Monotopia

Morning in the Hidden City crept across the mountains ringing it on two sides, casting tall, toothy shadows through the valley. Out in the streets, two children armed with Birdcage rifles and desert-knives fought playfully. Despite how violent the conflict grew, neither perished or was even seriously injured; the nanites in their blood pushed the bullets out and sealed the wounds with a thin metal sheen until they could coax the flesh into repairing itself. One of their bullets shattered a window in a nearby shop, and the owner emerged to scold the children and chase them off, grumbling about direspect.

A woman awoke with the light of the Sun. She kissed her sleeping wife on the forehead and traced a finger down the scars on her upper arm; mementos of her life in Monazite, before she discovered Drexer by sheer chance and was whisked away by them in the night. On her way out of the room, the woman tapped on a metal plate next to the door; the pitch-black shades lowered to cover the windows, plunging the room into a darkness even the nights here could not replicate.

Down by the city's Intake Center, more colloquially known as the Welcome Wagon, a man stood before the closed doors, tapping his fingers on his leg as he waited impatiently for the morning's eighth hour to come. He checked his silver pocketwatch once, then twice, and had to stop himself from checking a third time two minutes later. Despite himself, he found himself almost missing Rockwell, poisonous as it was; at least there most people were punctual .

Near the water intake and processing plant, three figures slipped out of a dry concrete pipe, carrying a duffel bag between them. They were greeted by a sleep-deprived watchman who had to take a few minutes to process their presence. His exhaustion melted away when they unzipped the bag and held it up, bathing his cramped watch house in the watery blue light of constrained Cherenkov radiation. He laughed, lightly at first, then merrily and pressed the button that would summon his supervisor.

In the heart of the city, the only area of the place you could truly say never slept, a doctor filled a syringe with shimmering silver powder suspended in saline solution. She turned to her patient - an individual from Birdcage with the rended wounds of an explosive decorating the left side of their body - and slid the needle under their skin. She could feel the buzz of the nanites as they activated, recognizing damaged tissue and kicking into their programming. A metallic sheen covered the wounds, and slowly, ever so slowly, began to knit them shut.

The city of Drexer reigned another day.