RFNB - Emergence

 In this episode of Radio Free Neo Babylon, Diogenes explores the Undercity—where survival in the shadows becomes quiet defiance. Through stories of neighbors, smugglers, and healers, Emergence shows how small acts of resilience grow into collective strength against the city’s illusion of order. 

Transcript

Welcome back to Radio Free Neo Babylon. I am Diogenes, your host, speaking from the edges, the cracks, and the places just out of reach.

Neo Babylon, in all its gleaming towers and engineered perfection, is built on a lie—the lie of permanence, of inevitability. Walk through the corporate districts, and you’ll see the world as they want it to be: ordered, efficient, controlled. But beneath that, in the places they’d rather you ignore, is the world as it actually is. And down there, beneath the neon and the surveillance, beneath the carefully curated image of civilization, lies the Undercity.

Now, don’t mistake me—there’s nothing romantic about it. The Undercity isn’t some grand rejection of authority, some utopia of resistance. It’s a place people ended up because they had nowhere else to go. It’s where the unwanted, the unprofitable, and the inconvenient were pushed when the city decided they didn’t belong in the sunlight anymore. People adapt because they have to. They build their own power grids because the Ukkim won’t wire their homes. They create their own markets because the corporations haven’t yet figured out how to monetize it. They learn to survive. After all, survival is the only option they were given.

And still, the boot remains on their necks. The gangs tax them like warlords, the corporations exploit them for cheap labor, and the Ukkim, when it acknowledges them at all, does so only to send enforcers or PR teams promising "integration initiatives" that never materialize. The Undercity is proof of just how much suffering the world is willing to ignore as long as the streets above stay clean.

But here’s the thing: suffering alone doesn’t break systems. Systems only break when people refuse to suffer in silence. When they stop waiting for someone to save them and start solving their own problems. And that’s when the ones in charge start to panic. Not when people fight, but when they stop asking permission.

You see it in small ways. A barricade goes up when a landlord tries to evict a block of workers. A neighborhood shares power when the council leaves them in the dark. A smuggler sneaks medicine in after another corporate clinic shuts its doors. Each act, by itself, is just survival. But together, they tell a story: that the people don’t need their rulers as much as their rulers need them to believe they do.

So where does that leave us? With a choice. Keep waiting for salvation or start looking around and asking: Who is hungry? Who is hurting? Who is unheard? And then do something about it. Not in some grand, world-changing gesture, but in the everyday refusal to let this world grind us down.

I’ll leave you with a couple of stories.

Years ago, I met a sasquatch man in the Undercity, a mechanic who worked out of a crumbling old warehouse. He fixed things—not just machines, but people’s lives. When someone needed work, he found them a job. When a neighbor was sick, he found medicine. I asked him once why he did it, and he shrugged. “Because no one else will,” he said. “And because someday, I’ll need help too.”

I met a harmaku woman who ran a tiny apothecary in a forgotten corner of the city. She wasn’t licensed. She had no formal training. But people came to her because the official hospitals turned them away and because the sanctioned healers charged more than they could ever afford. When I asked her if she was afraid of being shut down, she laughed. “They shut me down,” she said, “and I’ll set up somewhere else. And if they find me there, someone else will take my place.”

Stay direct, stay free, and as always, enjoy the sunshine.