Europe's Last Days - Prelude

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Europe's Last Days

Prelude

After leaving the Earth, humanity was condemned to live in three colonies, Mars, Titan and Europe. Two hundred and twenty years after the arrival of the first ships transporting settlers, the first of the colonies, Mars, had to be abandoned, in a strange and catastrophic event, more than eighty thousand people were abandoned, left to their fate in a habitat where the terraforming devices had failed without possibility of repair several years ago and the internal atmospheric control devices did so shortly before the evacuation began.

Most of those evicted were reassigned to other colonies, the luckier ones, who could prove that they had families to take care of them, were sent to Titan the most orderly and productive of the two remaining colonies, while the rest, generally of lesser resources, were sent to Europe, the largest and most populated of the colonies.

Almost three hundred and seventy thousand people were left to their fate in the endless corridors of the residential areas of this huge underwater city. With a population now over two and a half million and a growing criminality and conflict, Europe was not a pleasant place; since three years before the arrival of the evacuees from Mars, martial law prevailed, several union leaders and leaders of the most conflictive communities had been arrested for vandalism, even a few more violent were executed, on terrorism charges.

Europe would be the first colony planned for housing purposes only, Mars was originally a resort for wealthy people and Titan was designed as a mining colony; but the hasty way it should have been built; Because of the imperative need to evacuate the Earth, the original plans had to be reformulated and what would initially be three interconnected mega submarine structures, ended up being reduced to a single structure with a crowded and complex network of small corridors, tunnels and boulevards, with hundreds of thousands of rooms, each occupied by more than one family.

The colony consisted fundamentally of a huge bubble of hexagonal panels, submerged in the ocean of the Jovian moon, under its thick ice shell. It was built in this way, to take advantage of the temperatures coming from the ocean floor, which was heated by the intense tidal forces that Jupiter exerted on the satellite.

The bubble did not have the purpose of keeping the water outside, because the very structure of the colony was in charge of doing it, on the contrary, inside the bubble, there was even more water, but this was salty water, conditioned to lodge the forms of marine life that had been brought of the Earth, the colony of Europe was like a great aquarium, where the humans and its gigantic watertight structure, were some type of bad decoration.

After the arrival of the refugees from Mars, the already precarious and convulsed situation of Europe, collapsed completely, the plants generating food worked over their capacity and even so they could not supply all the population, the water supply was regularly rationed, so that it reached all the sectors of the colony, and the lighting and electrical supply to the houses, was frequently interrupted, to maintain operating the factories and machineries that maintained the systems of environmental control.

Food riots, thefts and looting increased and the action of the army became more and more violent, arresting the inhabitants of entire sectors of the colony, under the charge of causing riots. Raids on rooms and attacks on their occupants became part of everyday life in Europe.

Original text of @amart29 Barcelona, Venezuela, October 2019

Other stories from the series The Three Colonies

• Un Cielo Azul / A Blue Sky
• La Muerte de los Mares / The Death of the Seas
• Encélado / Enceladus
• Pegasus / Pegasus
• Deshielo / Defrosting
• En las Profundidades / In to the depths
• Sopa Tóxica / Toxic Soup
• El Ascensor Orbital / The Orbital Elevator
• Colonización / Colonization
• Titán / Titan
• Darts
• La Última Esperanza / The Last Hope
• Vacaciones en Soledad / Lonely Vacation
• Delfines de Júpiter / Jupiter Dolphins
• El Último Hombre Sobre la Tierra / The Last Man on Earth
• Europa / Europe
• Ícaro / Icarus
• Después del Éxodo / After the Exodus
• El diario de David / David's diary
• Europe's Last Days

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