#standard tower

Standard Tower is the official headquarters of the Company Standard, the sole providers of air and water, plateen and power, to the European continent since the 27th century. At over three hundred stories in height, it is the tallest building in the empire by nearly fourteen hundred feet. The Caron Building in Paris is the second-tallest skyscraper in the Three Cities. With far more to impress than simply its reach, Standard Tower’s cutting-edge plateen facades are complimented by the most extensive and diverse collection of salvaged pre-Fall architecture anywhere in the Three Cities. The power to light its serene, uninterrupted glow is equivalent to the consumption of the city of Vienna. Indeed, it would not be unreasonable to think of the Tower as a sixth city in its own right—the crowning jewel in Konstantin’s diadem of Edena, Paris, Geneva, Vienna, and Amsterdam. Public tours are available of the Tower’s hundreds of gardens and museums, as well as the battlements and observation decks above the Cloud Line.

Standard Tower is located in northwest Edena—which itself lies just north of the Alps, near the German-Austrian border of late antiquity. The Tower rises from the first large bend in the river Kam, across from the public green of Standard Park and the aristocratic cemetery of Cooper’s Hill. It is at the top of that hill that Emperor Harold-Konstantin Edel, the builder of Standard Tower, is buried.

The Tower was constructed in the mid-27th century, around the time of the creation of the Archtrusteeship of Vienna. Schloß des Meers was built contemporaneously, in celebration of the inception of the Continental Empire under Konstantin I. The palace was intended to symbolize the newly minted imperial crown, while Standard Tower would be the practical seat of Company power. Quarterly meetings of the Board of Trustees are held in the secluded neighborhood at the top of Standard Tower, with each Trustee or Archtrustee granted private apartments in that court wedged between Edena’s clouds and the Chairman’s sky. The Emperor’s Residence is also located on these top floors of the Tower, but the relative division of the Chairman’s time spent there as compared to Schloß des Meers has varied by imperial taste and contemporary politics.

Between classes, in the time they should have been showering after hours at drill in Discipline and Fitness, they’d climb the stairs and smoke out on the roof.  The wind whipped at that altitude, sweeping the hair up their foreheads and jangling the buttons on their half-opened uniforms.  They stood in silence or kicked bits of scrap back and forth, surveying the kingdom that lay at their feet.  One of the techy kids would boot-strap a patch on her wireless and stream territory music that was banned in the dormitories.  Sometimes Gorenin’s cousin, Istvan, even brought up the little flask of gin he’d smuggled in from the City.  They’d pass it around, pretending to be drunk on a few swallows when they knew it was only the dizzying height, playing tricks on their veins.  

Other than Gorenin and one of the girls—a Director’s daughter called Jo—Ferdinand had never much gotten on with the Academy crowd.  It wasn’t that they were mindlessly patriotic—they weren’t—or that they bought into the virtues the Academy was supposedly instilling in them—they didn’t—but that their minds lived in other places, far from his own.  The disaffection his friends felt was for their own captivity, for the waste of what they saw as the best years of their lives in an outdated school with a draconian curriculum; for the limited access they had to the concerts and art houses and coffee shops enjoyed by their Republican counterparts; for the stifling culture of an older generation that pervaded Standard Tower.  

Ferdinand could sympathize, of course.  These things had, and still did, trouble him greatly.  But there was something transparent about the despair of his school friends, these future Trustees and Managers, Directors and Generals.  Their anger was transitory.  Yes, they resented it: that the currency paid for the prosperity of their twilight years would be the vigor of their youth.  But deep down, under the trappings of their trust-funded rebellion, they held some comfort in the certainty of the prize.  Although he could not have put a name to it then, Ferdinand never shared their sense of anticipation.