floating city
America’s richest residents maintained that it was best to go about your day and never give a second thought to the massive, heavily armed floating city siphoning the Great Lakes.
Don't worry about it,' say rich

America's richest residents maintained that it was best to go about your day and never give a second thought to the massive, heavily armed floating city siphoning the Great Lakes.

Saying it was definitely not a situation to get worked up about, the nation's wealthiest residents assured the rest of the American public Friday that the heavily armed city being built in the sky high above the central United States had nothing to do with anything and could just be ignored.

According to the richest 0.1 percent of Americans, the massive floating city, which now casts a shadow from Nebraska to Minnesota, is lined across its entire perimeter with visible gun turrets, can house 300,000 people in luxurious accommodations, and uses giant tubes to siphon up fresh water from the Great Lakes, was not anything anyone needed to be concerned about.

"Relax, it's fine, it's nothing."

"The best thing you can do is to go about your day as usual and never give it a second thought," Gina Betts, a spokesperson for the wealthy Americans, said of the resources currently being poured into the construction of a permanent and easily defended settlement hovering two miles above the Midwest. "There's no reason for people to waste their time looking for any deep significance in the hourly departures of cargo planes carrying shipments of medicine, fuel, and munitions to a hulking fortress city in the clouds. Honestly, there's no need to even bother looking up."

"Relax, it's fine, it's nothing," Betts added as the rising towers of the city blocked out the sun across much of the country.

The wealthiest Americans stated that it was not necessary to look into reports indicating they had devised a plan to extract all of the country's arable topsoil so they could continue to grow food for their floating city in the wake of catastrophic climate change, saying any such efforts on their part were a coincidence and insignificant. They also told reporters that the public needn't trouble itself with the fact that the rich have procured the nation's entire supply of uranium-235 and hired the world's top physicists to build a series of nuclear power plants and ensure all radioactive waste is funneled away from their new home and deposited onto the planet's surface.

Betts also explained there was "nothing unusual at all" about what appears to be a 100-foot-wide sewer drain extending downward from the floating metropolis and emptying above Sioux Falls, SD.

"You know, rich people can be a bit eccentric, and sometimes we like to go out and buy up as many solar panels, oxygen tanks, and hazmat suits as we can just to say we did it," said Betts, who noted that investing in a state-of-the-art antiballistic missile system that could defend against projectiles aimed at the city was simply "a pleasant little diversion" for the wealthy and should require no further explanation. "We have a lot of disposable income, and it can be fun spending some of that money to erect towering silos in the sky capable of holding the state of Iowa's entire annual grain yield. It may be kind of quirky, but it certainly doesn't have any far-reaching implications or anything like that."

"Frankly, we'd be offended if you thought there was something else going on here," Betts continued.

Representatives for the nation's wealthy dismissed reports from across the country that mansions and penthouses were being abandoned en masse, suggesting that the richest Americans were probably all just going on vacation and that even if they were planning something, it was no big deal and not worth paying attention to.

"This is our money, we earned it, and if, on nothing more than a pure whim, we want to assemble elite groups of private military contractors and deploy them to protect our sky city, we'll do it, okay?" billionaire hedge fund manager Stephen Bennett said as he stood on a Minneapolis street corner and looked up, shouting to be heard above the deafening roar of thrusters that keep the settlement aloft. "If everyone else had worked harder, maybe they too could have outfitted an opulent paradise in the heavens replete with a pristine sustainable ecosystem, life-extending cryogenic technology, and tactical nuclear weapons aimed at any survivors below."

Bennett added, "But they didn't, and now they have to suffer the consequences, which don't amount to much, actually, because there's nothing to worry about here-nothing at all."