Season 04 - Episode 22

‘present the decline’

Syl has finally worked it all out and is now frantically packing.

At first it seemed as if there were several mysteries but now she realises they're all the same one. She'd already worked out that at some point in the past, GovCo lost the ability to grow food or manufacture equipment but until today she hadn't know why.

Similarly, she hadn't understood why some neighbourhoods had been secretly renamed and renumbered. Also, when The Collapse happened, she was tasked with mapping out how deep it went and found something wrong with that too. The Collapse clearly extended far beyond the lower limit of GovCo territory, yet when she checked, she found it shouldn't have.

None of this made any sense until a few hours ago when she threw caution to the wind and decided to do some real digging. It was a huge risk to take but the only way left to finally uncover the truth.

Ignoring the official maps, which had obviously been changed, she focused instead on the numbers. Numbers of people born and dying, volumes of food produced and consumed, distances travelled by boxes in the transit system. Utterly baffled by what initially appeared impossible, Syl checked and rechecked her figures until finally, the answer occurred to her.

The Levels had shrunk.

At some point in the past, GovCo's territory extended up and down and in every other direction, many times further than it did now. The Levels were a vast empire of people and industry, exactly as GovCo portrayed them today.

Reviewing historic tax and education records however, she found that year on year, GovCo had taken an ever larger cut of everything people created. Education became more expensive and wages shrank and so the number of people trained in technology shrank too.

As productivity fell, GovCo squeezed harder to maintain their profits, making everything even worse. Machinery broke down but there were fewer and fewer people who knew how to fix it. Eventually no-one knew and the farms and factories began to shut down altogether.

With no means of production, GovCo changed its approach and started redistributing what already existed. Of course as the population grew and GovCo continued to take an ever larger share, there was simply no way to sustain things as they were.

That's when the decision was made. It had taken her a long time to find it but she had managed to dig out a heavily redacted report detailing something called 'Operation Harvest'. As far as she could tell, tens of thousands of EnFo's had been dispatched to the furthest upper and lower regions of The Levels.

When they returned, several months later, they were millions of rounds of ammunition lighter and carrying an incredible bounty. Clothes, furniture, equipment, food, enough resources to resell and recycle for years to come.

GovCo had eaten itself.

Then they had simply renumbered the neighbourhoods, doctored all the paperwork and it was as if nothing had ever happened. This seemed initially insane until she realised that most people didn't travel very far outside their own neighbourhoods. Unless you went and looked, how would you ever know how big The Levels actually were?

The horror of it, the sheer volume of lives she assumed lost, rocked Syl back in her chair. She wept silently for a while, overwhelmed at the impossible thought of endless floors of corpses stretching off above her and below.

Then however, a new chill ran through her as history caught up to the present. The decline never stopped, it'd continued ever since and the war with The Church made everything worse. All the new EnFo deployments she recently signed off told her exactly what came next.

They're going to do it again.

More neighbourhoods harvested, this time with Church sleeper cells as an excuse. They're going to start tomorrow by wiping out one of The Scapes near the detention centre.

Most of all however, Syl has discovered that GovCo now knows that she knows. Her digging has been detected and they will be coming for her. She finishes packing frantically, tears still on her face. It's time for her to go, time to finally leave the safety of her gilded cage.

It's time to join The Resistance.

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