Zenith City is the futuristic merger of the twin ports of Lake Superior: Duluth, MN and Superior, WI. Through the strife and politics of the 21st century, the city becomes a focal point of climate and political refugees, burgeoning into a nascent metropolis by mid-century. Its aviation and shipping industries keep it well supplied, and defended, when political changes lead to more cities becoming more insular and autonomous. Becoming a forefront of advancing drone technologies aids the cities when threats to their well-being turn briefly hot, strengthening the partnership between the cities, and making them a target for outside interests. The self-sufficient nature of the region pushes back, keeping outsiders at bay with more cunning and economics than just drones, while losing some of their forward-thinking and community values in the process. Tension replaces togetherness, consolidation replaces solidarity, and the long-ambitious plan to unite the cities was finally achieved by a pro-corporatist native-son-turned-restaurant-king rather than by purer intentions. Still, as the city changed, and the people with it —adapting technology into their bodies themselves— presenting a more unified bulwark against future incursions became more important than holding onto the purity that outsiders had coveted in the past.
Inspirations:
Cyberpunk & Shadowrun
Neuromancer/Blue Ant
Snow Crash
Ghost in the Shell
Blade Runner & District 9
History of Duluth & Superior, Iron Range
Gotham
Pros:
Fictionalized future city metropolis in an unexplored setting of most fiction
Natural beauty in the surrounding area meets the harsh urban settings
New suburbs/city regions can be designed, 66 years in the future will have plenty of change
Near-future allows some modern elements to survive, even if dated/venerable
A unified city straddling previous political lines introduces more city agency and self-reliance to drive narratives that let it remain untouched by larger machinations (for longer)
Cons:
Existing real world areas may present unintentional limits or considerations
The timeline for all these changes may be too short to be believable (unless divergence is further back)
Less focus on space and sci-fi, cybernetics and grounded city narratives would take the forefront
Brand new setting means more groundwork to build than dropping into an existing fandom’s trappings
This part is an unfinished ramble, see above for more cohesive vision
In the 21st century, the quest for power drove wealth to consolidate and control; corporations buying out their suppliers and competitors, trillionaires who went bent whole governments to do their bidding, forsaking the rest to be exploited or abandoned. Climate change, political crackdowns, and economic instability drove residents from other parts of the country northward to havens of civility and progress. One such place, at the furthest depths of Lake Superior, king of the Great Lakes of North America, became what is now known as Zenith City.
Zenith City, a modern merger of two port towns with a deep history, began by forging a narrow path through the early parts of the 21st century. Industry, logging, and mining were bygone strengths of the region, which had settled upon tourism and a persistent shipping network to weather a new millennium. The region boasted of frigid winters that brought fierce gales upon the lake as early as November, and humid summers filled with pests like mosquitoes and visitors to the cities. It took a hearty soul to remain year-round, full of tenacity and Midwestern zeal, which is something the city still boasts in earnest.
A tentative study on the possible history of the Darkwire organization and its connection to the history and development of Celeste 7. (TENTATIVE AND SUBJECT TO CHANGE AND REVISIOM)
In the late 2050s, the Celeste project started by trillionaire [REDACTED] had seen enough successes in profitable ventures it inspired a new space race to the moon that rivaled the one that took place nearly a hundred years ago in 1961. Other companies backed by their own conglomerates of mega-rich funding, and several government cooperatives began to re-vitalize the renewed space industry with various different projects, levels of success, and degree of impact on the trajectory of a human peopled solar system. This also had the unintended effect of reproducing the Cold War, but with multi-polar competitors fighting for dominance without regard to ideological purity. With the authority of Earth governments decisively outrun by corporate interests in lunar orbit, reliance on mercenary outfits to exercise influence became more common place. In the opportunistic hyper-capitalist society forming among the Celeste Sites and the various Earth-Nation Enclaves, an undercurrent of shadowy exchanges peppered society throughout.
Militant units with plausible deniability and dubious funding sources frequently began to destabilize various independent projects in and surrounding lunar orbit. Anti-satellite weapons, de-orbited Sky Hook scares, ransom hacks on habitat filtration units, and numerous other operations with unclear attribution colored Lunar history with conspiracy and paranoia. This fostered a few cultural and technological quirks to the landscape, namely that securing remote network infrastructure was becoming unattainable in the increasingly advanced cyber arms race, and necessitated a return to air-gaped and hard wired solutions. To keep the sites in communication with each other, they buried fiber optic cables and put out signal flags along the path to prevent new sites from digging through them. These “livewires” kept allied lunar sites in communication with one another even as coordinated cyber attacks from Earth nations and organizations disrupted other network infrastructure… but even air-gaped systems are exploitable to physical access.
Though none can be sure the exact special forces group (or groups) that would later become known as a mythic boogeyman, certain former military and mercenary agents seemed to have gone native on their assignments to disrupt the booming lunar economy, and developed a unique partnership and strategy with what would eventually become the metropolis of Celeste 7. This clandestine group was an expert in infiltration, and their first target when arriving to a site was shutting down the livewire connections to the rest of the moon in order to execute their mission with impunity. Whenever word got out that a lunar site went dark, their operation had already succeeded. This spawned rumors and warnings, that, “if a you see a dark wire, the shadowrunners are already inside…”
The Cyber Conflicts of the Second Cold War eventually came to a close, disparate colony sites of various allegiances began to eschew their lineages and sovereignty in favor of a common municipality, at first forming a loose confederation. As this coalition negotiated with the member states of the United Nations and the other political blocs of power on Earth, hold-outs on the moon began to rapidly flip towards this new consolidation of power outside of Earth after experiencing a “Darkwire” event. Claims of foul play were discredited, submissions of evidence disavowed, and overall the chaos of political conflict suppressed to show all of humanity a unified front on the surface of the moon, with the founding of its first metropolitan city-state: Celeste 7.
In modern times, the legend of the “Darkwire Discords” live on as little more than myth. Several organizations in the decades following those original events have claimed lineage to the original Darkwire organization, but matching to that reputation has afforded most such claimants with little success or acclaim, and few last long. If Darkwire continues on in the underbelly of the city they helped [REDACTED] build, it does so in anonymity, and with purpose only visible in the shadows, or beneath the thrum of everyday life…