audio audioduration (s) 2.52 10.5 | text stringlengths 10 152 |
|---|---|
Good evening. | |
Tonight's story is called The Underwater City. So, snuggle up under the blankets and prepare for a wonderful night of sleep. | |
And, once you're all settled in, close your eyes. | |
The city of Kremenos is unlike any other city in the world. | |
If you woke up in one of the many one-bedroom apartments downtown, you might think that you were in New York or Tokyo when you looked out the window. | |
You would see tall, glassy skyscrapers reaching toward the sky and shading the streets far below. | |
If you listened carefully, you would even hear the gentle chatter of more than 30 million people as they headed to work. | |
If you were in the top penthouse suite, in the apartment building at the corner of 1st Street and 1st Avenue, you might be confused. | |
From here, you can see both the Eiffel Tower and Empire State Building at the same time. | |
The city of Kremenos was built as a mosaic of some of the world's biggest cities. | |
the Dancing House of Prague, and the Gateway Arch of St. Louis. | |
What really sets this city apart from all others is what you would see when you look up to the sky. | |
and you would never see dark Nimbostrasse clouds forming above you before a rainstorm. | |
When you step outside, you would never need an umbrella or a jacket. | |
Since the city's founding in the year 2300, every day has been dry and mild. | |
Kremenos is the world's first underwater city. | |
that was voted Most Beautiful Vacation Destination 45 years in a row. | |
It only made sense for the founders to give this city a Greek name like Atlantis, the city that inspired its design. | |
The founders decided on the name Kremenos from the Greek word meaning hidden. | |
The climate is controlled with artificial lights that replicate the rising and setting of the sun. | |
to support the city's population about the size of Shanghai. John was among the first generation of people to be born in Kremenos. | |
His parents had originally migrated to the city located on the ocean floor off the coast of Madagascar. | |
When John was a child, he used to wonder what the above-ground world was like. | |
His parents would tell him stories about their cross-country trips across America to places like Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Canyon. | |
He begged his parents to take him to America when he was younger. | |
But, by the time he was a teenager, he had completely lost the desire to go abroad. | |
He had watched enough movies from around the world to know that Kremenos was as beautiful as anywhere. | |
John had worked as a window cleaner ever since he was 15 years old. | |
Every morning, he was emailed a list of places that needed to be cleaned, on the inside and outside of the glass dome that covered the city. | |
For almost 50 years, he had spent his days driving around the city in his pickup and exploring every nook and cranny. | |
He must have been down every side road and driven around the edge of the glass dome at least a thousand times in his life. | |
The city was modeled after 32 of the most famous cities in the world. | |
Even though he had never been to any of those cities himself, from what John had heard, each district was almost identical to the original. | |
Overall, the city was somewhere between the size of Singapore and Hong Kong. | |
Now that he was less than six months away from retirement, he probably knew the city better than anyone. | |
He knew where to get the most mouth-watering slices of pizza in New New York. | |
He could also tell you which rooftop in tiny Tokyo offered the best view of the schools of hundreds of thousands of herring that swam by during the day. | |
where he got to meet the locals and learn a bit of their languages. | |
As much as he enjoyed the work, he looked forward to spending retirement lying on the sandy beaches in Little Lisbon or the Melbourne district. | |
with his eyes closed, and listen to the seagulls flying around him. | |
He could even spend an entire day watching the schools of fish swim by the city. | |
Now that his time in the workforce was almost finished, it was his responsibility to train his replacement. | |
On the day he was supposed to meet his successor, John's alarm went off at its usual time of five o'clock. | |
He took a deep breath before hitting snooze twice. | |
and walked to the window of his small one-room apartment. He pulled open the curtains. | |
but the neon glow of lights from the clubs and bars on the street below cast a gentle glow around his apartment. | |
He yawned and rubbed his eyes. He lived in the part of town modelled after Chicago. | |
To give the area a more authentic feel, giant fans were added to the roof of the dome to replicate gusts of wind. | |
It was the only part of the city where you could experience something similar to a natural breeze. | |
However, other parts of the city also had man-made weather substitutes. | |
spreading synthetic snow around the streets and build up snowbanks next to the sidewalks. | |
