to school on time.

DriveNet vehicles were controlled by satellite, and communicated with each other via GPS, thus, they only required a route plan, and no sensors. This meant, while highly efficient and coordinated, Autocabs were completely blind; they did not stop or yield to pedestrians or non autonomous vehicles. After all, an unscheduled stop could harm arrival times, and reduce profits across the entire city. So, warnings lined every sidewalk:

ASIMOV ADVANCED COMPUTING IS NOT LIABLE FOR ANY INJURY OR DEATH RELATED TO UNAUTHORIZED STREET CROSSING.

This meant Michael and Michelle had to either keep pace with or outrun the AutoCabs as to not get smashed to pieces by the unending torrent of traffic. As a result, they weaved through the gaps in traffic like a stream flowing down a rocky mountain. Over the years, they had even learned to spot the patterns in the AutoCab's formations, and could navigate through them in seconds.

The overpass led them through a park nestled inside the tallest Superscraper in Velo City, which stood in the center of Argenti. Livingstone Tower, the home of the largest surveillance and military contractor in the country. The structure housed thousands of apartments, hotels, malls, and a few hundred offices, accented by a few multistory holes in it allowing for roadways to pass through.

The siblings steered their cars into a line with several AutoCabs, following them onto an exit that wound off of the south side of the highway. They then followed the AutoCabs into an enormous, dark garage area, and onto a massive circular metal platform where the AutoCabs abruptly stopped. Michael and Michelle parked side by side, and the platform slowly began to descend towards ground level, plunging through a glass tube at a brisk pace, passing shops, apartment complexes, malls, parks, theaters. People could live their entire lives without ever leaving this building. Michael simply couldn't imagine living in a place like this

He waved a hand over his watch, and scrolled over to the live broadcast of the morning news.

"An Atmos factory in District 47 of Kempton burned down last nights thanks to faulty wiring. There were no casualties-"

That's the 3rd factory this month, Michael thought.

"In other news, at our nation's new capital, Richmond, Virginia, there is a large protest, standing up for the rights of artificial intelligence software. We go to our live correspondent, Carmen Espinoza for more."

A thousand voices chanted in unison over the broadcast.

"ALL MINDS MATTER! HUMAN OR ARTIFICIAL!"

"We're live here in our great nation's capital, Richmond, in front of the second White House as thousands of heroic social activists champion the rights of-"

Michael interrupted the speaker by waving his hand over his watch again, and switched to a different news station.

"Thousands of violent protesters march on the white house foolishly fighting for the rights of artificial intelligence software..."

Michael sighed. He waved his hand over his watch to silence it completely.

The elevated platform lurched to a halt with a heavy metallic thud, and the Autocabs slowly began to move forward.

The Mustang and the S13 pushed through the crowd of vehicles and into the open streets of Kempton. The area was damp and dark, lit by flickering street lamps, the light of the morning sun blocked by the buildings and roadway bridges above. The sidewalk was packed with pedestrians, men, women and children covered in a thin layer of soot and grime from the smoggy air. They walked with their eyes forward and heads down, monotonously shuffling to work and school like androids.

Michael kept his eyes on the road as best as he could, following the snails pace of the Autocabs alongside Michelle's 180SX. He desperately wanted to ignore the shambling pedestrians. Their very appearance made him feel incredibly guilty. It reminded him how lucky he was, he had a home with clean air, a place to bathe, healthy food, and clean clothes. All it took was one bad break, a bad harvest, a natural disaster, and Michael would be walking to school or work with the rest of them, packed in with 10 other people in a single room apartment like human sardines, using a small shower with cold water once weekly that he shared with the entire floor of the apartment complex. The thought made him shudder.

They passed through an open area, a small roundabout with a fountain statue of business mogul Patrick Callahan standing resplendent in its center. Callahan was creator of the Credits currency system that many held responsible for maintaining relative world peace and economic stability, others blaming it for the upswing in poverty and the rise of 'proxy wars' in South America. Michael just knew Callahan as the name that was written on large aircraft wings and Autocab tires.

They turned a corner and passed through a street lined with neon lit pharmacies of all kinds. A cancer treatment center, a narcotics store, an herbal clinic, plasmid formulation center and walk-in plastic surgery. If you thought your body needed it, it was available here, for the right price of course, and as long is it didn't permanently modify your body cybernetically or genetically. Any sort of modification that improved the function of the human body beyond what a human body was naturally capable of had been made strictly illegal, so you couldn't purchase robot arms for super strength, or wolf ears to hear better, well, if you wanted to stay on the right side of the law at least...

Michael paid no heed to the flashing neon signs and storefronts, nervously checking his watch, breathing a sigh of relief when he realized they still had 20 more minutes to reach school.

The Autocabs slowly made their way through another row of apartments before they reached a clearing of buildings, and a large group of shabby single story classrooms and trailers.

*********