2558 CE The Line (Arabic: ذا لاين, Magani: Zalayn) is a colossal, partly abandoned arcology located in Earth’s Arabian Desert, straddling the border between Magan and Arabia. Two hundred metres wide and half a kilometre tall on average, the linear city stretches 130 kilometres from a starting point on the Persian Gulf near the town of ilMirfa to a point in the Empty Quarter near 3arada.

Timeline

1. 2004 Inspired by proposed megaprojects in Dubai (ilSabi3), Aldar Properties, Abu Dhabi’s (Abuzabi’s) state-owned property company, announces a series of audacious projects including a ski resort, a theme park based on David Lynch’s iconic Dune trilogy, an “interstellar spaceport”, and, most notoriously, a 130 km linear city spanning the entire north–south width of the country. Only one of these will come to fruition, and it’s not the ski resort.

2. 2006 Construction begins on an initial segment, the nearest to the coast, which includes a luxury resort and sports stadium.

3. 2012 Mission Impossible: Dead Drop features a well-received setpiece in which Tom Cruise is chased by a villain while climbing on the side of The Line.

4. 2013 Though only partly finished, Segment 1 of The Line is declared “open for business” in a grand event headlined by Flo Rida, and families begin moving into its layered promenades.

5. 2014 The United Arab Emirates hosts the World Cup, to much international controversy. The ”The Line Iconiq Stadium”, which hosts a semi-final between England and Brazil, is generally regarded as a surprising architectural highlight, the rest of the building cantilievered daringly over the pitch.

6. 2020 The Line reaches 50% completion. Its insides are sealed off during the orcov-19 pandemic, with no one getting in or out, testing the limits of the arcology concept. It goes okay.

7. 2025 In a glitzy ceremony, President Mohamed bin Zayed al-Nahyan declares the near-finished Line the eighth emirate of the UAE, appointing his son Khaled as its sheikh.

8. Feb. 2026 Black Thursday. The value of crude oil plummets to values not previously considered possible. In Saudi Arabia, King Mohammed finds his heir apparent’s lifeless body at the bottom of a scarlet swimming pool.

9. Mar. 2026 An announcement on the young emirate’s website declares that The Line is finally complete. The front page of the International Herald Tribune shows a picture of Shell’s CEO brandishing a gun.

10. Nov. 2026 Amrita Dandha, a kefala worker from India working at a drone-delivery warehouse in Dubai, is berated, spit on, and severely beaten by a superior for failing to meet quotas. That night, in her minuscule subdivided apartment, she dies of an internal hæmorrhage.

    The incident is caught on video by a coworker, and goes viral on the Arabic-speaking and Indian internet. Mass protests break out. The Magani Revolution has begun.

11. 2027 An area in the barren Segment 18, previously pencilled in for residential use, is rapidly converted into a makeshift fortress for Sheikh Khaled al-Nahyan. He will never leave these 130 kilometres again. In Dubai, rioters parade CEOs through the mile-wide boulevards and force them to kiss the lifeless sheikh’s rotting toes. With no confidence in in the country’s crumbling military, Khaled hires a paramilitary group backed by the Bin Ladens, who are consolidating power in Saudi Arabia, to serve as security forces.

12. 2029 The UAE effectively no longer exists, most of the remaining élites having fled to Oman or retreated to a seastead in the Persian Gulf. Norway becomes the first country to recognise the People of Magan as a sovereign state. The Line stands as the only relic of Emirati power, mostly because anyone within a five-mile radius to its east is swiftly vapourised by Uzbeks in kevlar.

13. 2036 As the local geopolitical situation stabilises, The Line and Magan sign a ceasefire agreement through gritted teeth. Neither recognises the other as a legitimate entity, but at least some of the arcology’s residents can fly their flag at the Olympics.

14. 2050 The Line celebrates its silver jubilee with a Festival of Arts and Culture. The day after the initial lineup of participants is announced, an article in al-Ra’i connects an “unidentified” body found having fallen from the ninety-seventh floor to Yusuf al-Khaja, a dissident journalist imprisoned since 2045. State news dismisses it as a “Jordano-Zionist confabulation”, but 80% of invited artists are unconvinced, leaving galleries clad in empty white walls.

