Babylon: the city closest to hell

[ABSTRACT ONLY; NO FULL TEXT] This piece will be a series of short stories in the sci-fi speculative fiction genre exploring what crime looks like in the year 2072. The sci-fi author and creator of the "cyberpunk" genre, William Gibson, described cyberpunk as being "high tech meets low life". This is exactly what I want to examine in Babylon. The city of Kampala, Uganda has become the most important and largest city of earth by the year 2072. It has been nicknamed "Babylon" for its enormity and opulence. The reason for this is that a "space elevator" has been built there. It's an enormous spire and cable that reaches out beyond earth's atmosphere and has a space station on the end. It allows for comparatively easy space travel and the hauling of minerals from asteroid and lunar mining. This makes it a hub for trade on earth, and wherever there is an abundance of wealth, crime follows. In this sci-fi setting cybercrime has become the preferred method of theft and not all criminals are human. Sentient robots called "synthetics" are a workforce that yearns for something more. The questions of "what is human?" and who deserves rights begin to blur. Humans and synthetics campaign peacefully for rights while terrorists bomb and hack to make their voices heard above the din. The world has never been more advanced, yet it spirals out of control. Each of the short stories will involve different characters from different walks of life. They will all have their own views and experiences with the city of Babylon, but they all reside in the megalopolis. The theories I will be leveraging in these stories will mostly involve post-modernism and Marxism. Synthetic workers are both proletariat and the means of production, throwing a wrench in traditional Marxist theory. With new technologies come new questions of morality and fairness. I will confront these questions in the concrete jungle of Babylon..