The Inverted City: the underside of Titan Station

The Inverted City was the colloquialism for the bottom half of the Public Sector of Titan Station, the orbital city better known as the Sprawl. The Public Sector formed a large semicircle around the Titan Shard, with towering buildings and structures rising from both its upper and lower faces; the lower side was the Inverted City, joined to the upper half by gravity-adjusting elevators. Less crowded than its counterpart above, the district was silenced early in the Necromorph outbreak that consumed the station, and its ruin went unreported while the Upright City still fought for its life. The engineer Franco Delille and the police officer Sarah Andarsyn crossed into the district during the outbreak and found it already dead. Whatever remained of the Inverted City was annihilated when the destruction of the Site 12 Marker tore Titan Station apart.

A city beneath the city#

Titan Station's Public Sector took the form of a vast semicircle wrapped around the Titan Shard, and its architecture grew in two directions at once. Large buildings and structures rose from the upper face of the semicircle and hung from its lower face alike. Residents named the two halves accordingly: the upper became the Upright City, home to the Titan Memorial Medical Center, the waste disposal area, Cassini Towers, the Titan Station Church of Unitology, and the Concourse, while the lower half became the Inverted City.

The two halves were mirror images sharing a single hull. The top floor of any building in the Inverted City was at the same time the bottom-most floor of the Upright City, so that the district hung foundation to foundation with the city above it. Exactly which areas of the Sprawl belonged to the Inverted City, and which elevators could reach it, was never fully recorded.

The name itself was a matter of perspective, a point its own residents apparently understood. As Franco Delille and Sarah Andarsyn rode an elevator down into the district during the outbreak, the two debated whether the people who lived in the Inverted City called the Upright City by that same name. Sarah reasoned that they would, because down was wherever a person's feet happened to be.

Passage between the halves#

Movement between the Upright City and the Inverted City ran through gravity-adjusting elevators. When one of these cars descended past the bottom of the Upright City, it stopped at a gear set into the structure, and the gear rotated the entire elevator upside down before it continued on. From outside, the car could be seen still traveling downward while the silhouettes of its passengers hung inverted, the elevator's gravity switched to match the Inverted City's own. Passengers who boarded in one half of the Public Sector arrived in the other standing upright by local reckoning, without ever noticing that the station had turned over around them.

Life below#

The Inverted City was quieter than its counterpart. Sarah Andarsyn, walking its hallways during the outbreak, remarked that she knew the district was not as densely populated as the Upright City, yet even so it should have looked more crowded than it did. Fewer people made their homes on the underside of the Public Sector than above it. The district nonetheless supported the ordinary institutions of civic life, among them a school of its own, separate from the Titan Elementary School that served the Concourse in the city above.

The silent district#

When the Necromorph outbreak erupted across Titan Station, the Inverted City gave no sign of it. No reports of infection came out of the district at all. Only later was the truth discovered: the Inverted City had been completely wiped out before the Upright City ever became infected. Its silence had not been safety but extermination, and the pattern suggested that the Inverted City may have been the first place the Necromorphs entered the Public Sector.

Franco Delille and Sarah Andarsyn saw that ruin firsthand. Weighing their route toward the hospital and its survivors, the pair chose the longer path across the rim through the Inverted City, hoping to minimize their chances of being attacked, and took a maintenance elevator down. Below, they found two engineers in need of help and discovered that the district's gravity generator had been sabotaged or damaged during the chaos. Sarah dreaded the thought of the creatures moving unrestrained through the district in zero gravity, and Franco improvised a temporary fix that let the two press on.

The Inverted City they entered was still and seemingly devoid of life. Inside a school they found the mutilated bodies of civilians, and when Sarah spotted a panic room she assumed children might be sheltering inside awaiting rescue. Instead she found a Necromorph locked in with a group of dead children. Their superior, Weaver, ordered the school sealed so that the fate of its occupants would never become public and spark a panic. The district claimed one more life soon afterward. As the pair moved on in search of safer ground, Franco, a covert Unitologist agent whose mission to free Isaac Clarke could tolerate no further delay, shot Sarah in the back and executed her where she fell.

Destruction#

The Inverted City did not outlast the station that carried it. When Isaac Clarke destroyed the Site 12 Marker, the explosions that ripped through the Sprawl consumed the Public Sector, and the Inverted City was completely and utterly destroyed along with the rest of Titan Station.