There was even a small outdoor skating rink designed to look like a natural pond. | |
In the summertime in 2nd Seoul, sprinklers attached to the roof of the dome would turn on for a couple of hours to replicate rain showers. | |
If you were unlucky enough to get caught in them, your clothes would cling to your skin as you ran back home for a dry outfit. | |
and added milk that came from a dairy farm at the edge of town near New Cairo. | |
He also sprinkled in pieces of dried seaweed collected by fishermen from the city. | |
After he had a cold shower to help wake himself up, he changed into his work uniform. | |
He wore a pair of raggedy denim overalls with his name sewed into the chest. | |
and the street lights were turning off one by one. | |
where the faint glow of the real sun shone and made the water look almost green. | |
After his retirement, he was planning to take a submarine cruise to London. | |
His friends who had visited had told him that he should save his money and go to the local London district of Cremenos instead. | |
However, he had to see the above-ground world at least once in his life. | |
He wanted to ride the London Eye and see what the view was like when the Eiffel Tower and Empire State Building weren't visible. | |
He wanted to go to all 32 cities to see how they compared to the underwater versions he knew. | |
where his pickup truck, filled with all his cleaning supplies, was located. | |
He drove through the Cape Town district into Prague and then got on the freeway headed to Paris. | |
He turned on the radio to listen to the morning news. Each time he drove through a different district, the language changed. | |
He got off the freeway within view of the Eiffel Tower and drove until he was in the far south end of the city, nicknamed Little Lisbon. | |
This part of the city was one of his favourites. | |
In his opinion, this was where the people were kindest and where he felt most relaxed. | |
It was built around an artificial harbour that flowed to the edge of the dome where there was a beach. There was no water at the beach, however. | |
The sand ended at the edge of the dome, where the actual ocean took the place of where the ocean in Lisbon would be. | |
John cruised slowly through the old part of Little Lisbon with his window down. | |
All along the main road were cobblestone streets, filled with white buildings that had bright red-orange roofs. | |
Shop owners walked along the cobblestone in the early morning light with straw brooms in their hands. | |
They swept away the sand that got tracked into their stores from the nearby beaches. | |
Most of the shopkeepers recognised John, since he was here at least once a week, and they all waved at him with wide smiles on their faces. | |
Hola, bon dia, before putting a tiny espresso cup under the spout of the espresso maker. | |
She buttered two pieces of bread from the display case and carried them to John. They had been friends for years. | |
She had come from Lagos, Nigeria, almost a decade previous with her husband, who worked as an engineer. | |
but there were rumours that it was going to be a South American city. Maybe Sao Paulo or Bogota. | |
John had been hoping that the new district would be Buenos Aires, ever since he saw pictures of Argentina in a magazine last fall. | |
John spent about half an hour eating buttered bread with his coffee while reading the local newspaper. | |
and shouting at each other in Portuguese. The sound of children laughing was relaxing to John. | |
It reminded him of when he was a kid, and used to play soccer in Second Rome with his friends Leonardo and Andrea. | |
After breakfast, John drove to the edge of Little Lisbon, where there were a handful of resorts next to the beach. | |
He parked next to one of the resorts, and walked barefoot to the edge of the beach, where the glass bubble divided the ocean from the city. | |
Seagulls flew overhead inside the dome, and dove at the sand to pick up stray french fries left the evening before. | |
There wasn't a complete ecosystem of animals yet, but that was another project that the city planners were working on. | |
The eventual goal was to populate the city with wildlife of each region. | |
But, for now, there were only common city creatures like seagulls, pigeons, mice, and squirrels. | |
as he took a few moments to collect his thoughts, before his workday officially began at 9am. | |
Outside the glass bubble, thousands of blue fish about six inches long swam by. | |
his retractable squeegee, and his bucket filled with water, to the dome. | |
Before he started cleaning, he inspected the glass around the beach. | |
This was the most important part of his job, inspecting the glass for potential damage. | |
In his fifty years on the job, he had only ever found one crack, and it wasn't even all the way through. | |
The glass was more than three feet thick to withstand the extreme pressure of the ocean. | |
But, every now and then, small sections of the dome would be replaced to make sure that it didn't leak. |
End of preview. Expand in Data Studio
README.md exists but content is empty.
- Downloads last month
- 12