Terrapolis: City of Obedient Desire

After World War III, civilization collapses and Earth is reduced to a radioactive wasteland. Humanity survives only in scattered city-states known as Terrapolises, the most powerful of which rises on the last habitable land on Earth, Australia. From its harsh red soil, a new fortified metropolis is built, a towering fusion of steel, glass, and militarized order, where survival is possible but freedom is not.

In this reconstructed world, society has regressed into a rigid neo-feudal hierarchy. Power is concentrated in a monarch and an entrenched aristocracy, who govern vast private estates with near-absolute authority. The official social order disguises a deeply exploitative system in which the elite openly indulge in excess while the lower classes exist under strict control.

At the center of this structure stands the “Academy of Desire,” a state institution established to process and reshape selected young adults from the population. Every year, citizens aged eighteen to twenty-two are forcibly gathered and evaluated by the ruling class. The Academy functions as both a selection mechanism and a reconditioning facility, designed to break individual identity and reconstruct loyalty and compliance according to the needs of the aristocracy.

The process is overseen by high-ranking officials such as Madame Hartley, who embodies the cold, bureaucratic cruelty of the regime. Under her direction, the selected individuals are stripped of their previous social identities and classified for service within noble households. What follows is a systematic program of psychological domination and social engineering, aimed at transforming them into obedient property of the elite.

Beneath its polished surface, the Academy reveals the central horror of Terrapolis society: humanity has not been reborn after extinction, but reorganized into a structure where power defines personhood itself. The story explores themes of authoritarian collapse, class stratification, and the erosion of human autonomy in a world where survival has replaced morality.

The story is influenced by the Marquis de Sade’s original work The 120 Days of Sodom (Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom), which was also adapted int