[Editor's note: Same patron, same bar. Two drinks in. Still talking.]
Oh good, you're back. You're new here, aren't you? Never been in Nuevo before?
Anyway, I'm sure you never heard the story of how this city came to be.
Ah you probably don't care.
You know what? Fuck it. I'm gonna tell you the whole thing.
So. Back in the '90s, there was the Storm Decade. Big fucking mess. You weren't alive yet, right?
I was a kid. Maybe seven, eight years old? I remember my mom taping plastic over the windows every time the sirens went off. We lived in what used to be Portsmouth, before it got folded into Concord. The floods came through, and the government just... wrote us off. Packed us into emergency housing, promised rebuilding, then sold the whole fucking district to NetSure's parent company.
That's how I ended up here. In Nuevo Bay. City that was supposed to save us.
Anyway. Basically: big storms all across the United States. We got at minimum F4 tornadoes ripping through the freaking middle of the country. You got hurricanes and tsunamis and all this other shit going all across the eastern and West Coast.
So the government, right? They only have a certain amount of money, you know? And they really focused on the main cities: New York, LA, Philadelphia, Neo-SF, you know... Washington DC. Places that actually matter to them.
So they carved out some of the other areas. You know what used to be freaking Norfolk, down in Virginia? They took a chunk of that and some of the surrounding area, all the way down to the North Carolina border or something like that, and they basically turned it into a federal district called "Concord." Think something like DC, or how they used to have Puerto Rico before it became a state.
Wait, I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me back up.
Anyway, so it becomes a federal district. But again: the federal government ain't got any cash.
So they send out a bid. Whatever corporations can actually stop choking each other out and work together to build something? They get rights over the city. They can govern, they can, you know, do all this other stuff. And eventually they'll give it back to the people.
Anyway.
Some companies get together and they create the Harbor Recovery Compact. And eventually it turns into the NBCA, you know?
It looked like everything was right, you know? You look at Atlas Heights and shit and it looks amazing. Looks like a full-grown city. They got the floods gone with the Tidewall, they beefed up the tech, made it a real nice connected city.
But of course there were certain pockets, you know, areas that didn't deserve the same investment because maybe they weren't contributing enough money to the economics the corporations gave a shit about. So, you know, the communities built their own spaces out there. Where they couldn't afford the rest of it, you know? It's all fully connected.
So all of that happens.
And turns out we've been living in a fucking lie when it comes to this "give it back to the people" shit.
Sure, there's a council now. There's actual people and faces and names attached to how the government here works. But they're all paid off by the corporations so they can keep doing what they've been fucking doing since the city was founded.
My mom died waiting for a Claims & Resilience check that never came. Heart condition. The corporation that bought our old district? They never finished the clinic they promised. She waited two years for an appointment. Never got it.
But hey, if you can actually make it in the city? You're gonna be fucking rich. You can do whatever the hell you want.
And maybe that's why nobody's left.
Or maybe they just can't, with all the debt they got from the fucking debt corps and shit.
Anyway. What's your favorite drink? I gotta pay for this one.
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