NUI

"The world had cataclysmically changed since his great-great-grandparents had died, a time Tala Bolin, the Duke’s top scientist, remembered fondly from the moving pictures they had left behind. Since then, Earth had even changed its name, and the Duke had built La Manchette, an exorbitantly expensive, floating real estate ring for his elite society of minters and their servants, the halfpies. With their breathable atmosphere shrinking rapidly, and the ice caps long ago melted, the waters of all the Earth’s oceans had covered a good part of previously settled lands, on each and every continent.

In South America, portions of the Amazon’s basin had collapsed into its underground aquifer from the weight of the incoming waters of the Atlantic, turning the continent uninhabitable in its entirety, except for the peaks of the Andes. When the last bit of Antarctica’s ice shell slipped into the surrounding oceans, the Atlantic engulfed the Amazon’s delta and, from there, it penetrated slowly but menacingly upstream, into all the rivers of the mighty Amazon’s basin. Topographically, the vast rainforest offered little resistance to the incursion of sea water. That same huge piece of land was already holding in its geologic memory, since eons ago, the imprint of a river flowing the other way. 

People had lost their once arable land little by little, and retreated to higher grounds. Two centuries later, not even one soul was known to have survived at the top of the barren Andes. A symbiotic mega-ecosystem where the flatlands and the highlands had depended on each other for millions of years, had been rendered unfit to sustain life in less than two centuries. In a fell swoop, the sinking flatlands dragged the mountains’ fate with them, diminishing their flora and fauna’s chances of survival, included that of man.

A similar fate befell parts of North America, with former Mexico and the south of the former United States all slowly engulfed by incoming waters from two mighty oceans meeting head-to-head. Lying under significantly warmer waters were Greenland and the Arctic region. A small portion of dry land called Asylum8 still sat above water, somewhere in the middle of what had once been the United States and Canada. 

Brood was Europe’s outlasting Lowland, crammed between the Alpine mountain range and the Scandinavian region which, with its intricate geography, had been somewhat protected by the North Sea, and by the huge mass of land spreading far beyond its eastern borders. Once a fierce political opponent, this Eurasian landmass had geographically turned into Europe’s saving grace, when all was said and done.

Down below, in the Southern Hemisphere, parts of Australia pushed through, faring better than other land masses, due to the chaotic water currents encircling it, a natural gift from the Ring of Fire’s incessant volcanic activity. Called Witchetty, or Grub in short, the Australian Lowlands were inhabited by locals and refugees from the Pacific Rim and the many scattered islands of Oceania.

The last place where the skints stood up against their autocratic rulers, Africa, fared just as bad as South America."

"During the times of the massive human and wildlife exodus from Africa to Asia, via the Middle East, around the year 2150, most of the Earth’s territories were ruled by dictators who engaged in senseless narcissistic wars for world supremacy, to the absolute detriment of their populations.  Refugees from the areas of the world that had been violently ravaged by climate change had united in the Congo-Tanzania green belt to make a last stand. They thought the rainforests of Africa to be the best place to mount a resistance. Unfortunately, upon losing this last battle, they were removed to the then driest desert on earth, the Sahara. Their subsequent massive demise was one of the most devastating genocides in human history. After the Atlantic and the Indian Oceans merged over a good part of Africa, the southern tip of the continent was abruptly split lengthwise, what gave birth to a new subcontinent, with both sides soon to be fully submerged … There had been no recent signs of survivors in Africa, even though the central portion of the once enormous Sahara would have been inhabitable with some economic support, after a new, unnamed, mega river had found its way to the Mediterranean Sea, parallel to the Nile, cutting right through the middle of the desert. Just like the Nile had given birth to one of humanity’s most notable civilization, the Egyptians, this new river had the potential of sustaining life after the cataclysmic events that had shaken the planet. Sadly, the powers in place during that second century of the third millennium had no interest in saving others but themselves.

Lastly, Asia, the largest continent still intact, at least in its center, was missing the Middle East which had collapsed soon after the African exodus to Asia took place, as well as India and the former South East Asian countries, covered by the merged Indian and Pacific Oceans, but the territory north of the Himalayas that had once belonged to China and further into Mongolia and Russia, was now called Gohan, the largest remaining Lowlands. It took decades of wars and regional genocides, with no winners, only a tremendous loss of human lives, for the Gohan skints, or whatever remained of them, to settled down. When the construction of The Cuff was completed, and all the workers were sent back to the surface, they had to unite in the face of scarcity and dangers, and find a way to survive together through the uncertain times ahead.

Called La Manchette by the minters, and The Cuff by everyone else, the brand-new, suspended continent of the rich, was an ambulating paradise. The artificial, floating ring encircled the world high up in the air, perched atop a series of mountain peaks of similar height, circumventing the earth around the lower to the middle northern hemisphere. It took he Duke a mere decade to build this artificial high ground for the wealthy, a time in which the surface of the planet, or better said what was left of it, was becoming progressively uninhabitable and poor, depleted of nutrients, scorched by the sun during summers, and cracked open by the cold of harsh winters. La Manchette was designed as a double-layered ring, with one lower level for the halfpies and one upper level for the minters. The skints were left on the surface to fend for themselves."