Much like San Francisco and Seattle in the  late 20^th century, Boston remained a fairly consistent secondary-market performer that flirted with greatness on occasion without quite managing to lift it itself up out of the parochial weeds until a technological boom, in this case artificial intelligence, transformed the city and surrounding region into a cultural and economic powerhouse virtually overnight.

Boston already had a thriving economy built on the shoulders of MIT grads and Harvard money, then the first wave of online AI helpers started flooding the internet. Threats of world destruction competed with promises of an amazing future as the media tried to understand technology that its own creators were still coming to grips with. Amidst all this confusion, a small but supremely well-funded and genius-staffed start-up called ComUnity released MyStaff, five customizable robots, each with its own unique AI, designed to work as a team in your home or business at whatever tasks you could program it to do. Subsequent editions accommodated all tastes and budgets, and within a decade, it was rare to find someone who did not have a fully-integrated staff taking care of some aspect of their life. As a result, Boston exploded.

While both San Francisco and Seattle remained consistent in physical size due to geographic constraints, Boston had only the ocean to contain it, and as a result it expand like wildfire to accommodate an influx of fifteen million people in less than twenty years. Portland to the north, Springfield to the west, and all of Rhode Island and Connecticut merged at Albany with the massive Yorkadelphia megalopolis creeping up from the south.

Meanwhile, as the cracks of the city were filling up with people and their stuff, the glaciers continued to melt, and the oceans continued to rise. Like many coastal cities, Boston made huge investments in the latest, greatest technology to keep Mother Nature at bay, much of it coming from ComUnity, the only company able to spare tens of billions without hurting their bottom line. The wealthy citizenry spared no expense either, especially those whose families had been sitting on Beacon Hill or Back Bay property for a century or two. They dug down deep below their properties—regulations be damned—fortifying and waterproofing their little fortresses to withstand biblical floods if necessary. Unfortunately, a different force of nature had also been building strength and would soon render all their preparations meaningless.

The greed for fossil fuels which forced cities to build ocean barriers in the first place, had also driven the fracking boom in its endless pursuit of subterranean oils and gases. As once-premium real estate slowly disappeared in the advancing tides, billions of dollars were wiped out, but billions more had already been invested by private interests buying up everything above the flood plain. With a regulatory system on life support, federal and public lands were scooped up, reclassified, and turned into massive mining sites. Pretty soon the national landscape was dotted with these open wounds, but still they needed more territory. The problem was no was selling anymore. Therefore, they had to get creative and redirected all their combined R & D into extending their reach through lateral drilling. If they could not work the land from above, then they would from next door, and none would be the wiser. And if their reach pushed a little into adjacent territory, some knob with a topside McMansion would never know. This did not bode well.

Disaster was inevitable as years of this continued subterranean thievery eventually turned the bedrock beneath southern New England into Swiss cheese. The tipping point eventually came in the form of a small gas explosion in eastern PA, which started a chain reaction of events following the Ramapo Fault northeast, until it hit Cameron’s Line running north-south through western Connecticut. Already a fractured web of fault lines, everything to the east started collapsing due to the extensive fracking that had sucked the water table dry. The tri-state area turned into a swamp, while Boston turned into an island with a lot of water features.... ...