The announcement informed everyone that anyone interested would be employed under a temporary contract with Hephaestus Heavy Industries that came with some truly hefty perks. For twelve months, they would be employed with a salary of a thousand END per month, a per-diem meal allowance of a hundred and fifty END per month, free on-site housing, and each employee would receive a credit for a free future visit to a medical pod, should they ever require one.

Not only that, they would be given priority access to advanced courses and certification as electricians, plumbers, HVAC technicians, welders, and so on, should they choose to take that path. And with the first full month being essentially a paid vacation while they waited for the cities foundations to be laid, it was an excellent proposition. So they would be paid 12,000 END for the entire job, all while gaining an essential, marketable skill to prevent them from being unemployed in the future.

Once the realization sank in, billions of people rushed to the website to sign up for job placements with the construction crews. They knew that not everyone would be hired in the first round, but with a construction round beginning every month as the foundation crew moved from city site to city site, everyone would eventually get their turn. After all, with fifty thousand fortress cities slated for construction to house the seven billion imperial citizens, there was plenty of work to go around.

Along with the hiring of construction crews, more people would be hired, or kept on, as maintenance engineers responsible for cleaning, inspection, and minor repairs of the new cities. There was no experience requirement for either position, either, just that whoever signed up must be willing to work, and work hard, to complete the tasks in the time given and up to the standard required.

In the meantime, a model city had been constructed in the public simulation that they could go and tour, should they choose to do so. All of the cities would be built along the same general design; the only things that would differ were the individualized condos that people would be buying, or the detached houses for the more affluent.

Nearly everyone who was free at that moment rushed to the model city to take instanced tours of it, looking with wonder at all of the futuristic buildings and conveniences. And for those who were otherwise occupied at the time they were pinged with the announcements, they were busily making plans with friends to tour it together at their first opportunity.

......

When the people logged in, they rushed to the new model city. As they approached it, unrelated people began fading from view, shifted into different instances of the simulation to reduce the overcrowding from the hundreds of millions of people swarming a city that was designed for dozens of millions, at best. If they stopped to consider for a moment, it would be odd that the groups who intended to tour the city together had remained together, none of them being shunted into different instances.

But they didnt stop to consider that, being too focused on rushing to the pristine white towers reaching to the sky, decorated with hints of reflective metalwork and the glinting reflection of laminated glass.

The city was surrounded by a tall wall with four gates in it, each connected to its opposite gate by an eight-lane highway. There was a buffer layer of 25 kilometers between the wall and the first buildings rising from the ground in the distance, two-thirds of which was farmland, and the other third was virgin forest, left mostly untouched by human hands and surrounded by a tall fence, separating the wildlife in the forest from the humans outside of it.

As they approached the city proper, they were given an introduction by the citys VI, which showed a top-down view.

The designers of the city had gone with a ring design, with twenty rings from the center to the outermost ring, the distance between them increasing as the distance from the city center increased. In the direct center of the city was the government tower, which rose into the lowest cloud layer and housed all of the necessary infrastructure facilities to support a city of such an immense size. Surrounding the government tower out to the second ring road was a large, well-manicured park with many walking paths, biking paths, and attractions like carnival rides and games. It would be open all year round to everyone as a public service.

Leading from the first ring road to the government tower was a pristine walking boulevard separated by a long reflecting pool in the middle, which was made of black basalt rock polished to a mirror finish before being filled with clear water to twenty inches deep in order to promote reflectivity. Trees and decorative topiary bushes lined the sides of the boulevard, blocking the view of other maintenance structures and focusing visitors gaze on the government tower itself, which was a marvel of engineering that was narrow at the bottom, then gradually flared out and tapered to a point at the top, like a spear point thrusting from the ground.

Mirroring the rest of the citys white and chrome design, it almost seemed to defy the laws of physics, especially compared to more normal skyscrapers that were angular and as broad at the base as they were at the roof, if not moreso. The only other difference, beyond the design itself, was that it was a windowless edifice meant to project the prestige of the empire and protect the secrets held within.

Naturally, it wasnt open for public viewing.

The residential buildings began at the second ring road, across the street from the park district. Those on the second ring road itself were nearly as tall as the government building, perhaps losing out in height by a hundred feet or so. That trend continued as the buildings grew further from the city center, preserving an unobstructed view for people living in the top levels of each building, until the 40th ring road, which was populated by detached houses and compounds for the ultra-

rich, which was a departure from previous city planning. In the current city structures, the closer one was to the city center, the more valuable their homes would be. But in the fortress cities, it was the opposite.

When the curious wanderers finally entered each towering skyscraper, they discovered that they were self-contained worlds unto themselves. The first floor was filled with luxuries and entertainment venues, essentially a large and varied shopping mall, with restaurants, movie theaters, and showrooms for entertainers and the like. Going up a level to the second floor, it was populated by necessities, like grocery stores, clinics, police stations, and so on.

The third floor and above were residential floors, and each person that entered a residence saw the floor plan and interior decorations that they had chosen when they were designing their dream living spaces.

It was a tour that was only made possible by being in the public simulation, and it was a resounding success. Everyone who toured the model city came out of the tour with a great anticipation for their new home.

(Ed note: Only two chapters today. We wanted to do three, but chapter 520-521 is a two-parter so we decided not to leave you hanging like that.)