With cheap, clean power from PWRCORE-1, Talaris favors heavy, high-frequency electric infrastructure over private cars. Mass transit and freight run under the city or above it, and since 2025, when the street level of the Core was handed back to pedestrians, the surface has belonged to people on foot, cafés, buskers, and vendors.
The Tets
The Talaris Metro is known to everyone as the Tets, from the Japanese chikatetsu, subway. Japanese contractors built it in the 1990s and Korean firms extended it in the 2000s, and it runs with Tokyo’s punctuality but around the clock, because the city does. Riders talk to each other and to strangers, and busking in the stations and the larger cars is a respected way for a performer to be discovered.
The system adds cars to each train as demand rises, so riders can choose:
- Standard cars, the lively default.
- Quiet cars, for working or decompressing.
- Dining cars, with automated hot-food dispensers, ramen stations, and sometimes a live vendor.
- Pet-friendly cars, with easy-clean surfaces and air purifiers.
- Priority cars, for seniors, people with disabilities, and pregnant riders, with flush boarding and wide aisles. Priority seating is less a rule in Talaris than a point of pride.
Because of The Optional Work Week, the city has no rush hour in the old sense, only a gentle bump from executives, liaisons, and logistics staff who keep regular hours for markets that still work forty.
The Grid
The city’s Level-5 autonomous road network, the Grid, was built by Taiga Transport, a division of Taiga. Vulpine Dynamics operates it today under an agreement with Taiga Transport and pays for citizens’ free access as part of the Founders’ Dividend. Autonomous pods can be hailed by anyone who needs a car, mostly the elderly, the disabled, and the wealthy. People who insist on driving themselves are covered under Analog Drivers.
Freight
Delivery trucks are rare. Taiga’s Root System, a network of smaller automated tunnels running beneath the Tets, carries freight from the deep-water port to underground distribution hubs. City law requires every new tower in the Core to have a Taiga Dock in its basement, where freight capsules arrive and building elevators take goods straight to the right floor. Older districts such as Old Town and Shibs are served by knee-high delivery bots called Rollers, while heavy-lift drones flying geofenced corridors over the water handle premium deliveries and the cliffside estates.
Pawikan Lines
Getting around by water is often faster than crossing the Core, and Pawikan Lines runs the island’s ferries, which everyone simply calls barko. The fleet ranges from multi-deck commuter liners to small express boats, all electric, charged from PWRCORE-1 through rapid-charging tethers at their moorings. Terminals ring the island; some are cut into cliff faces and others sit at the foot of the Core’s towers.
Talaris protects its reefs strictly, so the ferries never dock at the shore. They moor in deep water, and passengers cross on wide, stabilized floating pontoon bridges. Many terminals have underground waiting rooms with glass walls looking out into the protected reef, where commuters watch turtles, reef sharks, and schools of fish while they wait.
On foot
Above street level, shaded walkways of tropical trees and solar glass link the districts. E-bikes, boards, and skates fill the plazas, and customizing a board with lights and decals is a youth pastime of its own.
The streets also carry the city’s food cars, descendants of the jeepney with the same freedom of design: neon-lit mobile kitchens covered in pop-culture references and holographic signs. The big chains stay in their storefronts, and the city enforces health codes strictly but leaves routes unregulated, so the cars go wherever the crowds are. They coordinate through the Grid into flash markets, dozens of cars converging on a plaza or an overlook at sunset and gone by midnight, and the competition for the best spots outside busy stations is fierce enough that vendors hire coders to tune their routing. Unpiloted vending cars sell hot coffee, iced matcha, and instant ramen through the night.
Taho still comes on foot. At dawn the vendor walks the streets calling up to the balconies, with a small machine following behind him carrying the taho. The best known outfit is Tahol-Tahol.