Microstory 2465: Steampunk Sanctuary

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It’s steampunk everywhere, so I hope you like steampunk! I sure do, but you’re not here to hear about who I am. What you really wanna know is if this place is any good. Does it live up to the spirit of steampunk culture? Why yes, yes it does. Because of course it does. It’s one of the easiest themes to implement, and it doesn’t take much to please the fans. To the ignorant, it may seem like nothing more than an aesthetic. You have brass, and you have steam. How nuanced could it be? But it’s actually a way of life, and one which we’ve never been able to explore at scale. Steampunk communities have existed for centuries, but by the time the technology was available to simulate it in base reality, there really wasn’t any practical space for it. Humanity was trying to rewild the world. We built vertically, and left the majority of the land to the plants and animals. Steampunk survived, but a city based on the concept wasn’t feasible. We could have fought it, and declared independence somewhere, but we understood the reason for shrinking the amount of area that humans were taking up, so we played ball. We limited ourselves to small corners of the arcologies, wherever we could find room. But those modern walls...they were still there, made up of their superadvanced metamaterials. We were only actors in a play, pretending as best we could, but knowing that there was nothing authentic about it. Enter Castlebourne, Stage Right. This is the perfect setting for us; a blank canvas that we can paint however we want. We’re using steam to power our technology, from trains to computing machines. It’s not efficient, but it is fun, at least for us. It’s not for everyone. But the best part about it is you don’t have to live here permanently. You can just visit. You might hate it, and want to leave right away, and that’s fine. Nonetheless, you might find yourself enjoying it a little, and maybe want to stick around longer. That’s great. There’s plenty of room. We have everything they have anywhere else. It just looks a little different. And it’s loud. Some people don’t like how loud it is, but that’s what you get in a world without transistors. I can’t get enough of it. The VR steampunk worlds were great, but nothing beats something you can feel in your real hands. That’s the whole ethos with steampunk. It felt like cheating to immerse ourselves in a computer simulation to live in a world where computers exist without the computer chip. Now we don’t need that anymore. Now we can be ourselves...truly.