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CHAPTER 1:

Hi, I’m Carter, and if you’re listening to this tape then clearly I was alive for long enough to finish recording it. Hey, that’s good news! Maybe I had time to tie up a few loose ends before they got me. You see, they will get me. They get everyone eventually, all I can do is stay alive as long as possible, make my tape, and hope there’s something on it that you can use.

We need your help, see.

Why would you help us? Good question.

I’ll start at the beginning, I guess.

I lived in Metropolis. As the name suggests, it was a sprawling, well, metropolis. The city was split into seven zones. In the centre there was Two, then surrounding that were One, Three, Four, Five, Six and Seven. Four was where I lived, it was where all the workers lived.

There was a pretty delicate balance of power, see. It used to be that One was where all the power was, and One was in the centre. The centre is where you’ll still find all the ridiculous stuff the rich like to buy when they’ve got nothing else to spend their money on, it’s just that it all belongs to the people from Two now. That’s a long story and I’ll tell you it another time. So yeah, when One used to be at the centre they filled it with shit.

I think the funniest example is a skyscraper on Thirteenth Street, which has got an actual functioning runway on the top of it. Guy that built it, Wallace Renshaw, wanted a penthouse. Partly because he was “fucking rich,” and partly because he had claustrophobia and anything smaller than a penthouse would have sent him “fucking crazy.” That led to another issue, getting up to the penthouse. He was rich, taking the stairs was a laughable solution. Unless by taking the stairs you meant ‘get some guys to carry him up the stairs on a throne.’ The lift, of course, was definitely out. So he decided he wouldn’t go up to his penthouse, he’d go down to it. While the rest of the world was trying to one-up each other by building taller and taller buildings, Renshaw was building the longest building in the world. 280 meters in total. Not that it wasn’t tall as well, the guy was planning to land planes on the top of it, you can’t do that among skyscrapers. The Renshaw Block can be seen from pretty much everywhere in metropolis.

Nobody questioned why he didn’t suffer from Claustrophobia on his plane, but back then you didn’t question Wallace Renshaw about anything.

And I helped build it, of course. Which is why I was so well placed to take it down.

Elsewhere in One was the financial sector where people that did fuck all all day decided how much money us Fourites would get while they raked in it and build bigger and stupider skyscrapers. Not that I was bitter. It was shit, but it worked.