Artifact #019, re-created by A. Shilov, described by H. Szabó & S. Feng. Dated circa A.S. 877, found in Norwich, Connecticut.
Map of New Junction Norwich, Connecticut
[1] Light factory – Le Rétine
In the Industrial Quarter, light factories such as Le Rétine are responsible for manufacturing filamented bulbs containing bioluminescent algae fished from the Atlantic Coast. These clusters of algae glow a soft blue, emitting enough to rival a small incandescent lightbulb, through chemical reactions inside of their body. The bulbs require fertilizer and fuel to be fed to maintain the algae. These algae provide a self-sustaining source of light for houses and apartments. These industrial Rétine bulbs are utilized in many standard offices in the Industrial Quarter; they are even used to tile the screens of monitors.
[2] Light factory – Leaf & Stem
Lux et. Femina, Inc. and Women for the Future partnered to construct the Leaf & Stem Factory. They won the tender from the Chicago Association of Female Architects to create a facility to generate light for in-need women’s shelters and communities. When it was discovered a decade ago that women’s centers were being deprived of electricity by the government, which was discounting social-justice-driven nonprofit organizations, they constructed a state-of-the-art facility using aquaponics and photovoltaic panels, where rows and rows of plants generated energy from bars of LED lights hanging above. The energy is funneled through underground pipes to communal families of women, who live together and protect one another, and churches dedicated to women’s services. Some of these women came to these centers from cities away; women’s communes became more and more common when anger at deteriorating agricultural fields resulted in mental illness and abusive behaviors from their husbands.
Leaf & Stem features 40 photovoltaic panels, osmotic aquaponic barrels where electric fish consume food and churn energy into wired storage, and Electraswim™, a system of 50,000 retinas of electric fish who have been genetically modified to lack all pain sensitivity and motor control. As vegetative animals, they lie there, and their opsins and photoreceptor cells inside of their retinas fire repeated action potentials, triggered by the photovoltaic panels, that are hooked up into a central battery. They feel no pain.
[3] Power plant – Pendant Co.
Pendant Co. is a power production plant, connected to its power refinery plant, Necklace Co. Pendant was the first factory to be constructed in the town. Its underground wires bunch up like mycelium networks and fan out to the different clusters of houses; as the wires near the highest layer of the dirt, they become so thin that they are like capillaries, the current thin and fragile. For the majority of the Levittown-like houses in this town, Pendant distributes only a small pocket of light each day, enough to sustain one room for five minutes each day, or a heat source for one hour. Individual houses make their choices – splurging their five minutes to pray to Hou Yi, the god of light, or spreading their one minute across the entire day to tune into their television networks to see a news update every few hours. Special television networks have one-minute news reviews each day to accommodate for this common habit. The news streams in from radio towers that sit in between cities next to the colossal windmills, which utilize the gusts of strong, bitter winds that thrust through the darkness to feed more power into the power grids of the city.
[4] Police zones
Police zones in New Junction Norwich are located primarily to the west side of the city, in between the Industrial Quarters and the Forgotten Territories. Police patrol this area heavily due to the smuggling of illegal materials that occurs through the Forgotten Territories into other adjacent states.
[5] Town Hall
City Hall’s headquarters are located at the heart of the downtown streets of this city, a building completely lit by power from Pendant each hour of the day. Like a church, it opened its bottom levels to citizens of the city who needed a place to sleep that night. Before the Great Reversal, City Hall’s top floors were covered with wall-to-wall windows to give a view of the city below. After the Great Reversal, the massive windows were plastered over with great tapestries and murals of Earth before the Great Reversal – rolling fields of gold wheat, a sky with birds soaring across brilliant white clouds. Years later, the mayor’s daughter called this heaven. The photographs propped on the desks of city office employees showed these backgrounds of artificial coloration, because they would bring their families in each year for city-mandated photoshoots. Everyone, then, had the same backdrop in their family photos – the same idyllic meadow tree, an apple orchard fading into two-perspective distance, a beautiful red Cadillac with the same license plate propped just behind the father, its gas cylinders and engines all taken from its body, a mere relic that sits at the top of City Hall and slumbers at night.
