Light Finds A Way

In the urban underbelly of the city, an entire population of unfortunates spent their entire lives in the blackness of the sewers. For generations, they'd had nothing but rats and each other for food, until Earl began cultivating rows and rows of crops in the light-deprived tunnels, where not even electricity reached. He made himself into the richest man in the world, yet no surface dwellers had ever heard of him.

When asked how he grew food without light, Earl claimed his crops were nourished on the clarity of his conviction. In reality, he was smuggling sunlight from above ground.

Stephen

One day, as he was looking through old photographs, Dave noticed a little boy in many of the photos who looked a lot like him, only a couple years younger. He was even in the family portraits.

As he flipped through, memories floated back of an imaginary friend named Stephen. Dave remembered him as a constant companion. His parents had always been kind enough to humor him. But sometime around his twelfth birthday, his parents had informed him that Stephen had been run over by a car.

It seemed strange an imaginary friend could show up in photos like that.

A Stone's Throw

For eons, stones have found their existence tedious at best, cursed by their lack of mobility and sensory organs. Why have a soul if they were doomed to suffer without ever experiencing anything but their own actuality? Their only solace was that they had been blessed with two nemeses, wind and water, against whom they could battle relentlessly.

It all changed when rocks became a unit of measurement. They found themselves hurled hither and thither whenever someone needed to estimate something's proximity.

Of course rocks had no way of understanding the change. Still, at least they have a purpose now.

Miniature Dragons

Before science invented the microscope, there was a popular theory that supposed illness and disease were the result of miniature dragons that attacked our immune systems. People believed the only way to defeat them was to equip an army of miniature knights to combat these miniscule, invisible dragons.

The king called for volunteers. They would join a mating program modeled by the dog breeders who created the miniature schnauzer. Over the course of several generations, they would sire knights tiny enough to fight the dragons.

Eventually it was discovered that germs, not dragons, were making people sick.

Sometimes science sucks.

The Never-Ending Date

Barbara and Steve began their first date in the firehouse deli. They both thought it quaint. It didn't take long for them to realize things were going extremely well. After their movie, as he walked Barbara back to her house, Steve suggested they continue the date tomorrow.

"I'll meet you in the morning and it will be part of the same date." Barbara found the idea charming.

When Steve proposed three years later, Barbara asked if that would mean the end of their first date. Steve said no.

"Why would I stop the best thing that's ever happened to me."

The Glue

Victor Coolidge often referred to himself as the glue that held the city together (the joke being the reason he was so obese was that a city of one billion people needed a lot of glue). In the end, he was the snag that lead to the city coming apart at the seams.

When he told his media friends that Georgi was the infant predator, they seized on the story. A manhunt began. Top-levels began dying in the vents. The riots spread to the sewers and the ground levels.

Georgi became the eye of the hurricane that finally destroyed Colossopolis.

Part 5

This is the treatment for a sci-fi novella. I think it's definitely worthy of more than the 100-word treatment. Let me know what you think!

Victor Coolidge

The larger an election, the greater the opportunity for corruption. In the largest city in the solar system, people assume it's easy to manufacture tens of millions of votes. For this reason, no one believed that Victor Coolidge, mayor of Colossolopolis, was duly elected. But his grip on power hardened over the years and seemed unlikely to end in anyone's natural lifespan.

But when Coolidge was discovered eating infant flesh in the vents, the news spread through the city at light speed.

Not many people believed Coolidge could overcome the scandal, but he knew all he needed was a scapegoat.

Part Four

The Vents

In Colossopolis, the slums and sewers were home to escaped convicts, perverts, and the debt-afflicted--the least desirable elements of society. Most of the city's population would never see the sewers in their lifetimes.

Such people had never even heard of the vents.

The vents were for the mutants and genkies who had nowhere else to go. There was a division of Justice that specialized in going into the vents to retrieve wanted criminals or especially valuable contraband. They had an 82% success rate of coming back alive.

Georgi was born in the vents and he didn't want to go back.

Part 3

Neon

Georgi was having trouble seeing.

Vacuumers operate in shifts of 16 hours on, 4 hours off for five days in a row, with three days of downtime. During their breaks, most of Georgi's colleagues stayed in the seedier sections of the city, near the exteriors.

For the majority of vacuumers, it was enough to dabble in illegal, though lightly-monitored, activities such as drug use or gene manipulation. Only the most foolhardy went in for neon ingestion. Georgi, however, wasn't worried about harm to his nervous system.

But if he couldn't see, he'd be fired and sent back to the vents.

Part Two

The Vacuumers

A city of one billion people relies on many citizens and institutions to maintain order. But in Colossolopis, the world's largest urban center, everyone knows who the city most depends on for survival.

The vacuumers are the only civilians allowed outside the city interiors. Donning their radiation-shielded hazsuits, they crawl like insects on the rooftops, cleaning the air.

Some doubt that what they are doing can really be called cleaning. It has been generations since anyone has been able to freely breath the atmosphere. But if they were to stop, the toxicity levels would quickly breakdown even the strongest shielding.