A hundred years of artificial intelligence facilitation has dried up the resources of the sector, building weather adapters that steal all the condensation from the sky leaving only dust and sand and scorched earth. People don’t have access to water- they drink SweatTM. Repurposed “purified” water from human bodies that are paid below minimum wage by the Ziphir Corporation to sit in a sauna- a furnace- to dry out into a receptacle. The equivalent of donating blood. Easiest money there is. Most who frequent the work, however, don’t make it to a fourth shift.
In the city, the sky is a screen dictating when to get up and when to lie down. All menial jobs are done by clankers. Almost all actual work is done by clankers. The classes are segregated as the haves and the havenots- those with real jobs and those paid under the table in the hopes of acquiring one. Opportunities for the poor consist of bodyguarding, hitmanning, drugrunning, bootlicking- unless you're a savant of some sort that can provide entertainment AI cannot. If you have money then most purchases are made on a subscription service fronted by one of the Big Tops- Almutech, Shoppie, Heynow, and Credlend- or priced out of range- even food services are subscription-based.
Many Alam-Suf citizens spend their time logged-in to the feed where they live out AI-designed fantasies earning e-creds to sustain them until their bodies inevitably waste away and their “soul” remains as an imprint in the Alam-Suf cyberspace. Others that work in a criminal field and get caught are thrown into one of the city’s Dens to await AI judgement, which can take up to 10 years. Anyone judged guilty is given to the Ziphir Corporation to work off their debt. If you don’t get caught and don’t make too many enemies, then maybe you’ll find a way to make a life for yourself here…
A common lifestyle is to live in a dingy one-bed apartment with a shitter and no shower, especially for those living in T-block, the block owned by the Tenerin Company, where the bulk of stories take place. There are about a dozen 15 to 20 floor concrete apartment buildings similar to one another that contrast the five neon-rail-fitted spiral corpo buildings scattered between them. This is the hallmark of Tenerin design. Each apartment has crooked neon signs advertising low, low interest on credit loans with a clanker tending the front desk. If it's a nicer building they may have a vacdrone picking up the lobby. The sky above Alam-Suf is a screen set pure, blinding white during the day with a gradual fade to deep blue at night. The streets below are hologlass, making a show of the intercity Shootaton bullet trains that the average scum could never afford a pass for. The traffic on these streets is mostly unregulated self-drivers, however every five minutes cybarriers materialize at intersections to allow citizens to cross. They have one minutes to race to the other side before the barrier falls and the cars rush out. At least once a day, however, the cybarriers raise for a different reason. The sky flashes red with a warning: "IMMINENT WEATHER APPROACHING" followed by a delay timer signifying that a sandscare is going to roll across the block. This event can be heard miles away even through the bustle of the city, with 84 mph winds carrying all kinds of dust and debris from the wastes outside the city with enough force to tear flesh down to the bone for any unlucky enough to be caught outside during it. Once it passes, sanducts open along the street shoulder and drain the sand deep below the underground stations, to a level of the city long since abandoned.