There is a world. Let's call it Penguin Planet. It is run by an evil oligarchy who use advanced technology to block out the sun and bring about a century long winter every five thousand years. They do this to depopulate the planet, and during the Long Winter, the Royal Penguin Bloodlines retreat to a city-sized underground bunker where they will live comfortably until the arrival of the sun.
During this century of darkness, the rest of the world undergoes serious political and economic changes. With the absence of a central authority, ruthless penguin-gangs climb their way into power within each individual city, creating a decentralized network of mini-governments across the largest continent.
As winter continues to get colder, body heat becomes a necessity for each penguin to live comfortably. Only a handful of the cities in the major continent have very large populations, but the rest have far less and long for more to keep the cold at bay.
It becomes every city-government's necessity to acquire as many new citizens as possible.
The populations of two cities are unable to merge together for heat, for when they do, the two governments go to war for control of the larger population and there is much loss of life. Death is good for no one, as corpses do not give off body heat.
To prevent the needless waste of useful body heat, the criminals in charge of each city all sign a treaty preventing one from merging with, or attempting to overcome another.
Arriving from other continents, there is a continuing daily stream of penguin immigrants who walk across the frozen ocean to find food as they have no access to it there during winter.
The governments in the major continent see this as an opportunity to acquire more citizens, and so they all create their own police forces to capture the immigrants as they arrive.
Each population is made up of both residents and nomads. Nomads can venture from city to city but residents have families and want to stay where they are.
The size of the police force, and thus the amount of penguin immigrants that a city can capture per day, is determined by the amount of residents that particular city has.
Of each group of immigrants that are captured, the adults are redirected to a city on the major continent. Half will turn out to be nomads, half will turn out to be residents.
The penguin-baby-immigrants however, are always seized by the capturing city's force and returned to their own city, for children are guaranteed to end up as residents of the city they grow up in, and therefore too valuable to send to another city. These -penguin children will grow up to become part of the police force, giving the city more power to accumulate more citizens.
The smallest cities had no police forces capable of capturing immigrants, and would soon get too cold and die, so the governments of each city all agreed that when one city's police force captures a group of immigrants, they should share. Only the children of the immigrants should the capturing city be able to take home, and the adults would be sent to the nearest city instead.
The smaller cities were happy to agree, because the children they were guaranteed would help them to build a police force to capture more immigrants. And if there was a nearby seizure by a large police force, then they could end up doing very well and get enough bodies in their city to keep the temperatures high.
Things were going not too bad for each of the governments for a while. Not everyone stuck to the rules, but everyone was receiving enough new citizens to keep warm as winter got colder.
Then the bigger cities came up with an idea. They offered the little cities another deal. If they used their police force to round up a few of their nomads and then sent them to the big city, that big city's police force would deliver an equal amount of adult immigrants from their seizures.
The little cities were happy to oblige, as their nomads would never become police officers and help them capture more immigrants, but half of the immigrants they would receive from the big city's repayment would.
The little cities rejoice at the bargain they are getting from their generous mega-city friends. Yet a few weeks later they begin to realise that; whilst before they were gaining new citizens at a rate equal to the declining rate of temperature, and thus able to survive but uncomfortably. Now, they were gaining new citizens at a slower rate than the speed of the temperature dropping as winter progresses, and none could understand why. The deal had been generous and the math worked out, so why had the city's rate of growth decreased? And why were the inhabitants of the smaller cities now facing death? No one could figure it out.
Meanwhile, the few large cities had become far larger. Their rate of acquiring new citizens had increased dramatically. What happened?
90% of all immigrants that were captured per day, were done so by one of the few massive cities. And with those cities now auctioning off their captures for nomads, rather than redirecting to them the nearest city as agreed, the smaller cities had now paid for their own disqualification from receiving any of the large captures of immigrant adults that are captured near to their locations.
The larger cities were now able to put a price on something that they had been previously giving to other cities for free. Only the smaller cities continued to deliver captured adult immigrants to the nearest location, but even that stopped when they realised what was going on.
Ten years later, with temperature levels twice as low as before, the smaller cities, the ones that remain, no longer have a police force. Theirs became redundant, and now every immigrant that arrives is captured by a united police force of the largest, yet much larger than before cities. The only way at all for little cities to gain anymore citizens is by sending some of their nomads to the larger cites. They live a shivery existence, waiting impatiently for a far too slow death.
Did they seal their fate when they accepted the devious deal from the larger city-governments? Perhaps so. Or perhaps they just need to overcome their differences and unite their populations into far fewer cities.
Tell me. Do you think the smaller cities government's should have taken the deal?
Resteem if you have any idea WTF I am talking about.