World Encyclopedia

The year is 21XX A.C.   The city is old.   A cyberpunk sprawl turned self-contained nation-state, Eratheum City has endured for centuries — long enough for entire districts to rise, fall, and fade into myth. No one agrees on when the city began, only that it never truly stopped growing. It expanded outward, upward, and downward, layer by layer, until even its own architects lost track.   Sixty known levels divide Eratheum into stratum — a towering cross-section of wealth, decay, and industry. The upper districts gleam with chrome-plated illusion, while the middle zones press tightly with worker tenements, wiring, exhaust, and rust.   And beneath it all: silence, frost, and dust.   The lowest floors — blacklisted to the public — house deep server vaults, where corporate AIs and old-world machine intelligences hum behind frozen walls. It’s cold enough to bite through insulated boots, and pitch dark in places light has never touched. These corridors aren't maintained — only visited when absolutely necessary. People go down in full gear, usually in pairs. Sometimes they come back.   Above the servers lie the catacombs — not graves, but the bones of earlier Eratheum. Concrete superstructures left abandoned by progress. Transit hubs with shattered trains and no routes. Storage blocks for obsolete tech, expired weapons, or decommissioned military hardware. Some corps use them still, but most of it has been written off. These zones are unlit, unmapped, and filled with relics too valuable to destroy, and too dangerous to use.   Roughly 30% of the city is sealed. Not by design — by necessity. Entire neighborhoods walled off after collapse, contamination, war, or worse. Signs warn of structural instability. Most people don’t know what’s behind those walls, and many more don't care to know.   Beyond the city walls lies a vast wasteland. Desert wind and sun-baked ruins, stretching farther than most dare to measure. The high-clearance military expeditions don’t report back. The maps are redacted. No one knows how far the desert goes. No one knows what’s out there anymore — if anything.   So people stay inside. Because inside the city, at least, the power stays on. The grid breathes. The neon glows. And life — or something like it — continues.