15. 2062 After reading an article about the Chilean Cyberrepublic and its Espíritu Nacional, Sheikh Khaled directs The Line’s department of technology and innovation to develop a technogenically intelligent “genius loci” for the city by uniting its thousands of robotic workers into a single holistic sapient system. The project proves infeasible with the day’s technology; in retrospect, it has been analysed as a major precursor to the naturally emergent genies of Mercury.¹

16. 2064 Khaled al-Nahyan, who somehow looks twice his age at eighty-two, makes his last official public appearance.

17. 2080 American media reports that The Line has banned “laughter that disturbs the public peace”. It turns out to be fake, but an actual ban on “shoes of designs which degrade our culture” flies under the radar.

18. 2100 The Third World War. The Line backs the Profundos, and the ceasefire breaks down. A Magani drone blasts a hole clean through where Khaled’s penthouse is assumed to be, instead killing thirty-eight civilians.

19. 2123 An Egyptian agent slips a deadly neurotoxin into Khaled’s daily nutritional injection. He leaves no obvious successor upon his death, and The Line’s administration devolves into a mess of warring cliques with no clear direction. It takes a month for them to even admit that he’s dead, and though the city remains an “emirate” in name, the position of sheikh will sit vacant for the rest of its lifespan.

20. 2128 A prolonged outage of the water desalination system leads to 400 people dying of dehydration. International organisations decry this man-made drought, but authorities deny everything, and only a trickle of aid is allowed through.

21. 2145 The Line is hæmorrhaging residents. A scorching report in Caixin estimates that some 35% of citizens have left in the past decade, and quotes a analyst from Republican Arabia who calls the ever more dilapidated structure “no longer fit for the basic necessities of life”.

22. 2160 Out of money and out of options, The Line’s government announces “a sunset for the Emirate of The Line’s continued state existence”. A rare physical flyer sent to citizens’ homes sets out a fifteen-year plan wherein each of the city’s twenty-six segments will have utilities and services cut off one at a time, snaking in from the desert to the sea until nothing but the abandoned shell remains.

    Tenancy transfers are offered to a selection of suburban homes on artificial islands in Dammam, Bahrain, and Qatar.

23. 2178 The last bus out departs, carrying residents to their new homes — and only three years behind schedule, too!

    Any remaining holdouts are swiftly “taken care of” by security, and all synthient workers are taken offline, left to stand in perpetuity.

24. 2200s Although The Line has a population of zero and a government consisting entirely of empty chairs, it continues to exist as an international entity on paper, neither part of Magan or neighbouring Republican Arabia. This makes it an attractive spot for international squatters and criminals, who eagerly take up the derelict structure; for most, however, their occupation is transient, the dream of a lawless utopia fast crashing into the reality of fifty-degree temperatures and no indoor plumbing.

25. 2244 The Magani and Republican Arabian governments agree in principle to share sovereignty over The Line’s carrion, closing the favourite loophole of those too dumb to figure out seasteading.

26. 2291 By this time, the tourist trade has resulted in an informal settlement popping up, catering to their needs and/or sucking visitors’ wallets as dry as they can handle. The small town is officially gazetteered as Zalayn City.

27. 2340s The “back-to-Earth” movement is in full swing in the outer worlds, and offworld bohemians, hippies, and squatters begin colonising The Line’s unrefurbished sections, attracted by its long history and ease of connection to several major spaceports. (The authorities generally turn a blind eye, seeing them as better occupants than the previous crisp-kiddies and fraudsters.)

    Centuries in the desert turn out to have preserved the synthients’ circuits quite nicely, and the arcology’s new occupants find that with a little tuning, those who haven’t been sold for scrap are eager to return the complex to livable conditions.

Today, Zalayn (or The Line, however you wish to call it) has largely bounced back from its 23^rd-century nadir. Though nowhere near as populous as it was in its heyday, the roughly 100,000 offbeatniks, eccentrics, and hucksters who call the structure home are quite happy with that — more space for them!

Any given inhabited corner of modern Zalayn is liable to be covered in unfamiliar materials and vivid colours; entire floors play host to elaborate pieces of living technogenic art. But, in its furthest reaches, where the sands of the Rub‘-al-Khali still sit pristine, urban legend has it that you can still find yourself in rusting halls that have lain untouched since 2178.