[6] School – Edison Community College
Although the practice of having official programs or ‘majors’ has not been utilized since before the Great Reversal, Edison Community College (ECC) follows a loose track system whereby students who attend choose one of several career-prep options; Electrical Engineering, Bioengineering, Electricity, Politics, & Economics (EP&E) Medicine, Governance & Community Values (GCV), and Education are the most popular. ECC offers paid internships with local companies and has a compulsory community service project centered around Fallen Heights for all students in the Medicine, GCV, and Education tracks (although not, notably, for those pursuing the EP&E track).
[7] School – Lumen School (K-12)
Focused on providing a science-focused education to uplift the next generation of inventors and innovators, The Lumen School also attempts to keep the literary and historical traditions of the past alive, although the latter priority proves near impossible, due both to staffing issues and a lack of student interest in the pre-Reversal world. There have been some student protests to stop the practice of having older students spend at least an hour a day on stationary bikes to provide additional electricity to the school and teach discipline, although none have been successful.
[8] St. Luxorem Hospital
Located centrally within the city, St. Luxorem Hospital is a hospital with a capacity for 450 beds. St. Luxorem also conducts a hospital-based research program, ranked as the #67th best hospital in the United States by the U.S. News & World Report.
[9] Neighborhood – Fallen Heights
Fallen Heights is a New Junction Norwich borough at the south of the city, east of the White River which divides the city in half. Each year, Fallen Heights hosts the annual Flea Market; many musicians sing in the streets for money. Its population is just over 10,000. Near downtown Fallen Heights, the city is famed as well for its Industry Murals, inspired by Diego Rivera’s murals in the city of Detroit, Michigan, of the light factories. The neighborhood of Fallen Heights has suffered gentrification and rising crime rates. Shops have struggled to stay open, local businesses failing under the pressure of larger corporations opening stores in close proximity.
[10] Neighborhood – New Riverbend
New Riverbend is a neighborhood in New Junction Norwich with a population of over 17,000. Considered family-friendly, this neighborhood includes many parks and artificial beaches. It features a small water park and a dog park.
[11] Neighborhood – Hillford
In Hillford, folks are used to living with little-to-no electricity and even less supervision. Daring youth from New Riverbend (and occasionally even a rebel or two from Weston Falls) will venture into this shadowy neighborhood in search of a scare… they say that the houses are so sparsely populated here that no one can hear you scream. But be not mistaken, the proud residents of Hillford may be few, but they know how to enjoy themselves in the dark.
[12] Weston Falls Closed Community
Where light meets luxury living!
Within Weston Falls, you can find luxury living reminiscent of the days before the Great Reversal. With ballrooms and public spaces reminiscent of Versailles (the residence of the Sun King himself, Louis XIV), the elite few who live here enjoy a life that can only be described as regal, but here the ‘crown jewel’ is not some rare gemstone but the light that permeates the space. The abundance of electricity here far outshines the meager holdings of the nearby city — although those who live here hardly remember this fact, as they rarely leave the property.
[13] Natural History Museum
At the Natural History Museum, exhibits show life from prehistoric times to the contemporary age. Exhibits demonstrate the biomes that humans have existed in, from Asiatic climates to South American environments, and contain shows of the underwater and rainforest worlds. Fossilized and formaldehyde-preserved tanks show now-extinct species of plants that were not able to adapt quickly enough and could not sustain their photosynthesis after the Reversal, many preserved in the labs of shrewd biologists who worried about the extinction of certain species.
[14] Forgotten territories
Mt. Soren
Mt. Soren is the highest summit of the Northeastern Front Range of the Appalachian Mountains. This 14,753-foot fourteener is located in the Lyman Forests, 18 miles from the city of New Junction Norwich, Connecticut, at its base. Backpackers and climbers heavily populate Mt. Soren.
White River
The ‘White River’ moniker was given because the darkness turned this river a foggy, cloudy ice formation. It splits the city in half, and ice from the White River is melted to give drinking water to the people of the city. The White River receives runoff condensation from ice that collects and freezes at the summit of Mt. Soren throughout the year. Its name also harkens to the Silver River, the mythological river in the Great Reversal.