Published for the first time "Legend of Kaunas"
Some people think that in 2222 Kaunas will be forgotten... What about Kaunas. All of Lithuania!
They were right.
Not for Kaunas, but for Lithuania - that mystical land from which the ancestors who built the labyrinths of Kaunas' dungeons came.
But Kaunas? No... Kaunas is just different.
The labyrinths of Kaunas' underground - the castle, the streets of the Old Town, the churches, Laisvės Avenue, the neighbourhoods around it, and even that little piece of the confluence where the rivers flow out of the unsealed sewage pipe and flow back in again - all of this has survived.
...It's just that nobody comes here anymore. Only tourists from Berlin, Rome or Paris.
There are not many people with these features. Because there's no one to be here - what are you going to do on the ground floor? Only old architecture or a prostitute. Tourists from the thousandth floor love it - it's fun to go down, breathe the stale air, enjoy the artificial sun in the artificial dungeons of Kaunas, where you can't go further than Aleksotas or Žaliakalnis, because behind these are the foundations of Kaunas.
Then those tourists go back to where they came from. Up. To the beehives, the skyscrapers that define all of Europe. They sit there, eat, sleep, breed and wait for good ideas that will change the world... They wait a long time for those ideas. They can afford it when they are immortal.
There was a time when only Kekto and the Beast were immortal, unheard of for centuries... Then, after the immortality vaccine, everybody became so. Kaunas citizens and suburbanites. They multiplied like grasshoppers in the meadows of Panemunia. They were growing and climbing on each other. Eleven floors of concrete were not enough, so they built thousands of floors of concrete temples!
The faceless construction conglomerate has demolished everything in its path - the Viliampolė cottages, the Aleksotas factories, the Dainava districts, even the Panemune Shiloh.
No big deal, really.
After the mechanical titans drove in suitably gigantic foundations, concreted everything in a three-kilometre radius around the five-kilometre-diameter Kaunas dungeons... They replanted the forests. And they built houses. Movie theatres. Gyms. Five new Žalgiris arenas, five Acropolises, one for every thousand floors.
Now, to get to the Oak Grove, you don't get on the first trolleybus, but one of thousands of lifts and choose your destination - the A1408. The "A" here stands for high.
Once there, you'll find a park of oak trees. Even real bison! Of course, these bison are not alive. Food, air and water are scarce for humans too, so there is no reason to print biological animals. These bison are exact mechanical replicas of the creatures that once roamed the oak forests of Kaunas.
Kaunas has survived. It has changed, but if you ask any of the 30 million people in Kaunas what they think of their city, they will tell you that it is the best in Europe.
Only the Beast, it seems, no one remembers. Although he built his city and holds the foundations of this everlasting city. Not even Kectos, whose symbols adorn the walls of the Kaunas Metropolitan.