Everybody here talking about how Florida went underwater and then turned into a castle of pstic or some bullshit, while the rest of the world forgets that Italy literally became the Mediterranean!

  Excerpt from ‘The World After the Flood’, 2025

  Let’s try this again:

  You know your day is going to be shitty when, first thing in the morning, you wake up and your world is ending.

  Sara-no-surname, was a street kid and an orphan. Yeah, not the best combination in the world.

  Now, one thing must be cleared up immediately: she was a street kid by choice. The orphan part, well, apparently her parents had abandoned her in front of her orphanage as a chubby little baby of a few hours old, like some bad copy from a Snidey cartoon character, and ever since then she’d grown ‘inside the system’, being trained to be the ‘perfect citizen’ the Corporations wanted you to be. She was sure that, had she decided to stay in the orphanage, she would’ve one day become an office drone with the lowest wage the ws allowed, forever bound to her corporate overlords and forced to do the same job again and again day by day until she inevitably either put an end to her life with the help of the cheapest rope money could buy or she decided to start going to some random two bit corporate psychologist – whose life was probably just as empty as hers – to hear them talk about how she needed to get a hobby.

  So, all in all, not the kind of life she wanted for herself.

  And, for all that getting by day by day as a street kid – not so kid anymore, but who cares – wasn’t easy, every day she thanked her lucky stars that she’d made that choice.

  Sure, her perspectives weren’t that great but, honestly, unless you were born with a silver spoon, they never were.

  Still, in a year she’d be twenty-one, and at that point she would be allowed to audition at the Gianni Famiglia, the local mafia group. They were always willing to take in new people, whether that be as operatives for their more… gruesome businesses, or as simple workers in their cover operations. And, most important of all, they actually took care of their people, which was what she was more interested in.

  In many ways, this had been one of the most surprising events in recent italian history: the mafia, instead of being absorbed into some big corpo group or becoming one… had not. They had simply changed tack. Instead of being close knit groups of criminals who wanted to make money through corruption and menace, they had turned into some sort of vigintes who worked with the people to try and make things better with them. Sort of like communists, but the strange kind.

  She really didn’t care about the specifics: all that mattered was that they had managed for the st forty or so years to remain a pain in the ass to all corpos while also managing to help people in their own way.

  With a yawn and a big stretch she rose from her ‘bed’ in her six and a half square meter apartment, although she always thought that ‘hole in the wall’ was a more appropriate title. Her grand home contained her bed, which could be colpsed into the wall and which was connected to a small table. Beside that was the smallest kitchen in the world, containing a single sink without drying rack, a small cupboard below to hold the pce, a little fridge by the side seemingly designed to hold the least amount of food possible – probably to force people to spend more time inside supermarkets to shop, this way exposing them to more ads and, therefore, increasing the chances of making sales – and her one possession she’d stolen from her orphanage, a light blue trunk that contained all the clothes she’d managed to stuff inside.

  She groaned, blinking her eyes in the total darkness – not helped by the ck of windows – of the room, her hands wandering beside her bed looking for the light switch. Finding it, she flicked it on… and groaned as nothing happened. Right, it was broken. And she didn’t have the money to fix it. Hell, technically speaking she didn’t even have the money to live in this pce, but the previous owner of the Hole had jumped out a window and, as luck would have it – the greatest amount of ck she’d ever had – his corpse had spttered right beside her! After the shock and the scream, she’d found the keys to this pce and his documents, plus some credits.

  So now she lived here, poor Armando Carogna – what an absolutely awful surname, maybe that was one of the reasons he’d decided to end it – was dead but nobody knew it, and she’d found a way to keep the water and electricity flowing inside the Hole. All in all, not bad. Not good, but certainly better than living in the streets as she’d pnned.

  Cracking her spine, and ignoring the absolute agony of her neck – she’d found out at the orphanage long ago that she had Schmorl’s Nodes, a specific type of hernia, in three different locations of her spine. This agony was not new – she rose to her feet, stepping towards the Hole’s door and, most importantly, the light switch beside it.

  A flick ter and she was… not blinded, no, because the strip of led lights she’d bought for cheap was as bright as torchlight behind a heavy veil, which was a surprising blessing on most days. It certainly wouldn’t help her eyesight in the long run, but she’d only need to wait one more year… hopefully.

  With a sigh she opened her fridge… and found it empty. Right. No money for groceries since she hadn’t found work in the st week.

  Her stomach growled, reminding her that this wasn’t the first day she had gone without food, and she promptly ignored it because thinking about her hunger would just make it worse.

  So instead she opened her tap and began drinking the clean water, quenching her thirst and at the same time quieting the hunger, at least for a short while. It would come back with a vengeance ter, but that was a problem for future Sara. A Not-So-Distant-Future-Sara, but not Now-Sara, and that was enough for her.

  She washed her face, removing the sleep from her eyes… and her morning routine was done.

  Another day, more struggles, she thought with a sigh as she walked towards her chest of clothes and, after opening it, put on her favorite shirt – it was bck with a white outline of a spider, a Bck Widow seeing as it had a red hourgss on its back – and a pair of bck jeans to match.

  With that, she walked out of the Hole and into the outside world, into the streets of New Rome.

  Yes, New Rome. Because the st one had ended up underwater. Like most of Italy.

  The beautiful country now survived on its mountains, which formed a good thirty five percent of its ndmass, where a few megacities had been built. New Rome was found on the Apennines in the area that had once been the border between Lazio and Umbria. On some lucky days, if the smog was less thick than usual, and if you were near the top levels of the megacity, you could sometimes get glimpses of the city that had been: the highest houses and paces, a few rocks from the Coliseum that hadn’t colpsed, stuff like that.

  Not like many people were left alive to mourn all that had been lost.

  Or, for the matter, people who could bring themselves to care.

  With a sigh, she opened the doors that led outside, into a little alley that connected towards one of the wider streets of the Low End.

  It took her a moment to notice.

  She wasn’t paying attention after all.

  But the streets were surprisingly silent. Completely silent.

  She looked up and around, trying to understand what was happening.

  Then she saw the sky.

  And noticed that she had a pretty good view of a rift that, she knew, was letting aliens, the Antithesis, into her city.

  “Ah, fuck,” she whispered, as if talking in a low voice could save her from the probably death that awaited her.

  Then the silence was broken by something else. Something coming from ahead of her. The sound of something cnging to the ground.

  A moment ter, something green the size of a dog appeared around the entrance of the alley, completely silent. It snuffled and sniffed around, or she imagined it did.

  Then it seemed to lock in on her.

  And she began to run.