Weekly Poetry Challenge four

underwater cities

Underwater cities

By the year 2035
The entire world was faced.
With the need to move
Into underground cities

As the situation on the ground
Due to massive storms
And fires everywhere

Due to accelerating climate change
Made life on land.
Increasingly impossible

In many areas
Death Valley Temperatures
Became the new summer norm.
With short Siberian arctic winters

Millions of people
We’re facing starvation.
Or worst

Governments around the world
Became authoritarian fascist nightmares.
With AI systems controlling many decisions.

Global trade and commerce
Drying up

Governments announced.
The solution was to move.
25 percent of the population
into new underground
or underwater cities.

The existing cities
Were almost all.
abandoned

Just too difficult
To protect them

From the ravages
Of a world environment
Becoming hostile
To human life.

New technologies provide electricity.
Through wave power
And desalination became common.
Nano construction was overseen.
AI-controlled robots did most
Of the construction.

People who were politically connected
Or useful to the state was given the first choice.
Of accommodations

More than half the population
Were given a chance to join them.
Via a lotto system which
Could only accommodate ten percent.

It took ten years to move.
One billion people
Twenty-five percent of humanity
Were ultimately moved.
To the underground
and underwater cities.

100,000 escaped
to Lunar and Martian colonies.

Life was grim.
People ate fish and chicken.
and Inscet protein bars
and urban farming vegetables

those left behind.
survived as best they could.
but many perished
as did most wildlife.

Those who lived in the new cities.
Did not think too much.
Of those left behind

Just something that had to be done.
To save the human race
From total annihilation.

Feral coyotes, lions, tigers, and wolves
feasted on the feral cattle, horses, and pigs.
and on the few surviving humans
who lived in improvised fort cities.

That was how civilization ended.
And the new Dark Ages began.
In the vast underground,
underwater cities.