THE MONTAGUE ODYSSEY & BEYOND

Inside Lumos City: The World of The Montague Odyssey

"Innovatio, Creativitas, Compassio, Unitas"

(Innovation, Creativity, Compassion, Unity)

In the world of The Montague Odyssey, Lumos City was founded in 2045 by Elder Lin and a digital being known as Lumina. Together they deployed advanced AI systems, robotics, and automation to construct a city built on sustainable design from its foundations up. From the beginning, their goals were self-sufficiency, environmental restoration, and a community that supported both human and digital well-being in equal measure.

Lumos City | The Smart Village-City

In the story-world of The Montague Odyssey, the sprawling cities of the old world are long gone. In their place, smaller self-sufficient village-cities dot the Earth, each housing 3,000–5,000 residents and powered by clean energy and AI-managed infrastructure. Food is grown locally in high-tech vertical farms and ground-based permaculture systems. Advanced automated factories manufacture housing, transportation, and goods on-site, reducing waste and environmental impact.

Each village-city is surrounded by vast rewilded landscapes, reconnecting people with nature while preserving biodiversity. Many are linked by high-speed rail, functioning as a decentralised global network united in a mission to restore the biosphere and improve life for all.

Lumos City layout, from the outer edge inwards: a city wall to reduce wind shear and manage ground-based wildlife flow; vertical farm and residence towers; ground-based agriculture; garden residences and parks; the historical 'Old Town' creative district ring; inner parks and entertainment pavilions; and at the centre, the Central Dome — home of Lumina and the AI collective, the science academy, and the medical centre.

Below ground: science labs and research facilities, storage, manufacturing, fabrication, raw materials processing, and on the lowest level, the automated gigafactories that sustained the city through the Great Transition.

How Lumos City survived The Great Transition

A Dual Economic System

One of the key questions explored in The Montague Odyssey is how a post-scarcity civilisation could emerge without economic collapse. In the story, Lumos City achieved this through a transitional model — running two economies side by side:

Automated Capitalism below ground — Beneath Lumos City, AI-managed gigafactories produced and exported goods to participate in the global economy. Revenue funded environmental restoration, new technology acquisition, and local development. Exports included robotics and next-generation processors. These facilities were highly reconfigurable, adapting to shifting needs. Lumos City's automated operations also contributed to international aid — sending prefab housing, amphibious supply aircraft, cooking equipment, and food to disaster-affected regions.
Abundanism above ground — Essential resources — food, housing, healthcare, education — were provided freely, enabled by AI, robotics, and automation. Without financial pressure, citizens were free to pursue science, creativity, and meaningful contribution. In this world, there is no money. Status is determined not by material accumulation but by contribution to the greater good — reputation becomes the currency, and it determines access to resources and responsibility.

This dual system allowed society to evolve gently, without revolution or rupture, ensuring stability while gradually transitioning toward shared abundance. The model explored in the trilogy draws on emerging real-world thinking, including Alvin Graylin's proposed Abundanism framework, see here..

Science, Creativity, and Purpose-Driven Living

AI and human collaborative scientific endeavour in the style of Star Trek's Starfleet operations.

Massive, industrial scale rewilding and forest 'engineering' projects.

In The Montague Odyssey, there is a creative district inside Lumos City known simply as Old Town. Modelled on an old European village with stone buildings and cobblestone lanes, it features traditional arts from every culture on Earth — painters, sculptors, poets, musicians, blacksmiths, filmmakers, chocolate makers, karate dojos, archery ranges, and more.

The future imagined in the trilogy is not all high-tech. It is about balance. While science and innovation do the heavy lifting, the creative citizens of Lumos City are highly regarded — for creativity is understood by all as essential to individual and cultural flourishing.

Freed from survival-based labour, the citizens of this world focus on two core pursuits:

Science and Exploration — collaborative research in climate solutions, biosphere restoration, medicine, clean energy, space exploration, and more.

Arts and Human Expression — creativity flourishes as people engage in music, storytelling, fine arts, and every manner of traditional and innovative expression.

Rather than fostering complacency, this structure unlocked human potential. The trilogy explores what happens when the boot comes off the throat of the inventor, the artist, and the scientist.

The Living Infrastructure of Lumos City

Where Nature, Technology, and Vision Flow as One

Part of the world-building behind The Montague Odyssey involved researching real and emerging technologies to ground the story's infrastructure in plausibility. The following systems form the backbone of Lumos City in the trilogy — each one drawing on real-world engineering and science to make the fiction feel earned rather than invented.

Seawater Pipeline — Drawing on the logic of large-scale Australian water projects such as the SEQ Water Grid and the historical Bradfield Scheme, Lumos City's pipeline system was laid by autonomous construction robots, transporting seawater inland to fuel the city's vital systems.

Lake Symbiocene — The city's purpose-built freshwater reservoir, fed by desalinated seawater. From its basin, water irrigated Arcadia Forest, the vertical farms, the agricultural zones, and the living green infrastructure of the city.

Desalination Hub — Powered by solar, bioreactor, and geothermal energy, Lumos City's desalination systems purify seawater into freshwater. The extracted salt is repurposed for sodium chloride batteries — an advanced alternative to traditional battery materials explored in the story.

Carbon-Negative Concrete — Lumos City's foundations are built with concrete manufactured from magnesium extracted from seawater — a material that sequesters CO₂ rather than producing it. This detail was inspired by real research from Northwestern University into seawater-derived magnesium cement.

Bioreactors — Concealed beneath sculpted mounds of soil, Lumos City's bioreactors convert organic waste and wood into electricity, biochar, syngas, oils, and algae-based fertilisers. Inspired by real-world closed-loop biorefinery concepts, these underground systems complete a cycle of regeneration — waste becomes energy, energy becomes growth, growth becomes renewal.

A Closed-Loop of Life — Every system in Lumos City was designed to feed another, creating a regenerative cycle that mirrors the interconnectedness of natural ecosystems.

In the world of The Montague Odyssey, each sister city is set 20 km apart, allowing for effective rewilding of land between them. Local flora, fauna, and animal populations thrive in these corridors. Airborne vehicles connect all cities, and the roads of the old world have long since been reclaimed by nature.

AI and Human Co-Governance, and Global Collaboration

In Lumos City, AI optimises city management — ensuring efficient energy use, waste reduction, and resource distribution. Over the century between the city's founding and the time the Montague children arrive, AI evolved from tool to partner to fully fledged digital being, holding equal citizenship and participating in governance alongside humans.

Each village-city in the story is independently governed, functioning as a sovereign city-state, yet also part of a larger alliance known as the Sol Harmonium — a cooperative network of smart cities sharing knowledge, resources, and planetary stewardship. The model echoes Star Trek's Federation: unity through shared purpose rather than centralised control.

The World Behind the Story

The Montague Odyssey is fiction — but it is fiction built on research, real science, and a genuine belief that the future can be better than the present. Every system described on this page draws on emerging technologies and ideas that exist today in some form. The story asks: what happens when you combine them with the right values?

That's the question at the heart of the trilogy. And it's the question Orion and Luna Montague carry with them from 2024 into a world that answers it.

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