Part 40: Fit The Thirty-Sixth : The Sprawl

Fit The Thirty-Sixth : The Sprawl


Funkytown's combined centenary and millennium celebrations went off without too many problems, though the free concert given by 80s one-hit wonders Pseudo Echo raised a few eyebrows, especially when they played the one song anyone really remembered them for.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8ae0gdXf5E

How was I supposed to give a dignified speech after THAT? But anyway. No-one seemed to think it was too weird that the city had had the one mayor for all of its hundred years, indeed some of the attendees - too many, in fact - took great delight in reminding me of all my pratfalls over the years. The "We're Fucking Awesome!" speech was a particular favourite of citizen, even though I'd been trying to blot that from my memory. I was having tough luck with that.

I just wanted it to end. But, apparently, I still had a job to do.


At least we got some funky new technology which meant that we could actually get energy out of the waste that we were incinerating. This was good because since all the garbage we couldn't recycle was being burnt anyway, but now it would provide a nice backup for all the nuclear plants.


I ordered two of the things to be built as soon as I could, and more of these would be installed as the old-school incinerators outlived their usefulness.


There. Perhaps not all that much of a contribution by themselves, but being able to combine two utilities in one facility was gold.


We were running out of the space on the flat, so some more of the space around the airport was allocated to housing.


I actually decided to lower the residential tax rate to 4%. Did this have the desired effect?


Apparently not. You're getting a bargain for living in my beautiful town, you ungrateful jerk!


And so in 2001, Funkytown finally clocked over the half-a-million mark.


A quick assessment of the power plants showed the new incinerators were playing their role in not allowing the nuclear plants to overload and go BOOM.


Not that wasn't the only thing that could go BOOM in town, so I thought that renaming the High Tech Doozibob to something more appropriate would be appropriate.


Damn, these years were flinging by ... like sands in an hourglass.


The last unsullied part of Boot Hill was being zoned up...


But, HARK! Here was still a nice hunk of land on the southern plateau that had yet to be paved under.


I decided to have a nice scenic route built just on the verge of the hill.


Before we got to work on subduing the final frontier in Cat's Corner.


I started off with a basic town centre; school, police station, that kind of thing.


A quick return to town; the tenements near the port were flattened to make way for more office high-rises.


And, goddammit, another whirlpool. Why was this even happening in the river?


One of the town planning guys got creative with the new estates, I'm not sure whether he was trying to summon the Chaos Gods or what, but I had to admit it looked kind of cool. The pizza delivery boys might have a different opinion, of course.


To be honest I'd nearly forgotten about that corner. That guy who kept taking aerial pictures of the city from exactly the same viewpoint certainly had, you could barely see what I'd done there.


Boxy, but safe.


2006? Shit. Time flies when you're having fun I guess.


Cat's Corner expanded rapidly, though a reserve was set about one of the craters from the space junk attack a few years back.


OK, I'm getting pretty sick of these swirly bastards.


The most annoying part was that the latest whirlpool took out the high-tension power lines over the river. I had two for redundancy just in case, and for whatever reason they weren't easy to place. Some crap from the engineers about disrupting local buildings, like that was a huge consideration for me.


Once again the subway system was falling behind the growth.


Because we were all cashed up, though, it was almost trivial to extend a couple of the lines into the new territories.


The airport was actually being overcrowded, so I decided to evict some of the new estates I had zoned only a few years back to make room for a second runway. Captain Foresight, that's me.


Greville and his smelly pals turned up to drop a petition off at my desk, so I had to listen to them rabbiting on about how I needed to plant more trees or park something like that, even though that was what I generally did with any bit of land I didn't see any other use for.

There was no point being a big ol' jerk about it, even though being a big ol' jerk had contributed a good amount to my success. So I made a point of at least reading the executive summary of the report out loud to them, commented on the texture and quality of the recycled paper they'd used, and then told them to bugger off.


2010, can you believe that? There weren't any challenges left for me. Basically I'd paved the whole county, I was just filling in the gaps and indulging in weird planning schemes like the Domino Drivers' Doom Estate, and of course making vast shitloads of money that I didn't know what to do with.


I mean, we were doing pretty well, but I'd almost welcome some big fucking meteor or alien invasion just to keep me on my toes.


If they did come for a visit, though, them goddamn googly-eyed Martians had better not steal my hot bitches.