Consider the Arcologies

1.

In the computer game SimCity 2000, there are four pixelated structures that are the apex of the metropolis. They are called "arcologies". An arcology is a real architectural concept with its own long history, that his been described with respect to the game. It is a self-contained city-building of some 150,000 pixelated souls. I am, in this particular moment uninterested in the pre-history of the buildings, but rather taken with what it is like inside them, which you must make up yourself, as the game never shows you. So here, I am going to be an impossible flâneur. 

By the way, at the end of the game you choose to launch the arcologies into space. You abandon the metropolis that you have spent hundreds of hours balancing and maintaining. In SimCity 2000, the apex of the metropolis is its death. Cue the accelerationists. Cue Tacitus by way of Gibbon. We are all, in the end, some simulacrum of the bad emperors.

2. 

Each of the arcologies has a name and a distinct set of features. The first you can build is called the Plymouth Arcology, presumably in reference to Plymouth Rock and the American pilgrims, if the American pilgrims were cyperpunk proto-Borg beings who never went outside. All the walls in the Plymouth Arcology are screens. There are some limited outward facing windows, at a steep slope, in front of which the elite like to stand for cocktail parties to see the lights of the city below, which in their minds is already a necropolis. They wear something like Rick Owens, but made of translucent skin. The draping is very similar. There are also those boots that sort of turn your leg into a tube for the shoe.

Anyway, the difference between the Plymouth Arcology, and its sister structure, the Darco or Darcology, versus the other two grey structures with translucent caps, is like the difference between the Vatican and the Orthodox Church. The schism is immediately evident, irreconcilable, and also incidentally, calendrical. They have increasingly divergent holy texts, and ways of measuring time. On the Plymouth Arcology, which is also a 90's alarm clock with digital red numbers that you watch all night, time is conceptualised in iterations of reboots and series. The citizens of the Plymouth Arcology trace themselves back to the citizens of the second or third Shard in London. For this, they often brandish complicated tapes of history and place elaborate notarised certificates on the walls. From the certificates hang the relevant USB sticks and SIM cards, ancient, like medieval wax seals, and the occasional papal bull.

3.

The Darco or Darocology is the natural evolution of the Plymouth Arcology. You can only build the former after the latter exists in the gameworld. It is the Predator of Alien v. Like Byzantine emperors born in the purple, if your family has lived for enough generators in the Darco, you are born in the black. If the citizens of the Plymouth bother with clothing, those of the Darco remind each other that the body is mere flesh, which is also grass. There are no lawns on the Darco. There is no grass. To those truly born in the black, the flesh is ideally translucent to the point of near transparency, so as to highlight the functional web of veins and capillaries, the thoracic and other glorious cavities. The citizens of the Darco take great stock in dreams, and hire oracles and augurs in abundance. The augurs, instead of tracking the flights of birds before important battles, or casting lots, instead look into the venting and infinitesimal crossings of hallways as portents.

If the Procopian Histories were a building they would be the Darcology. The only actual books on the Darco are, of course, ceremonial, but they are bound in handwoven brocade from a single factory in the drowned field of the old Laguna Venetia. They are mostly worshipped by touch anyway, since light in the Darco is low and hums in perpetuity, like a boy choir made of fluorescent industrial overheads. The air smells like oud and toner ink. 

4.

The Forest Arco maintains it hasn't yet abandoned the form of the city. Its governance is very complex, and by intention bureaucratic. Unlike the citizens of the Dome Arcology, who have Platonic metaphysics and all its aesthetic entailments,  those of the Forest Arcology maintain that they are Aristotelians at heart and live in a polis. Of course, it is also an oikos. This is something they like to argue about endlessly. They often traverse the paths around the low lying forest ring as if it is an agora, and not a chain-restaurant space-version of the New York High Line. They enjoy looking through large windows at the streets exponentially far below so as to better hone their comparative theories. To outsiders, whom they occasionally summon as an amusing curio, they are insufferable.

Dinner parties in the Forest Arco are long and cultivated affairs. There are jokes in several languages, including the structure's own argot, engraved onto the spoons. Although all food is formed from centrally grown algae and soy protein, it is given abstract shapes, and often courses are stuffed and hidden inside one another. A fad for the extremes of molecular gastronomy once lead to clear spheres of agar jelly, a kind of aspic, made for each individual guest with a cloned replica of their own right eyeball inside. About this, the epigrams speak for themselves, as in the Forest Arcology, poetry is, at its most elevated, all epigrams. 

5.

The Dome Arcology considers itself to be the apex of arcology culture, which is itself the apex of the city, and so the apex of the apex. That is a lot of apices. This is not to be confused with Apis(es), aka the several unique species of bees that make their hives in the shadows of the Big and Little Rocks. The rocks were designed to resemble, in passing, Yosemite. If the Forest Argo has an argot, difficult to understand for visitors from the city, but in the end still penetrable, the Dome Arco can truly be said to have evolved its own speech. There are sixteen cases of noun, and the act of conjugating every form of a common verb can take up to an hour. As such, speech aloud is infrequent, but a great and well-honed art. 

There are no windows in the Dome Arcology, not because the citizens dislike light, which they get in abundance from the eponymous Dome, but because they no longer have any interest in the activities of the city from which they have ascended. Erasure is revered in the Dome Arcology, which is to say making oneself clean of one's ultimately and unfortunately terrestrial origins. While the Darco prefers the extreme visibility of the body, the Dome practises its complete effacement. The Vestals of The Lake have never been touched, and shoot straight from the cryovats into obscuring veils of white that flare up like the gowns in a Whistler portrait. It is debated, amongst experts in the city below, whether the Vestals still have faces.

Everything inside the Dome Arco is lush and green. Days of the week are designated by their types of hydration. There is an entire corpus of song, faintly Theocritan, devoted to the qualities of mist, and the beauty of the droplet. If you were to mistake the leaves of the Dome for rough bucolics though, you would be sorely mistaken. Every vein, every frond, is perfectly and intentionally placed. The conifers on the top of the structure serve as absolute proof of Predestination. 

6.

It is said there is no man living in the city that has been to all four arcologies, except the architect, who is long dead. Each of the arcologies maintains a different founding architect, but the records suggest, in the end, that it was only one. It is also said that the architect, after completing the final arcology, slit their wrists in the bath, but this is a myth entirely, just as elephants crossing the Alps were, or the existence and rules of the Babylonian Lottery. The city did not force the planning of the arcologies on the architect unwillingly or under any sort of duress. When they blast off, each of the arcologies sears the earth uniquely; a scarification, or, as is written in the corner of a lost blueprint, a form of prayer.