London

London is the future metropolis that grows out of the Jackpot’s prolonged social collapse: a city of widely spaced megastacks, automated environments, and unusually sparse street life, where immense wealth coexists with the memory of mass death. It matters not simply as the setting for Wilf Netherton and Ainsley Lowbeer’s world, but as the visible result of a history in which catastrophe remade society without remaking it equally.

A City Recognized Through Difference

Flynne Fisher first tries to understand London by comparing its image with cities she knows. In the future city, the river’s curve and the older, lower buildings are recognizable, but the skyline is not: its towers rise as evenly spaced megastacks on a grid of their own. The contrast is sharper because the London she knows has no such grid, and its tall buildings cluster more closely and vary more in shape and size. The city is familiar enough to identify and different enough to feel like an engineered version of itself.

That difference is also built into the way Flynne reaches it. Wilf Netherton is given her feed in London, and Flynne later enters the connection through a string associated with Milagros Coldiron SA. The city is therefore not merely somewhere she visits: it is a remote environment she must access through a technological link, while her view of it remains bound to the question of who is watching and connecting her. Her first encounter with Wilf reflects this mediated contact. He appears behind an old-fashioned monitor in a room furnished with pale, glossy materials, marble-like surfaces, and a high black turtleneck—a human introduction set against a world whose ordinary material life is already strange to her.

Flynne’s later visit makes the difference between the cities a social as well as an architectural fact. Looking around from Soho Square, she notes that they are in Europe’s biggest city and that she has seen almost nobody. Wilf can point out a man sitting on a bench with his dog, but the streets remain without traffic and strikingly quiet. London’s scale does not produce the crowds and movement Flynne expects; the empty intervals between people become part of its character.

The City After the Jackpot

Wilf explains the history behind this city to Flynne on the porch of her home, speaking through the Wheelie Boy’s tablet while Ben Carter guards the house nearby. He rejects the familiar apocalypse pattern of one decisive event followed by armed survivors. The Jackpot, he says, had no single beginning or ending: it was multicausal, more like a climate than an event. London’s present is thus the outcome of an extended chain of crises rather than a clean break in history.

Human activity helped drive that chain, but not through a single deliberate act. Wilf describes the disasters as anthropogenic and systemic, with climate change contributing to further problems as carbon levels and political inaction compounded one another. The weather crisis worsened rather than resolving; people who did not understand the process helped create it, and even recognition came too late to reverse the damage. The future city rests on this accumulation of consequences, not on a technological miracle that erased them.

The scale of loss gives London’s survival its moral weight. Wilf tells Flynne that about 80 percent of the living population died over roughly forty years. When she asks whether those dead are the bullet that was dodged, he confirms it. The phrase makes the survivors’ reduced carbon output and later adaptation inseparable from the deaths that made them possible: the city’s continued existence is not evidence that the catastrophe was harmless, but part of what followed it.

Wealth, Infrastructure, and Survival

The Jackpot did not affect everyone in the same way. Wilf says that the richest people could become richer as the population fell and ownership concentrated among fewer survivors. Continuous crisis also created continuous opportunity. London, long a natural home for people who owned much of the world while not living in China, was among the places that rose first and had never entirely fallen. Its modern prominence is tied to older concentrations of wealth as well as to the aftermath of disaster.

The megastacks express that history in built form. Flynne’s security shifts had included patrolling one of the towers, but Wilf clarifies that it served more than as housing for rich people: the towers also consumed carbon, a function that became more consequential after population collapse reduced emissions. The survivors treated this environmental change as a near escape from danger. That perception sits uneasily beside the human cost Wilf has just described. A system can register the drop in carbon as success while the narrative insists that the drop came with the deaths of most of the population.

London’s buildings and infrastructure are also bound up with the future’s remote-control technology. In a vast enclosed space associated with Daedra West’s hall of voice mail, Lowbeer and Wilf move in koala-like forms while the island’s assemblers consume foreign objects, from drifting polymer to larger manufactured things. Lowbeer says their units are already being eaten and that their time there is short. The encounter places London’s technologically mediated bodies within a larger environment where human-made objects are not permanent: even advanced equipment can become material for another system.

Automated Space and Its Human Contrasts

The city’s public life can seem less inhabited than its architecture implies. Flynne’s walk through central London yields one visible man and his dog, no traffic, and a quiet she experiences as deathly. Yet people remain present through networks, remote bodies, and automated arrangements rather than through dense street crowds. The contrast is not between a wholly empty city and a populated one; it is between the form of urban life Flynne recognizes and the mediated, selective form she encounters.

A visit to Lev Zubov’s house gives that future a domestic counterpart. Wilf sees Conner Penske on his hands and knees in the garden, snarling at Gordon and Tyenna; the animals’ altered, long-jawed forms make them resemble carnivorous kangaroos dressed as wolves. The scene is not a portrait of London’s streets, but it helps define the world to which the city belongs: technological transformation reaches into bodies, animals, and private life, not only into towers and public infrastructure.

The imposing black ZIL used for a journey to Farringdon adds another layer of historical continuity. Built in 2029 and the last of its assembly line, it had belonged not to Lev’s father but to his grandfather, who had lived in the house. Lowbeer chooses it as transport. Its brushed, nonreflective surfaces and formidable appearance make the old vehicle feel deliberately suited to a city where automated systems and carefully managed appearances coexist with inherited objects and social histories.

London as a Measure of Unequal Continuity

London’s decisive significance lies in what it makes visible about survival. The city is recognizably continuous with the past—its river, older buildings, districts, and old objects persist—but its towers, automated systems, and near-empty public spaces mark a profound break in how urban life is organized. It is neither a wholly new city nor simply the old one restored; it is the remnant and construction of a society that endured by changing its infrastructure and narrowing who could benefit from it.

The city’s wealth and environmental adaptation cannot be separated from the Jackpot’s unequal consequences. The richest gain from scarcity, towers help absorb carbon, and London rises early, while most people die across decades of accumulating crisis. Against that history, Flynne’s astonishment at the quiet streets becomes more than a visitor’s reaction: it registers the distance between her world and a future whose apparent order was purchased through a catastrophe that the city’s architecture cannot conceal.