Nairobi 2160 AD

The Kenya’s capital is a floating city, a metropolis controlled by GK2140 Satellites hovering overhead. It is a city for the third millennium. It has everything that the body wants but nothing the soul needs. Miles of grey skyscrapers, strangely naked-seeming in the clean, clear air kiss the clouds like obsessed lovers; crisscrossing air routes, and AeroCars.

Phoenix City. Former Nairobi City, the capital the New Kenya. Fifty million souls. Theirs is happily-ever-afters.

Before it rose from the ashes, Nairobi was a city of haves and have-nots. There were those in the upscale ‘hoods with exotic luxury fuel guzzlers and enviable lifestyles; and there were those from the sprawling slums, drug-addled and impoverished. And there was the middleclass who were neither here nor there, working all their waking hours to give their kids the best from international schools, talent academies, and foreign vacations.

When the epidemic started, the gap between the rich and the poor widened. Those from the upper scale of life barricaded themselves in their electric-fenced homes going only to the remaining the rich only exclusive upmarket malls to get what wasn’t airdropped at their homes. Downtown roadside food vendors crawled into the city centre and became buddies with the Kanju, continued to sell their contaminated foods to the already dying population.

There was misery in the streets. It soaked into the sidewalk cracks and into graffitied walls. It was in the six-star hotels where once only the movers and shakers of Kenya’s economy dined in, in designer cloths boutiques, and in the alleys where garbage that was never to be collected was perpetually searched, and not just by the cats and dogs. Then the people became garbage themselves.

The city was ghostly frozen for those months the plague ravaged it. The rich didn’t move from their uptown homes for fear of getting infected. Most of the people who had fled the country started coming back, to stand in solidarity with their dying brethren.

The second wave of the deaths started shortly after. They were worse than the first that were caused by contaminated foods. They began with tumours in the groin and armpits, and spread in all directions consuming everything. Death came within an hour of infection.

As though that was not enough, a mysterious fire consumed everything else that the plague didn’t devour along with the corpses that lay topsy-turvily everywhere. All was gone.

From the ashes came Phoenix City.

We called ourselves Goddies. We were a group of pro-metahuman scientists who wanted to cleanse the world of the lower level humans. When the first genetically engineered baby was born in a lab at the Nairobi Hospital, we were holed up in a secret lab in the basement of Kenyatta International Convention Centre experimenting on nanotechnology, genetic and mutation-engineering, and telepathic science. Project Homortals (Homo Immortals) was the ultimate creation—longevity of up to 1500 years before rejuvenation, transcendental powers, mind control, extra-terrestrial intelligence, and ubiquity.

We got the industrial bacterium responsible for the 14^th Century Black Death plague from Japan. Japan wanted to use it on China for Second World War atrocities on the Japanese. The bacteria was enough to wipe out the city before proceeding to the rest of the country.

With the Homo sapiens gone, we Homortals rebuilt the city.

Phoenix City, Capital of the New Kenya, is the solution to the legendary Nairobi floods, land grabbing, and dwindling resources courtesy of corrupt and selfish Homo sapiens politicians. It is a self-sufficient floating ecotopia that is covered in vegetation, generates its own power, grows food, manages waste, and provides clean water. It has eco-skyscraper cities where people live, work and can easily get to gardens, open space, the beach and even “forests”.

The ghosts of the entire humanity we wiped out from existence ambushes our AeroCars, sometimes sabotages the aerial routes. We live with the ghouls and ghosts. Vehicles that take people heaven bound when they die got stuck in the space. The phantoms pass by, bitter with our presence. But perhaps they are locked in another time, imagining the things they didn’t do, fantasizing, and building “castles in the air”.