Nineva

The most iconic city of Gilgamesh, and the destination that most people have on their mind when they dream of visiting the colony. Put simply, this is no ordinary city. Nineva is an anthill of casinos, hotels, and highways that is visible from space.

History
The story of Nineva begins in 2471, when Hisano Goto succeeded her father as the chair of Goto Heavy Engineering. At the time, the corporation was looking to expand its portfolio beyond space station construction and resource extraction. Hisano was an architect by training. She believed that there was a future for the company in arcology construction. The board was eager to test the new heiress, and found several projects where GHE could test its mettle. Only one project caught Hisano's imagination. A project that, to hear certain board members tell it, was sure to break the company's reputation and bottom line beyond repair.

Hisano wanted to build a highway.

There was a dry lakebed on Gilgamesh, which was an interstellar nexus for motorsports. Gearheads came from other colonies to crash cars and race motorcycles on the salt beds. A resort named Silver Sands was set up to cater to those motorsports, with a spaceport and hotels and a few casinos. Those casinos thrived due to the colony's lax vice laws, and within a few years they were doing more business than the motorsports had ever drawn in.

The Goto heiress smelled an opportunity. Build it, and they will come.

The highways that Hisano designed were three interlocking rings. The two smaller rings would each be three kilometers across, encompassed by a larger ring a bit bigger than six kilometers. These rings were not simple roads. They were multilevel highways, three to four layers high, with an upper pedestrian deck. Only a megastructure like this could route traffic to the hundreds of hotels, showrooms, and casinos that were sure to be built here.

Twenty kilometers to the south of Silver Sands, the foundations for the highways were laid in the empty desert. Hisano's then-boyfriend, Bengt Lundqvist, poured the first slab of permacrete himself. Within two months, the highway to the spaceport in Silver Sands was completed. The first hotel was finished in a year, and the first casino took fifteen months. Legend has it that Nineva's first whorehouse beat out either of them, as the construction workers set aside a shack and hired some hookers from up north.

Gilgamesh Jaunt
Nineva benefitted enormously from Gilgamesh's proximity to Reach. As the UNSC's military-industrial complex solidified and more Earth citizens made regular journeys to Reach, a quick vacation to Nineva was in the reach of more people. A two-day journey to Gilgamesh, three days in Nineva, and then a two day return journey fit comfortably within a salaryman's one-week vacation.

Reach is more-or-less the midpoint between Earth and Gilgamesh, but Gilgamesh became a popular layover point between the two worlds. Almost a day's worth of travel could saved by jumping directly between Gilgamesh and Earth, rather than a Gilgamesh-Reach-Earth journey. By combining paid vacation or leave with a business trip between Earth and Reach, thrill-seekers could arrange for an extra day of partying in Nineva.

Modern-Day Attractions
Nineva is home to well over two hundred casinos, dance clubs, and bars. Many of these establishments have a theme or a gimmick to set them apart from the crowd. Some are exclusive, some have features not advertised to the public, and many live on in legend.

The Hanging Gardens
As Nineva matured, Hisano stepped away from direct administration of the city so she could focus on combining her three major interests: Architecture, horticulture, and art. The upper decks of all three elevated highways were closed off to vehicle traffic and turned into walkable gardens. These gardens were initially dismissed as a whimsey, an escape from her duties as the chairwoman of GHE's board. Instead, she drew inspiration and samples from all across the Asian continent, building a garden seventy five kilometers long and five lanes wide. The garden was finished in 2489, but Hisano Goto was never truly done with it. She continued to revise the garden, adding this feature and that even as she moved on to other projects.

The Hanging Gardens are open to the public. Hisano's future projects were less available. As she became more reclusive, her gardens became more exclusive. They were available only by request, and then by invitation, and then not at all. The last few gardens are hard to find, known only by word-of-mouth and through footage from a few unauthorized drone flythroughs.

