Elon Gation

The air in the Upper Tier of New Colwyn was always scrubbed to a crisp, artificial sweetness. Down below, in the choked concrete canyons of the old council estates, it tasted like diesel and damp ash.

It’s been 15 years since Covid 24 struck—they finally got it right. I say ‘they’ as it wasn’t just the governments, the big corporations were involved too. They finally found a virus that killed the poor. Covid 23 wiped out the gays, the trans, the non-binaries—The Gay Plague some called it. AIDS 2.0 said others. It wasn’t the virus that killed them of course, it was the “vaccination”—I hate using my fingers as inverted commas like some poncy twat, but that’s the only way to describe the “vaccination”. With the NHS in the hands of corporations, a “special” (there I go again!) vaccine was administered to anyone who fell under the Covid 23 remit—plus anyone else the government and big corps found undesirable. Those targeted with the “special” vaccine soon showed symptoms and were quarantined in purpose built Convalescent Homes, each with a crematorium annex.

That’s how the Transglobal Underground was formed—a safe haven for the survivors of Covid 23.

Still, life is good if you’re one of the elite, or you tow the line and fit in. Not so good if you’ve voiced an opinion that differs from theirs.

But Covid 23 was just the beta test. The real masterstroke came with Covid 24, and it wasn’t designed to kill immediately. It was designed to clean up the "demographic deficit."

The corporate-state alliance called it Project Civic Renewal, but on the ground, we just called it the Postal Code Purge. They didn’t need complex DNA sequencing to target the social underclass; they just used the NHS central database and cross-referenced it with postcodes. If your address registered in a rundown estate, a dodgy high-rise, or a regional town the Ministry of Finance had written off a decade ago, your mandatory Covid 24 vaccine batch number started with a 'G'.

The effects were subtle at first. The "chav mummies"—as the Upper Tier tabloids loved to sneer—who already had five or six kids, suddenly found they couldn't conceive another. The real horror, the quiet one, settled in when their teenage kids grew up.

A whole generation of council estate youth, raised on cheap energy drinks and survival instincts, found themselves completely hollowed out. No pregnancies. No sudden scares. The estates, usually deafening with the sounds of screaming toddlers, barking staffies, and tinny music blasting from tinier speakers, began to grow eerily quiet.

The government celebrated it behind closed doors as the ultimate cost-cutting measure. No more child benefits to pay. No more social housing to build. The underclass problem, engineered to vanish within a single generation.

I stood on the balcony of a twenty-storey block in what used to be the Peulwys Estate, watching the sunset bleed a toxic orange across the Great Orme and sea. Below me was the Last Playground—a concrete patch where the paint on the swings had peeled away to rusted iron.

There were no children playing. The youngest person on this estate was eighteen, and he spent his days staring at his hands, knowing his bloodline ended with him.

"They're flattening the houses on Highlands Road tomorrow," a voice said behind me.

It was Llion. He was a survivor of the Covid 23 sweep, smuggled out of a Convalescent Home by the Transglobal Underground before the crematorium chimneys could smoke. He wore a heavy high-vis jacket—the universal uniform of the invisible working class.

"Why?" I asked, not really needing the answer.

"Fewer people means less space needed," Llion spat, sucking on a smuggled, highly illegal vape. "They’re zoning it for luxury smart-flats. For the corporate mid-managers. People with 'approved' genetic and financial profiles."

"They're wiping us out without firing a single bullet, ethnic cleansing" I muttered.

"Then we change the ammunition," Llion said, his eyes reflecting the dying orange light. He pulled a small, silver stasis-vial from his heavy jacket pocket. It gleamed under the shattered balcony light.

The Transglobal Underground wasn't just a network of safe houses anymore; it had become a rogue laboratory. While the government thought they had successfully sterilized the "undesirables," locally, our underground medics—the struck-off doctors and rogue corporate scientists who still had a conscience—had been working in Bryn Elian, the abandoned secondary school. This was the case in major towns and cities across the world.

"Is that the counter-agent?" I whispered.

"The synthesis is complete," Llion nodded, a grim smile touching his lips. "It won’t reverse what they did to the older generation, but for the kids? The eighteen and nineteen-year-olds? It rewrites the corporate blockers in their system. It restores the future they tried to steal."

The plan was simple but incredibly dangerous. We couldn't distribute it via clinics—everything was monitored by biometric scans and corporate AI. We had to contaminate the Upper Tier's exclusive supply lines, or better yet, weaponize the delivery system, introducing the counter-agent into the very water treatment plants that supplied the outer sectors.

The elite wanted a sterile, compliant world where the poor simply ceased to exist, leaving behind just enough automated drones to clean their streets and maintain their servers. They thought they had engineered the perfect corporate utopia.

I looked down at the silent, empty streets of the estate. Tomorrow, the bulldozers would arrive at Highlands Road. But tonight, the Underground was moving.

"Let's go," I said, stepping off the balcony into the dark. "It's time to give this country its noise back."