Fertilisers sometimes leach into lakes, flooding them with every nutrient plant life needs to grow. Almost everything in the water dies: algae gorge themselves on the feast, blooming and reproducing to fill the surface in a stagnant foam. When the boom turns to bust, they rot and are decomposed, using up all of the oxygen, as well as blocking out all of the light. The plants die. The fish die. The amphibians die.
Forests are full of air, but there are still ways for those above to starve the ones below. When the soil is particularly rich, trees may grow tall, limited only by the light that they can harness from the sun. They construct vast canopies to capture this energy, solar panels of cellulose and chlorophyll which tame the great star's fire and turn it into life. Almost everything in the forest dies: with the light above eclipsed by giants, smaller shrubs, and flowers, and weeds and even their own sapling young are starved, suffocated in the dark.
No matter how bright the summer, only the tallest plants could profit from its warmth. No matter how rich the nutrients, the algae would thrive at most other life's expense. No matter how strong the flow of wealth, it would never trickle down to those that needed it the most; they were more likely to face famine, in fact, in a time of great prosperity at the top.
London had been one of the wealthiest cities in the world. Now, Alex was one of its wealthiest men. He was a long way from learning about ecosystems himself: he had left biology classes at Harrow for a degree reading medicine, and was now the capital's foremost haemeopath.
His wealth stemmed from his product. The metropolitan upper class had craved superiority even more since leaving the proletariat behind, and a thriving market for body modifications had risen as the city had: from prosthetics to mind-enhancing drugs, these high-tech commodities could be seen in every luxury home. Alex's Bleud was most extensive of them all.
Youth was the goal. That quest, somewhat ironically, was an ancient one, the search for a fountain of youth or elixir of life unifying cultures from around the world. Herodotus, the Father of History himself, identified such a fountain in 400 BC Africa. Legend had Alexander the Great find it in the Middle East, Nicholas Flamel discover it in France, and Ponce de León seek it in the Americas. Successive Chinese Emperors had perished in their prime, ingesting poisons they believed to bring them extra years.
Alex had found the secret here, five hundred meters above the Thames. It was a simple recipe, with only two ingredients, but his haemeopathy was a revolution in the war against ageing, preserving the invaluable look and feel of youth for clients whose fortunes could buy everything but time. The first ingredient was blue.
E133, Brilliant Blue, was produced by machines on an industrial scale. Food dyes were ubiquitous in modern life, making the dullest of fare seem exciting, novel, or even just palatable. Without them, mozzarella would not be white, gherkins would be grey, and most jellies and confectionery would be the diluted buff of faded leather.
The famous salmon pink, naturally arising from a wild diet of red krill, must be added to the fish more commonly fed in farms on wheat, soy, and chicken skins. Even orange peels have been injected with pigments, though the fruit gave the colour its name: for the modern consumer, even the original is no longer orange enough.
For Bleud, E133 created a brand, a unique feature which caught the eye. It made the simplest of substances seem exciting, it made a novelty of its fundamental base, and it made palatable an uncomfortable truth. A truth that only Alex could know. Human children, raised with empathy and a fanatical love for nature, are reluctant to consume another creature's flesh unless it is coloured for them, covered in breadcrumbs, or cut into geometric shapes. The blue dye gave an impression not only of innovation, but of sanitation too.
That was the marketing side of the product's success, borne from an understanding of the human mind. It was a knowledge of the body that inspired the rest, although even here Alex had been far from the first to see results. Experiments in the first few decades of the twenty-first century had shown that giving old mice the blood of their young could reverse the signs of ageing, rejuvenating muscles and the brain. The idea was even older than that.
The most enduring human image of an immortal was that of Count Dracula, the legend of a man who lived millennia but never aged, sustained by rejuvenating blood. The real life Countess Elizabeth Báthony was reported to bathe in the blood of virgins to retain her youth, and even the nobles in this country had always indirectly thrived off the back of their liegemen's blood and sweat and tears. Alex had just been the first to have it bottled.
That was the second ingredient, although his client could never know. Bleud's artificial appearance gave the impression of novelty and sanitation, an innovative supplement of lab-created chemicals, added to their bloodstream to enhance the real thing. In actual fact, it was the real thing in itself, simply taken from a younger form.
The lower classes had little choice but to offer up their children's blood. Since technology had rendered most wage labour obsolete, unemployment and poverty had spiralled, whilst the owners of the capital machines had grown even richer. They had already lived in skyscrapers and penthouses, travelling as often by helicopter as by train. With everything controlled online, soon there became no reason to travel down one building's storeys only to cross the street and ascend another's.
There had always been sky-bridges, tunnels between buildings which echoed the Vasari Corridor constructed so that the Duke of Florence, unwilling to mix with his people, could pass above them unseen. Those which already existed had multiplied, a building project fuelled by the new wealth of the ultra rich, whose profits had soared with the increased efficiencies and near-eradicated wage bills. Many had not enjoyed looking down between the gaps, and soon these had been paved over too: a concrete canopy formed, consigning the now literal underclass into an underground city, a cesspit full of vermin and crime and disease.
Desperate parents became willing to pay any price for the medical treatment their children needed: when the doctors demanded a sample of the blood they'd healed, they were unable to refuse. Alex's miracle cure had not been a breakthrough: he had simply been in the right place, at the right time, with the necessary leverage and a will to act on science which ethics had previously restricted to mice.
That is the cycle's final stage. In an short-lived algal bloom, decomposing micro-organisms bloom themselves in the decay, draining the lake's oxygen as they reproduce and break down the glut of floating dead. Even when the bloom has passed, however, their riches live on: their over-use of that precious element has suffocated all aerobic life, and so there is much more disintegration to be done.
In the forest, trees rise higher when the soil is rich, blocking out the sun above. When the nutrients behind their growth spurt fade, though, they are easily replaced: the photosynthetic monopoly has wiped out all shorter life, and so the tallest trunks continue to thrive, fuelled by the decaying ashes of their opposition.
Fuelled by advances in their technology, London's richest left its poorest behind. Where their wealth and innovation could not help them, however, frustrated in the timeless search for youth, the poor became a fuel source of their own.
