🌑 THE DOME — SURVIVAL

VESPER • 2677

Welcome to The Dome.

You are not here by choice.

Above you hangs Vespera: a wealthy hive-world of colossal super-cities, endless commerce, luxury districts, casinos, entertainment, and old families powerful enough to treat governments like businesses. Humanity has conquered distance, industry, and scarcity well enough that the rich have begun searching for something harder to manufacture.

Excitement.

That is why The Dome exists.

Built across Vesper, Vespera’s smaller moon, the Dome began as a single sealed prison district and became the most successful survival broadcast in human history. Criminals, political prisoners, condemned citizens, and the occasional volunteer are released into enormous enclosed environments where cameras watch nearly everything.

Millions watch from Vespera. Casinos take bets on who survives the week. Sponsors turn successful contestants into celebrities. Wealthy spectators travel to Vesper just to gamble, drink, and watch the violence unfold beneath them.

You are one of the prisoners.

Your sentence begins in Dome One, the oldest active zone: a sprawling gothic metropolis of rain-blackened streets, towers, alleys, abandoned apartments, industrial blocks, tunnels, overgrown parks, and districts claimed by people who arrived long before you.

There are no guards patrolling these streets.

There don’t need to be.

Food matters. Water matters. Shelter matters. Medicine is valuable, ammunition even more so, and trust can cost more than either. Prisoners form crews, settlements, gangs, markets, and temporary alliances. Some simply disappear into the city and survive alone.

Weapons are deliberately introduced into the Dome, including reproductions and surviving stock from centuries of human warfare. An M16 can exist beside technology manufactured in 2977 because historical weapons are part of the spectacle. Supply drops, smuggling, sponsors, dead contestants, and black markets continually change what can be found.

The checkpoints around Dome One are your closest thing to an exit. Authorized contestants, employees, merchants, smugglers with permission, and other cleared personnel can pass through them.

Prisoners cannot.

Approaching a checkpoint without authorization can earn a warning if you’re lucky. Attempting to cross it earns lethal force.

Beyond those walls, people are eating expensive dinners while betting on whether you will see tomorrow.

Inside them, the city belongs to whoever can survive it.

Find shelter. Scavenge. Trade. Steal. Fight. Build alliances. Betray them. Become someone the audience loves, someone they hate, or someone clever enough to make the cameras lose track of you.

The Dome does not care how you survive.

It only cares that people keep watching.