No one remembers the first shovel of dirt turned in 1942. The official paperwork marked it as civil defense infrastructure. In truth, it was the first chamber of a secret womb — one that would grow beneath American soil for nearly a century, quietly gestating a world of its own.
At first, they were nothing more than fallout shelters — gray, claustrophobic cocoons tucked beneath mountains and deserts, meant to cradle politicians through the firestorms of atomic war. When the Cold War froze the globe in a long tension, these bunkers deepened and expanded. They were fortified, stocked, and fitted with laboratories and artificial sunlight arrays. Privately, scientists began to ask: What if we could live down here?
The question became a project. The project became a proof. Plants grew beneath LEDs. Livestock bred in pressure-sealed chambers. A closed-loop ecosystem emerged, fragile but functioning. Volunteers stayed for weeks, then months, then years. When the Cold War thawed, the government didn't shutter the bunkers. It buried them deeper.
Wealth trickled in next. Billionaires bought vaults like vacation homes. By 2020, the elite built entire subterranean townships — luxurious pods of polished steel and simulated sky. Tunnel roads and whisper-quiet maglev trains connected them. Engineers laid down what would become the Underline, an invisible highway grid crisscrossing beneath the continent.
By 2040, underground resorts became the rage for those with wealth and curiosity. Casinos without clocks. Themed parks without sunburns. Subsurface vineyards lit by soft amber panels that mimicked dusk. Then came the exodus: affluent families moved in for good, building homes in domed caverns lit like eternal springtime.
Generations passed. Children born in the depths thought of the surface as a myth — too loud, too hot, too cruel. They invented new slang, borrowed words from old dialects and scrambled them in the echoing chambers of this buried world. Politics shifted too. Elections were no longer decided by U.S. law, but by the Council of Arxen — a self-governing body whose existence was unknown to those above.
Now, in 2087, an entire country exists beneath America’s feet. No satellite has ever seen it. No census has ever counted it. To the surface world, it is a legend — an urban myth whispered about in conspiracy forums.
But down here, under a thousand layers of rock and silence, life hums on. Children chase synthetic fireflies through artificial forests. Markets sell algae cakes and 3D-printed steaks. Trains pulse like blood through long arteries of tunnel. And the people below wonder, sometimes, if the world above still remembers them — or if they ever truly knew.