SinergiaLab · UnitedCities · 2026-09-04
Free energy: the world UnitedCities imagines
In UnitedCities, energy stopped having an owner. A statue of Tesla in Boone G marks the origin of that fiction, anchored in real science.
In a plaza in Boone G, one of UnitedCities' cities, there's a 40-meter statue. It's Nikola Tesla, pulling energy from space with his hands. On the base, two inscriptions:
"Someday we will harness the energy of space. It is only a matter of time." Nikola Tesla. 1856-1943. Scientist. Inventor. Creator of white energy.
The first line is real. Tesla said it over a century ago. The second is fiction: in UnitedCities, that promise came true. And that fulfillment is the hinge everything else turns on.
Rethinking cities
We think of cities as places. They are, before anything else, energy systems: points where energy concentrates and from which it is distributed.
Taken in its broadest sense, almost everything a city organizes is a form of energy. Education is energy put to the service of forming people. Mobility is energy put to the service of moving bodies. Construction is energy transformed into arranged matter. Work is human energy channeled toward an end. Health is energy sustaining a body. Entertainment is energy put to the service of nothing more than enjoyment. None of these categories exist without access to energy, and the way that energy concentrates and gets distributed ends up defining the shape of the city, its hierarchies, and its limits.
Throughout human history, that energy was regulated. Someone produced it, someone controlled it, someone priced it. That's why cities grew as concentrators: where energy was, power was, and where power was, the city grew.
Millennia of burning
The pattern behind that regulated energy was always the same: burn something.
We started by burning wood. Then coal. Then oil. Then radioactive materials. With each leap, the scale of combustion grew, and with it the cost the planet absorbed in silence for millennia.
In the UnitedCities universe, that bill reached its limit, and nature's answer was The Great Flood. It wasn't a punishment or a biblical rain: it was physics. The melting ice and rising sea levels, accumulated over generations of combustion, reshaped the map of the planet. After the Flood came the Great Blackout, and with it the certainty that continuing to burn was no longer an option.
A knowledge that was already there
What's interesting is that the idea of an available ocean of energy isn't new. It's ancient, and it appears in traditions that never spoke to each other.
The Vedas describe human beings moving through an ocean of Prana, the vital energy that sustains everything that exists, with a question that became proverbial in the tradition: where is the water, if we're swimming in it? In China, that same principle received another name, Chi: the energy that circulates through all things, which Chinese medicine and philosophy place at the foundation of health, the body, and the world.
Modern physics arrived, by a completely different path, at a similar intuition. Dark energy, undetectable directly to this day, is calculated to make up around 85% of the total energy in the universe. It's there, supported by observational evidence, and remains, largely, an ocean we don't know how to draw water from.
What would happen if that energy, the one traditions called Prana or Chi and physics calls dark energy, could become usable energy?
What Tesla saw ahead of his time
The way out, in UC's fiction, didn't come from a new fuel source. It came from a different idea about where energy is, and that idea had a real attempt at proof.
In the early 20th century, Tesla argued that if Earth's atmosphere could conduct the enormous energy of a lightning bolt, it could also conduct much smaller amounts of electricity transmitted in a controlled way. In 1899, at his Colorado Springs laboratory, he proved it: he transmitted power wirelessly and lit lamps at a distance using the ground as a conductor, a successful experiment that confirmed his idea worked.
With that proof in hand, Tesla scaled up the project. He built the Wardenclyffe Tower, in Shoreham, Long Island, funded from 1901 by J.P. Morgan with 50,000. He presented it as a wireless telegraphy station able to compete with Marconi, but his real goal, which he didn't fully share with his backer, was to transmit electrical power wirelessly to any point on the planet, without wires and without a meter to bill it. When Morgan found out, he pulled funding before the tower could be tested at the scale Tesla needed. The project was abandoned in 1906 and the tower was demolished in 1917. Tesla died in 1943, in New York, with the idea proven but never brought to the world.
Tesla held that space contains the energy needed for life, not the matter that has to be burned to obtain it. It's a complete inversion of the model we know: instead of extracting and burning a finite resource, you capture something that's already available, everywhere, all the time.
A life's objective
Behind that argument there was more than technical curiosity. Tesla was fascinated by the notion of radiant energy and by its capacity to become free energy. He knew it was possible to draw on that energy by connecting directly "with the true force of nature".
His life's goal was for electrical power to be equally accessible and available to everyone, anywhere on the planet. In a context where energy governs the economies of nations, that is not a technical proposal: it is a political one.
Perhaps that is why he became the target of personal attacks, of attempts to stain his brilliant career, of an isolation that left him in absolute poverty. Tesla died abandoned. That same day, the FBI confiscated all of his materials and opened the Tesla file. To this day, his entire body of work remains a state secret.
The origin of UnitedCities
That's literally where UnitedCities' fiction begins.
In real life, after that confiscation, much of the papers Tesla kept in his room at the Hotel New Yorker was never seen again. In UC's universe, that disappearance wasn't a loss: it was the Transconverter blueprints, hidden in that same last address, waiting for centuries to be found.
Centuries later, after the Great Flood and the Great Blackout, those blueprints turn up hidden among the remains of a submerged city. That's the origin of the Transconverters and humanity's reset: not a new technology invented from scratch, but ancient knowledge, scattered between the Vedas, Chi, and the notes of a scientist who died without funding, finally put to work.
The result is white energy: clean, taken directly from the environment, impossible to own.
What happens when energy stops having an owner
If something that was regulated and concentrated throughout human history is freed and becomes available anywhere, at any time, what changes?
- In cities. They no longer need to concentrate around an energy source. In UC there's no longer a single metropolis dominating the map: there's a network of small cities, floating, amphibious, submerged, built with reclaimed materials, each limited to a size that doesn't compromise its balance with the environment. Distributed energy allows for distributed geography.
- In work. Much of human labor, throughout history, existed to sustain concentrated energy systems: extracting it, transporting it, protecting it, billing it. When energy is available without an intermediary, that work disappears and frees up human time and effort for other ends.
- In relationships and culture. Much of social hierarchy depends on artificial scarcity: whoever controls a limited resource controls whoever needs it. Without that scarcity, relationships lose that axis of dependence. It's the ground where Bio-belonging grows, UC's pillar that understands humanity as part of nature rather than above it.
- In the relationship with nature. The bond stops being extractive. There's no longer a need to wrest something from the environment to sustain human life, because the energy was available in the environment all along. That shift in stance, more than any specific technology, is the philosophical heart of UnitedCities.
A fiction anchored in science
UnitedCities doesn't propose this as a naive utopia. It proposes a serious question, with a real historical anchor (Tesla and his conviction about the energy of space) and a complete narrative consequence: what shape cities, work, culture, and relationships would take if energy stopped having an owner.
Nature's answer to millennia of burning was the Great Flood. UnitedCities' answer to that answer is a civilization that learned, late but in time, to stop burning and start capturing.
SinergiaLab, Buenos Aires, 2026
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