"The Northwilds arcology had been built according to the standard Imperial template; it was an irregularly-stepped pyramid that, even still in its initial stages, was five kilometres wide at its base and rose more than three kilometres into the cloudy sky. Narrow streets radiated away from the arcology across the plain, surrounded by hundreds of smaller buildings that had yet to be subsumed by the structure’s ever-expanding footprint.

Each arcology was constructed in a similar fashion on newly-compliant Imperial worlds: first would come the labourers and their families, relocated by the tens of thousands from towns and villages all over the hemisphere. They would be resettled in a town at the site of the new arcology, which would spread outward in all directions as its population swelled. Then, once there was a large enough labour pool that had been sufficiently trained to begin work, the digging of the arcology’s foundation would begin. The structure would grow in stages, expanding outwards, upwards and downwards at the same time. Little by little, the arcology would swallow up the town, its residents progressively reassigned to districts inside the structure itself. The population would continue to grow as well, along with the civil services and bureaucracy that went along with it. In theory, the population and organisational growth would match the growth of the structure so closely that by the time the structure was complete, the arcology would be fully populated and self-sufficient. Of course, such things rarely ever went precisely according to plan.

‘How many people are at Northwilds these days?’ Zahariel asked.
‘You mean civilians? About five million, all told,’ Morten replied. ‘About a quarter of that are Imperial citizens from offworld: Administratum officials, engineers, industrial planners and the like.’
Zahariel consulted facts and figures committed to memory before leaving Aldurukh. ‘A stage one arcology is built to support twice that number,’ he observed. ‘So half of the structure is still unoccupied?’
Morten shrugged. ‘The Imperium’s industrialisation plan calls for twenty stage-one arcologies across Caliban, but the planet’s population won’t be able to support that for some time yet.’
The Librarian frowned thoughtfully. ‘That seems like a great deal of extra work. One would think that they would build new structures as needed, rather than all at once?’
Morten spread his gnarled hands. ‘Who can say? The Administratum has its reasons, I don’t doubt.'
‘How is the population distributed throughout the arcology?’ Zahariel inquired.
‘We’re keeping the natives penned into the lower levels,’ the general rasped. ‘The garrison, the Administratum infrastructure and the offworld residents are housed on the upper levels, where we can keep them secure.’ "