Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

“Right,” said Ren, after finishing the presentation, “now all that crap’s over, let’s take a look at Kintrex!”

He led the group outside and away from the buildings. “Okay, so we’re in the middle of the city right now. This is a level kind of area, probably a public park. Not much in the way of artefacts in the ground so that’s why we set ourselves up here. But we are literally surrounded by the city. Do you see it?” They looked as he pointed out the green-sloped hills and valleys all around them.

Iokan gasped. “I see it,” he said.

“What city?” asked Liss. “This is still country!”

“Oh, sure, it’s countryside now,” said Ren. “But look at the hills and valleys. What do they remind you of?”

“Oh, that can’t be…” said Olivia as she realised what she was seeing. “Gods… those can’t be… streets? Can they?”

“Streets?” asked Pew. “I don’t see it…”

“This is a city… and no one has lived here for a very long time…” said Kwame, looking down the long valley, peppered with trees, that stretched away in front of them and ran down towards the meeting of the rivers. At several points, other valleys seemed to be crossing the first.

“Where is it?” demanded Liss. She happened to be looking at Katie at the time.

“The buildings surround us. Their degradation indicates complete reclamation by natural forces,” said Katie.

“You still don’t see it?” asked Ren. Liss shook her head. Ren pointed at the hills. “All those hills used to be buildings. And all the valleys used to be streets. It’s been so long since it happened that soil’s been laid down over the whole area. And this, my dear, is what’s left.”

VISITOR GUIDE: CITY 53 ‘KINTREX’

Summary

‘Kintrex’ was discovered by satellite geomagnetics, which detected the distinctive shapes of streets and buildings underneath the landscape. From the air, the pattern becomes quite recognisable: a complex of hills and valleys that have no watercourses to indicate natural formation, and are strongly suggestive of an urban landscape.

The site is well placed at the confluence of two rivers, and surrounded by land that could once have supported a wide variety of agriculture. It is too far inland to be a major port city, but at least two minor tributaries to the river have unnaturally straight courses, suggesting a canal system may have linked cities in the region.

All the archaeological work done so far has confirmed the initial expectation of an urban centre of middling size, covering approximately 110 km2. Population may have ranged between 250,000 and 400,000. Excavations in the centre of the city have revealed a rather well-preserved commercial district, while a number of residential areas have also been uncovered. Major industry has yet to be seen, and excavations to find the industrial zones are ongoing.

The area was served by an extensive system of fixed railways, many of which are embedded into the road network. The roads themselves are of surprisingly poor quality outside the central area, suggesting that private transport was relatively rare in this society. As the railways are easy to discover with geomagnetic techniques, it has been possible to reconstruct almost the entire network.

One thing the site lacks, along with most others we have investigated, is any great number of human remains. While we have discovered some skeletons inside dwellings, these are the exception rather than the rule. We believe the city was abandoned before or shortly after the asteroid impact, and that the site was never re-inhabited, as we have seen no cannibalisation of building materials that would be expected during a reconstruction period. While some have speculated that the inhabitants were evacuated by an IU-like organisation, we have no evidence for this. It is more likely that the people of the city fled and perished in attempts to reach safety. It is impossible to say where they fled to, or how long they survived.

While excavations are still ongoing, some exhibits from Kintrex are now on display in Hub Metro. Certain portions of the site are open to diplomatic visitors, school groups and members of the public. Please be sure to book at least a month in advance, as this is a working archaeological site and arrangements have to be made to accommodate your visit.

Ren led the group into the city, along paths marked by hi-vis gossamer strung between floating lights, paths they were warned to stay on in case of ground collapse. Myself and Veofol brought up the rear, and let him do his job.

“A lot of the underground spaces in the city collapsed a long time ago but a lot of them didn’t,” said Ren. “You never know when you’ll stumble on a basement that wants to give way. So stay on the path, boys and girls. I’ve got eight of you on the start of the tour and I want eight of you when I finish the tour.”

The path led along the middle of an ancient street long since turned into a narrow green valley, until we rounded a corner and saw a long excavation covered by a canopy and bounded by safety lines. “This part of the site is pretty well compressed,” said Ren. “So it makes it easy to see all the layers. Okay, everyone needs to take a safety helmet from the rack before they board the platform. Mind your step.”

We took helmets and walked onto a floating platform in the middle of the trench. Ren lowered us the four metres to the base. A readout flickered into life along the rails keeping us from the trench walls, showing the estimated date of the deposits at each level. “This whole section of earth was shipped back to Hub Metro for the exhibition,” said Ren. “But you can still see the basic strata — the layers where one set of deposits were laid down and you can find artefacts from that era. Down here” — he crouched to indicate a lighter layer of earth, close to the bottom of the trench, dated to 48,300 years before the present — “is where settlement begins. We’ve found pottery and middens at this level, so we reckon the site was inhabited by stone age peoples…”

“Um. What’s a midden?” asked Pew.

“Rubbish pit. That’s where they’d drop food waste, broken pots, and so on. Stone age peoples weren’t big on recycling.”

Pew nodded. As a child, he probably used them himself. “Yeah, okay, I know what you mean.”

“And heading up, you’ve got some more advanced iron age stuff — for some reason they skipped bronze at this site,” said Ren, setting the platform to slowly rise past unremarkable clay to a blackened layer, “then at some point the settlement was burned to the ground, I mean a total loss, complete disaster. Maybe the city was sacked, maybe it was natural — we just don’t know yet. All we’ve got is this black, flaky stuff here. That’s charcoal from wooden buildings. And then, going up” — he raised the platform again — “you can see they rebuilt — see that line of stones? That’s the foundations of something a lot more serious than wooden construction and it’s typical for the period. Maybe they learnt their lesson, huh? But really, we think the place was mainly military for a while, and all the stone was for defensive reasons. Once you get above that” — he tapped the controls and we rose once more, past the stone layer — “the settlement expands and expands and pretty soon you’ve got a major city again. We think most of it was technology driven — steam, probably — or maybe the politics changed and suddenly they didn’t need to be so scared of the neighbours. Either way, that takes us up into the anthropocenic stuff, which is when people really take charge of the landscape, and we’re not so far down any more so it’s less compressed. You’ve got the underground infrastructure around here, like utility pipes, cabling, all the infill around them and so on. There, you see?”