Ultranautica

For a million years the planet flooded, and for a million years man hid in an underwater city. In their giant submarine they would bode their time away from the storm and from the monsters lurking in the sky.

Ultranautica was the largest man-made structure in history. When democracy failed a totalitarian system was imposed so that every citizen would tend to a certain aspect of submarine life now that everyone was totally dependent on another for survival. The government adopted a strict eugenic policy so that one's descendants would be better at their job than they were. And so peace reigned in the final refuge of man.

Or so it was for the first few centuries. Nobody remembers what happened afterwards but a combination of factors resulted in the near-complete collapse of societal order in Ultranautica. Nevertheless many areas remained habitable. Civilization lived on albeit in increasingly primitive forms, each generation more ignorant than the last. Soon nobody remembered how the machinery functioned and why they worked to maintain it.

But they continued to toil nonetheless. Ultranautica twisted their flesh and bone. In her womb they became children. In the years to come civilizations rose and fell and man diverged into a panoply of grotesque shapes.

Explorers from the habitable zones would call them "abhumans" for the first few centuries, but eventually there came a point when a few species no longer resembled humans at all. Structural decay had created so many ecological niches that soon enough an ecosystem of uncanny monsters evolved from humans, shiprats, insects, and stranded aquatic life teemed in rusting jungles of machinery, waiting to be unleashed on an unsuspecting world.

At last the waters receded. Ultranautica balanced precariously on a tooth-like mountain overlooking a valley reeking of putrefying fish, buried in three feet of mud and silt. The doors, rusted shut, were blown open with gunpowder made from saltpeter gleaned from evaporated human urine, charcoal made from burned human bones, and sulfur obtained from human flesh.

And for the first time in a million years, Man walked the earth, changed.

ahem

Tear speaking! Tear speaking!

I promise not to dump exposition on you like this again but I thought a little narration was in order.

"choo-choo!"

So anyways this planet sucks. The whole surface used to be one big ocean and all the land used to be seafloor. Now there's like a tenth of the sea left because solar flares vapourized all that water and now the climate is extremely unstable because most of it's in the atmosphere.

Get ready for droughts, blizzards, typhoons and thunderstorms no matter where you are. There aren't even any mountain ranges to block them out. Speaking of mountains this place isn't very scenic. It's been eroded for so long it's just mud, sand and silt. To be fair there are a few volcanoes and fumaroles but they come from mantle plumes and not tectonic plates.

Also, did I mention the stench? There's dead fish all over the place. And not just regular fish, they're absolutely massive because had the whole planet to themselves for way too long. If you listen closely you can hear those dead fish exploding in the distance. Or up close.

I don't know about you but it's pretty hard to ignore expired seafood bigger than a Boeing. I'm talking globsters and bleached fish skeletons everywhere you look. And by everywhere I mean everywhere.

"No, you touch it!"

In Earth's deep sea ecosystems the main food source is marine snow which is pretty much fish flakes falling down from the shallower layers of the ocean. Another thing that happens on the seafloor are whalefalls, which is when a whale dies and all the deep sea creatures come from miles around to feast on it.

Here the main food source for most ecosystems here are whalefalls but instead of whales it's globsters. Just about all the animals are amphibious at this point. The rest are dead or cannibalizing each other in toxic puddles full of the vilest stuff imaginable.

Everything here is poisonous because nature has absorbed everything humanity has put out for the last million years and then some. Nibbling on a bit of seaweed is a guaranteed death sentence.

As for the rest of the universe? Well the sun's fat and red and hogs up way too much of the sky. The cosmological structure is a lot like ours but it's approaching heat death in a few million years. While I was here I didn't see any stars in the sky even though there weren't any clouds. As far as I know that sun might just be the last star in the universe.

Awful place. 0/10. Don't visit unless you're taking photos for your next death metal album cover.


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