Peter's Winter Palace
A very large and ornate shopping mall, established in 2515 by a media executive from the Sakha Administrative Region. Peter's Winter Palace was immediately set apart from the competition by the unapologetic use of Muscovite Baroque in the architecture and the interior decoration. It was made famous by exclusive clothing lines which sourced animal fur from various terraforming projects. Mink and stoat fur had almost entirely disappeared as a fashion item in Human space. Peter's Winter Palace brought it back, along with beaver and wolf pelts.

Stardive
Stardrive is the largest casino in Nineva, and its opulent lightshows are often billed as "The real reason you can see this city from orbit." Part casino, part showroom, part theater, there is something here for everyone. Just about every major musical talent of the past forty years has opened on Stardrive's stage.

Fortune's Wheel
Fortune's Wheel was one of the first casinos to be established in Nineva, and operated until 2507. It was saved from obscurity by the classic spy flick Never The Same Place Twice. Several more action and thriller flicks were filmed there, either on the casino floor or in the hotel. Ironically, the Fortune's Wheel met its end in a scenario that could have come from one of those thrillers. A bomb was planted in one of the backrooms as part of an extortion attempt. The bomb was thoroughly tamperproof, and when negotiators lost contact with the extortionists, the disarmament code was never delivered.

Goto's Den
Legend has it that Goto's Den is a very exclusive blend of nightclub and brothel that sets up in a different location every week. They say that to get in, you got to know someone, and you got to wear a blindfold. They say that Hisano's daughter Kaori stocks the brothel with girls drawn from all over Human territory. For the longest time, Goto's Den was an urban legend, fueled by anecdotes from talented but minor musicians and named in a deposition taken from a chemist who used to make designer drugs. Recently, leaked INTERSTELL documents have named the brothel as a place of interest to the Human Trafficking Division, though investigators doubt there is a real connection to the Goto family.

Notable Incidents
The extravagant and salacious nature of Nineva, extravagant and salacious rumors about its creator were probably inevitable. Some say she was a black widow. Some say she had a direct hand in the underground skin market that thrived in Nineva. Some say that Nineva was nothing so much as an ant farm to her.

Hisano's own life was checkered enough. She never married, but instead enjoyed the company of a succession of boyfriends, relationships which grew shorter and more infrequent the older she got. It is not public knowledge who the father of her three children was. Likewise, she had a difficult relationship with the board of Goto Heavy Engineering, at times feuding openly with them. From the 2470s to the 2530s, a statistically significant fraction of GHE's upper management met an untimely end through suicide, industrial accidents, and drug overdoses.

The last interview with Hisano Goto was conducted in 2523 by the famed botanist Austin O'Mellan, who broke into one of her private gardens to deliver a shoot from a female Cycad tree. This was a fossil-tree, thought to have been extinct for four hundred years until a preserved cone was found in a South African bog. O'Mellan assumed that if anyone had stems from the male tree that once resided at the Royal Botanical Gardens of the United Kingdom, it would be Hisano with her wealth and connections.

Hisano accepted the gift, and then took Austin to a garden on the other side of Nineva. There she showed him a copse of Cycad trees that had been re-created through genetic engineering and a seed from the lost male tree.

Human-Covenant War Era
Nineva and the surrounding entertainment sprawl peaked at 35 million visitors a year in 2524. The outbreak of the war caused a steady downturn in business. By 2527, when the Covenant were widely known to be glassing planets and the UEG was gearing up for war, a trip to Nineva came to be seen as wasteful and indulgent. The decline continued until 2535, when the UNSC adopted emergency powers and relaxed economic controls to prevent an economic collapse. Attendance stabilized and even increased in some years, until 2544 when wartime austerity measures were reintroduced. In 2551, only eighteen million visitors journeyed to Nineva, and they found a city where the glitz had scratched off and permacrete was showing through.

Notably, as the war progressed, civilian patronage dropped steadily. Nineva only saw a stable business from increasing numbers of UNSC personnel who took advantage of Gilgamesh's proximity to Reach to forget their troubles for a week of leave. For this reason, Nineva saw a skyrocketing number of deaths of despair in the last two decades of the war.